A recent article in Newsweek “How we narrowly avoided a depression” (Robert J Samuelson – Newsweek 10/12) just caught my attention. Its business commentary but in a way, it relates so directly to our work.
Samuelson drew distinctions between 1929 and 2007-09, and talked about The Depression as one of serious economic downturn and paralyzing fear.
He adds that “a devastating loss of confidence inspires behavior that overwhelms the normal self-correcting mechanisms . . . normal anxieties are converted into abnormal fears that trigger panic”.
He’s talking about society but he might just as well be talking about human nature.
Our recent “close encounters” with recession haven’t take us into a depression. We’re not in a state of optimism, but the trauma of tomorrow doesn’t grip us with terror either. The consumer sentiment index is still weak, unemployment continues at its worst, and the specifics of recovery are tentative at best.
Progress can be slow, but, in the words of Ted Kennedy, “We carry on” and we make our way forward.
And as therapists, that is how we help our patients to heal.
Fear has such a far reaching impact – not only upon our outlook, but also upon our health. And, because of what it does to the brain, it can be self-perpetuating. Take a look at our latest video.
To learn more about the fear response, check out our mind/body programs.
That simple quote from the article about overwhelming normal self-correcting mechanisms is SO helpful. My husband and I are still emerging from that dark time. Sadly, it was not just 2007-2009 here as the area we are in was so hard hit that recovery has been very slow. He went nearly nine years without steady employment, while I became too sick to work at all. We nearly lost everything.
Although our heads knew this was a horrendously difficult time for millions of people and that we were not alone, the overwhelm caused by fear after fear coming true and being joined by ones we had not thought of was like getting slammed down by wave after wave on a beach. It left us depleted on all scores. Our hardwon healthy coping mechanisms went pfffft, and our default fear based programming took over, thus increasing our feelings of failure and despair.
How helpful it is to see that in print and to realize that we did not fail as we feared. It was just too much for normal coping to handle.
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