Anxiety and multiple selves

Anxiety and multiple selves

Anxiety and multiple selves

. 43Contents
Introduction. 3
Development of the self. 4
Unity. 4
Mirror Stage. 4
Intentionality. 5
Content 6
Origin. 6
Being development mechanisms. 11
Structure of being. 17
Structure of the self. 21
Caveats to proposed development theory of the self. 23
Anxiety. 26
Defining anxiety. 26
Threat Continuum.. 26
The Triggers to anxiety. 29
The Maintenance of anxiety. 30
Avoidance. 30
Conflicts. 30
Substitution. 31
The Internalised Other 32
Association. 32
Secondary Gains. 33
The Treatment of anxiety. 35
Summary. 42
References

Introduction

In this paper following the tradition of plural self thinkers (Rowan & Cooper, 1998), (Mearns & Thorne, 2000, pp. 101-119), (Polster E. , 1995) I argue how the development of the self results in the self’s constitution including multiple entities that I refer to as “beings”. These beings I argue are constituted out of cognitive/behavioural/emotional, relational and resource aspects. I understand threat to these beings as the cause of anxiety. On the basis of this I then produce a clinical framework to help working with clients on the basis of this theory.

To get to this position I propose that the self develops through relationships where being loved\cared for and valued are sought, or via the conditions of these relationships. These relationships can be with a significant other or reflexively with the self. These relationships are then internalised which constructs the beings within the self.

I understand anxiety as existing within a threat continuum. The continuum contains the level of threat, the significance of that threatened and the ability we have to respond to the threat.

On the basis of the plurality of self and the threat continuum I then derive a framework to help work with clients who present with anxiety.

The assumption of this paper is that because humans share culture, concepts and language we have a commonality that provides the basis for general knowledge about being human. However because we have a uniqueness of experience and because culture is heterogeneous, then there is a unique aspect for each human that is not accessible in the general ways that I am offering in this paper.  I believe we need both the general and unique knowledge to work with clients and this paper aims at the former.

Development of the self

To talk of the self, is to talk of who I am, my identity\identities to myself and to others. It is to talk of how I may be expected to act.

It has two aspects, a unity, and a content. When I describe myself as “I am curious”, we are then talking about the unity of the subject “I” plus attributes of this unity “curious”, i.e. its content.

Unity, I will argue below, develops in two ways: synchronically through the mirror stage and diachronically through intentionality.

Content, I also argue below, takes place though the following two mechanisms:

1. The internalising of relationships with significant others\self where love, care and being valued are sought or acted on.
2. The conditions of these relationships which include knowledge, skills and attitudes.

Unity

Mirror Stage

An infant has many sensations e.g. hunger, tiredness, and being uncomfortable. Lacan argues these sensations are initially disparate but eventually form a unity, culminating as the infant gazes in the mirror:

The mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation – and which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality. (Lacan, 2001, p. 4).

In front of the mirror there is the emerging identification of these disparate sensations as belonging to\constructing the same person.

In the mirror stage unity is achieved by a separation from ourselves, a standing back to judge to establish a unity.  “The self is the conscious synthesis of infinitude and finitude that relates itself to itself, whose task is to become itself” (Kierkegaard, 2013, p. 29)  there is the self which synthesises and there is that which is synthesised, in short a separation, a judging and a synthesising of the disparate to a unified state. The foundation of the self is self-reflection, a relationship I have with myself. This we will see as a theme of the multiple beings of the self, that what I am, is essentially relational with my various beings.

Intentionality

Within a child’s intentionality is temporality: this is the ball that I know bounces as I bounced it yesterday, I want to bounce it today and tomorrow as it will be fun. The child through intentionality engages with the world and themselves temporally.

The child’s experience of themselves and objects in the world then is informed by the temporal horizon of past, present and future.  This is what Merleau-Ponty describes as the living present, “This amounts to saying that each present reasserts the presence of the whole past which it supplants, and anticipates that of all that is to come” (Merleau-Ponty, 2002, p. 489) , where the present experience is experienced in terms of the intentional desire for the future, based on the knowledge from the past.

What gives the numerical identity of self of all these parts of the temporal being is our personal style, our way of doing things, our intentional style, “my world is carried forward by lines of intentionality which trace out in advance at least the style of what is to come (Merleau-Ponty, 2002, p. 483).

The following diagram gives you the development of the self as described above.

Content

Origin

What follows is a discussion of how the individual beings of the self are constructed from relationships with significant others or reflexively with the self, where love\care\valuation is sought or by the conditions for these relationships. The content of these beings is influenced I will argue by the three major cultural\historical epochs (Romantic, Modernity, Post Modernity).

Definitions

Before continuing however, I need to define the terms “love\care\value” as they are a central part of my argument.

Love\Care\Value

When I talk of love I follow (May S. , 2011) in seeing love as “ontological rootedness”,   “a home in the world” (May S. , 2011, p. 6). When the child was part of their mother in the womb their needs were immediately satisfied and there was no understanding of the difference between themselves and their mother. As the child grows, there is an emerging sense of their individuation which culminates in the Lacanian mirror stage. Up until the mirror stage the child had a home. When the child realises themselves as separate, initially through unsatisfied desires and then through self-reflection, then they can experience isolation and the need for love: to feel that they have a home in the world and someone who understands them and makes sense of their world with them. The trajectory then is there was home, then I individuated, then I needed love to replace the home, the unity that I knew.

As much as love, a child also needs care and valuation. To be valued is to consider your life as valuable to the person who values. This valuing ranges from the unconditional which means you are valued because you are through to conditional being you are valued because you do certain things.  The more you are valued it seems by significant people in your life, then there is a development from the context specific valuation to one of being, in other words I am valued by person x because of y develops to I am valuable.

To be cared for, is to have your needs tended to in the way that you want them to. 

I draw love out as a separate term to care and valuation because whilst standardly having the feeling from another that you have a home in the world means you will be cared and valued, this isn’t always the case.

Significant others

Primary Care Giver

A child generally has a primary care giver, the main person who loves, cares for and values them. The relationship between child and primary care giver then has the latter offering love, care and valuation.  They also look to get the child to follow certain rules\beliefs which we can call attitudes. The primary care giver can\will alter the amounts of giving love\care\being valued according to how the child adheres to their attitudes and punishes them by a removal of love\care and valuation.

The child develops their relationship with the primary giver within desire for following their attitudes and its rewards.  In time, through repetition this relationship then gets internalised:  (Rogers, 1959, p. 208) detailed in (Cooper, 1999, p. 55)  “as the child develops, the associations between self-experience and positive regard are internalized, such that the child comes to experience ‘positive self-regard’ independently from the positive regard transactions from external others”.  It is this internalised aspect of the self I call “being”.

When the child feels anxiety then there is a threat to either the actual relationship they have with their primary care giver, or its internalised being:

 “Anxiety, to Sullivan, arises out of the infant’s apprehension of the disapproval of the significant persons in his interpersonal world. [..] Disapproval in the present sense refers to a threatening of the relationship between the child and its human world” (May R. , 1977, p. 167).

Therefore the attitudes of the primary care giver can be critical; following their attitudes gets rewards; failure which can threaten the rewards in relationship causes anxiety. The edge of beings are then marked with anxiety.

However this position makes it seem as if the child passively grows within the attitudes of their primary care giver. The child however is a strong influence in this relationship which is initially enabled by the attitudes the primary care giver has developed in terms of how children should be cared for and responded to and latterly by other relationships the child internalises and acts upon.

Peers, Media, Family

The number of relationships the child engages with increases as they develop, for example with media, family, and peers. The relationships of the child with these various groups again has the same effect as the relationship with the primary care giver did, it constructs a being of the self on the basis of a desire for love\care and valuation by this group. So as much as the child’s being was in relationship with the primary care giver, now it gets increased to also be in relation with more significant others.

So the child starts to develop multiple beings each of which is circled with anxiety. If I follow the attitudes of the significant other then I get love\care and valuation and if I don’t then I get the opposite. This then introduces a new threat because different beings may have competing desires and acting to get reward from one being actually produces anxiety in another. This intra-self relationship being one which Polster describes as “a community of selves that vie for ascendancy” (Polster E. , 1995, p. 5) .

Self

As much as a child can seek love\care\valuation from significant others these can also be provided by relationship to themselves as their knowledge, skills and resources develop.

Love being provided through meaning they attribute to the world to provide their home; care through how they act to themselves and valuation through how they tend to their own needs

In this case the child splits themselves into two, the active part and the passive part, the lover and the loved, the cared for and the cared, the valuer and the valued. 

Therefore in relationship with themselves the same mechanisms that are seen in relationship with the other take place and provide the same internalised beings.

Conditions for relationship

Relationships with others or oneself presupposes meaning and some level of stability and predictability. To be in relationship with you, I have to know something about how you will act and how I will respond.  So with a combination of meaning and predictability I can get my needs met in relationship.

It is for these reasons you can see the formation of beings of the self where love\care\valuation are sought but not received.

In school where someone is bullied by their peers then they might come to think of themselves in this context as worthless and this would construct a being in their self as worthless, what Beck would describe as a core belief (Beck, 1995). This might then generalise to other contexts of their life, where they might hold the same belief.

What seems to be happening here is the child needs to make sense of their overwhelming and unpleasant experience, if they can’t then the world becomes overly disordered which threatens their ability to be in relationship and get their needs met.  Thus in relationship with the bullies they understand themselves as worthless, which helps to explain the bully’s action and can make it easier to bear both in terms of meaning and how they respond to the bullies, maybe by cowering.

Therefore where being is formed when love\care\valuation isn’t received then the target can be the conditions for relationship.

The conditions of relationship can also include more general knowledge, skills and resources. To care for myself I need amongst other things food\warmth\security, I need to know how to get them and to have the skills to apply this knowledge.

Being development mechanisms

In this section I want to show the mechanisms which are at play to develop the content of the beings of the self. There are two parts of this, the first is the mechanisms within the relationship with the significant other. The second is the mechanisms from different cultural influences.

Then I want to show how internalisation happens, and then how being is then maintained.

Content development mechanisms

Relational development mechanisms

The development of the beings of the self has four significant relational mechanisms.

1. The use of implicit\explicit attitudes from the significant other.
2. Modelling, i.e. how the significant other behaves and demonstrates their values\beliefs.
3. The material aspect (objects and skills) both of their relationship and how the significant other relates to them.
4. The type of relationship.

The first mechanism sees the child caring for the attitudes of the significant other to increase reward\decrease punishment.

The second mechanism sees the child emulating the significant other so they provide their own rewards.

The third mechanism relating to skills and objects sees the child operating in two ways:

1. By caring for or emulating the significant others material relationships
2. By the Marxian notion of consumer fetishism (Marx, 1990, p. 165) where relations with objects augment human relationships.  So as the significant other cooks for the child and shows how sophisticated they are for having high-tech appliances. This leads the child understands to be sophisticated is to own high-tech appliances

The fourth mechanism is relational and is a modifier for the other three mechanisms. The relation between child and the significant other is bi-directionally constitutive, so as much as the significant others response constructs the being of the child, so in return does the child consolidate and develop the being of the significant other. The nature of this relationship could be inconsistent, volatile, demanding etc. and these relational styles will influence how the other mechanisms operate. So if the significant other is inconsistent in behaviour then what the child learns by modelling might have the same effect of being inconsistent, or they might create its opposite, i.e. very rigid.

Cultural development mechanisms

Whilst the multiple beings of a person’s self are derived through relationships, a major influence on the type of content of these being is culture.

Kenneth Gergen in his seminal book “The Saturated Self” details the major different cultural influences on self, coming from the Romantic, Modernist and Post-Modern periods.

The romantic self, born in the nineteenth century where the conception of the self “lays central stress on unseen, even sacred forces that dwell deep within the person, forces that give life and relationship their significance” (Gergen, 1991, p. 19). The self of the romantic is of passion, value, morality and significance. The modernist self, born in the enlightenment where “reason and observation are the central ingredients of human functioning” (Gergen, 1991, p. 19). The modernist self is of essences, rationality, progress, individuality and is understood by the metaphor of the machine. The post-modern self,  born in the twentieth century, where the fixedness of the self of the romantic and modernists periods loses its footing, as the individual self has “multiphrenia, generally referred to as the splitting of the individual into a multiplicity of self-investments” (Gergen, 1991, p. 74). In post-modern selves rationality loses its objectivity and foundation and is replaced by play and rhetoric. Authorities are replaced by sound bites and social media and roles and relationships cease to be immutable and homogeneous and meaning derives from relational context rather than things in themselves.

Whilst in academia and the arts, post-modernity seems to be a significant, maybe even dominant style, within the general populous you can see influences from all periods and perhaps stronger influences from the romantic and modernists eras.  The influence of these eras is seen in the content and nexus of beings.

In the content of being might be the importance of morality (romanticism), or progress and efficiency (modernity) or the plurality of career or gender identity (post-modern). The combination of these constituent beings can also produce an overall style of self, which you might see as having a dominant hue drawn from these three cultural influences.

Seeing the content of being as derived from different cultures then tensions in the self is an outcome due to the incommensurable nature of these different cultures.  For instance, you cannot derive an “is” from an “ought”, as David Hume taught us (Hume, 1739, p. 335). So to have both values from romanticism and rationality from modernity leads to a contradiction, you could never reduce value to a rational base.  Again to hold in the essential view of modernity will clash with the perspectival approach of post-modernity. This cultural tension is a provoker of anxiety, where action which nourishes one being threatens another.

The internalisation of relationships

Given I argue that the self is constructed out of multiple beings created from the internalisation of a relationship or its conditions, what then are the mechanisms that enable internalisation?

Internalisation is where the original relationship is firstly encoded within the systems mentioned above (Cognitive, behavioural etc.) and then also acted out. The original relationship then had certain dynamics, use of punishment and reward for example, which when internalised then we see are then played out by the self to the self. The self is both a representation of the significant other and itself.

The relationship is internalised by two major processes

1. Time
2. Foucault’s Panopticism

Time

Repetition of an activity moves our awareness of it from our consciousness to what Freud would argue as our unconsciousness and what Merleau-Ponty would argue as our body. So for instance driving: when I learn to drive I am hyper-aware of everything, clutch, gears, steering wheels and I am rather clumsy using them. As I practice I get used to their operation and the act of driving slips out of my conscious awareness and my body\unconscious takes over to the point where I can drive many miles whilst thinking of something else and only return to the conscious act of driving should there be something dangerous or significant to bring me back.

In the same manner if one aspect of my being was to win at races when I was a child, as I got love\care\valuation from my parents, then if I repeat this act of trying to win races, this then starts to be the way that I act, repetition takes over and my style of behaviour slips from conscious awareness to the thing that I do in this situation. In some sense now when I perceive races, the relationship I had with my parents is embed there, and as I perceive races my desire to win is engaged.

Thus as there is a relationship where the other’s attitudes shape your attitude and your behaviour, the attitudes of the other might be questioned and challenged. Through repetition and time, then this starts to be your unquestioned way of behaviour, it moves out of a conscious choice to a body\unconscious way of being.

Panopticism

The significant other operates in a number of different ways to effect the recipient’s behaviour: punishment\reward, modelling, putting demands on them for behaviour via rule governed behaviour e.g. family requirements: how their room and the house is organised etc. or a toothpaste manufacturers demanding a certain level of whiteness of smile in their adverts to maintain confidence, reinforced by people who act on this.

As such the recipient can be under the constant gaze of the significant other, within the family home, or within the wide grasp of advertising (from mobile phone, to petrol pumps, and in toilets in pubs). What this then means is that the child through both repetition of being watched\monitored for certain tasks, they then start act as if their significant other is always watching them. The movement is then between I am watched but I am not always aware to therefore I am always watched as I watch myself. Picking up on the repetitive mechanism above this then seeps into the unconscious\body and it becomes what I do in certain situations.

 We can see this idea originally stated in Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon on as detailed in (Foucault, 1977, p. 200).

Maintaining Effects

The maintaining processes of these internalised relationships will vary depending on the relationship that is internalised, however two main aspects will invariably be seen, punishment and reward.

Punishment

The punishment the recipient exerts on themselves depends on how their significant other punished them but common approaches would be:

1. Criticism
   1. The recipient is labelled an x, where x defines their whole being, e.g. stupid, lazy etc.
      1. This then develops into self-criticism as it is internalised.
2. Reduced care levels
   1. The recipient isn’t treated as well because they are being punished, their favourite food isn’t cooked and they might find their room and clothes not tidied as often as they were.
      1. This then develops into the depressive symptoms of not caring for self as it is internalised.
3. Reduced valuation
   1. How the recipient acts and talks is held in less esteem whilst they are being punished.
      1. This then develops into low self-esteem behaviour when internalised and the recipient doesn’t listen to themselves, value or care for what they need.
4. Scary tales for the future
   1. The recipient is told how if they continue acting in such a way then the future is a very bleak and scary place.
   2. This then develops into anxiety (anxious predictions and worry) when internalised.

Reward

There is much similarity on the rewards side as there is to the punishment side, the rewards being an inversion of the punishment.

1. For criticism get praise.
2. For reduced care levels get increased ones.
3. For reduced valuations get increased ones.
4. For scary tales of the future get attractive ones.

So the relationship becomes internalised both in terms of what is encoded and how the relational dynamics were acted upon. It would then seem that what is considered the self is a collection of internalised relationships whose origin is generally forgotten, and now attributed to what it means to be me.

Structure of being

What then is the structure of these beings of the self? I propose that the internalised relationship with the significant other has two parts the actual\ideal which are both codified via the following categories:

1. Cognitive/Behavioural/Emotional
   1. Imaginal
   2. Perceptual
   3. Memorial
2. Relational
3. Resource

Actual\Ideal being

The relationship with the significant other appears to have two parts, the actual and ideal.

As much as adhering to the attitudes of the significant other produces rewards, then the child does not always succeed in doing what the significant other wants, either as they haven’t got the desire or the ability.

We can then talk about the ideal being and the actual being. The ideal being what is required by the significant other, the actual is what the child does. The actual gets constructed by the child judging themselves in light of the attitudes expected of them by significant other.

The ideal being then can be thought of as that part of being that develops morality, what I feel I should do, what others should do. The actual being develops parts of self-image, and provide the sense of expecting how I will act in a certain situation, my style as Merleau-Ponty referred to it.

The codification of being happens in the following way.  To explain it I will use the following example of being:  “I am a good footballer”.

Within the cognitive\emotional\behavioural system the codification is as follows:

Cognitive/Behavioural/Emotional

Cognitive

You store propositional knowledge, in text or image, about football where it’s played, the rules of the game etc. as well as the extra knowledge on how to be a good footballer, for instance how to beat an offside trap.

Behavioural

Your body has the motoric knowledge of how to kick a football plus how to curl it into the corner of the goal.

Emotional

Emotions gives significance to the various aspects of the cognitive and behavioural systems, so joy attaches to scoring the goals, sadness to be not being in the team etc. There is also encoded certain ways of emotional expression in certain contexts.

Within the Cognitive\Behavioural\Emotional systems then as much as you store atomic aspects highlighted above then you would also store relational aspects, i.e. causal and associative. So within the cognitive system you would have causal rules if x then y and rules of association seeing x means y or y is close by.

Memorial\Perceptual\Imaginal

The Memorial\Perceptual\Imaginal dimension of the Cognitive\Behavioural\Emotional system refers to the sense that we each of these systems has its past, present and future aspects.

In memory we hold propositional facts, muscle memory and our ways of being emotional.

In the present we perceive according to our perceptual bias, via our body schema, with our emotional significance.

In the future, of our dreams and plans, we project from our history our possibilities, of thoughts and ways of acting and feeling.

Whilst each of these different temporal aspects holds different content, they also can hold a different emphasis, such that memory can be more important as you are wedded to an event that happened, or to an event you crave, or the sensations of the moment.

The being of good footballer then will have how they engage in the present with their training and their matches. They may also have a perceptual bias around me as a good footballer, such that if the team loses then it wasn’t my fault. They will have a stock of memories that support being a good footballer for instance the time the cup was won. They will have imaginal engagement of maintaining being a good a footballer by planning to do extra training on Thursday.

Relational

There are a network of relationships that support “being a good footballer”:  the team, the coach, the referee, your opponents. Each of these relations will be supported by a number of styles and ways of being that are part of your “being a good footballer”.

Resources

The resources that support the “being a good footballer” are temporal in nature. They are the things that enable me to play today, the boots, the shorts and the shirt. They are and the history of the trophies and pictures of me playing. They are my future: the pictures of my heroes that I aspire to, that adorn my bedroom wall.

In a strange way then what the being of the self means doesn’t all exist within a person but rather within their resources and their relationships, which are “outside” them, to use a dualist metaphor. Being exists in bank accounts, the number of likes on Facebook, trophy cabinets and relationships.

Structure of the self

I have argued that the self is constituted by internalised relationships known as beings. This follows the concept of configurations of self from Person Centred Theory:

 “The Self is a composite of its various configurations coexisting in a creative and self-protective conflict” (Mearns & Thorne, 2000, p. 104)

“A ‘configuration’ is a hypothetical construct denoting a coherent pattern of feelings, thoughts and preferred behavioural responses” (Mearns & Thorne, 2000, p. 101)

As much then as there are many beings within the self then they are in relationship to each other. It would seem that some of the abstract aspects may be subsumed and some intersected with others and some unrelated.

So you could see the being of “successful” having the areas that you should be successful in subsumed underneath it. If one of those is about relationships then this might intersect with the being that understands the “loving relationships”.  Indeed there probably are a myriad of possible ways you might see the relation between these beings, their abstraction and it may well depend on which being reflexively looks at the configuration which determines what it looks like.

Within this complex then I want to suggest that different aspects of being have different levels significance to the person who has them. I would argue that the more significant aspects are the more common to all aspects of being, although for some people there may be one being that is more important than all others for instance being a good footballer, or having a very powerful and all-encompassing ideology, religious or political.

Caveats to proposed development theory of the self

To summarise my position:  the self gets developed by relationship or conditions of relationship whose aim is love\care and valuation. This relationship is encoded and internalised and split into two aspects the ideal being (the aim) and the actual being (the reality).Therefore you have multiple identities constituting the self that represent the multitude of significant others that a person has been involved with. The self is a community of selves.

Unfortunately human development whilst I believe primarily develops in this way, does not accord to the clean lines I present. The major reasons, I believe it departs are:

1. Contradictions
   1. Between stated rules and modelled behaviour
      1. Mum shouts at me:” Don’t shout”.
   2. Internally in stated rules
      1. Love thy neighbour, unless they’re a paedophile.
   3. Internally in modelled behaviour
      1. When drunk Dad sings but he usually is shy when asked things.
   4. Between groups
      1. Peer groups say dropping out of school is good, parents don’t.
   5. Between actual behaviour and desired behaviour
      1. Dad is very careful with money but talks about all the things he’d love to spend money on.
2. Strokes
   1. When the child can’t get strokes for following rules, then they will break rules to get them, as we learn from Transactional Analysis “any stroke is better than no stroke” (Stewart & Joines, 1987, p. 73).
3. Relationships
   1. The above model assumes a binary relationship between the child and the given rules, either I will accept or reject these rules. Of course there are shades in between and there can be acceptance under some circumstances and rejection under other.
4. Complexity
   1.  The number of significant others in someone’s life can be high. As these are internalised then there become relationships between them. There are also thematic similarities between them and these common properties can have major significance. So to have a certain level of money might run through many areas, or to be successful, or to have a certain type of body. The end result can be a highly complex system of internalised relationships, of fragments of internalised relationships, of highly significant common themes between relationships and generally the outcome of highly complex systems can be a level of unpredictable results, which can make understanding behaviour on the basis of internalised behaviour highly speculative.

The above offers two critiques. One that this theory of development of the self isn’t adhered to, two that it is but the output of it is unusable.

To the first critique, the above muddies the waters for a simple development of the self. However this doesn’t mean that it is contradicted, rather they can be considered the outliers, the exceptions to the basic development. This would enable us to make some general understanding of the human experience, and where it diverges from this would be the idiosyncratic aspect of a person.

To the second critique then what seems most salient is whether an understanding for a client on the basis of internalised relationships, or multiplicity of being of the self is useful to them in enriching their understanding of themselves.

Anxiety

Defining anxiety

I would argue that anxiety is a taxonomical term, giving a label to certain human experience.  Human experience we understand and talk about via a number of systems: mental, biological and physical. Therefore the human experience we label when talking about anxiety spans all these systems.

From Soren Kierkegaard through Sigmund Freud, Rollo May to Aaron T Beck and beyond, the type of human experience that anxiety relates to is threat.

As threat levels can be of greater or lesser intensity then it seems appropriate to produce a threat continuum and to place anxiety on there, where we can also relate or distinguish it from other emotional words we use to talk about threat.

Threat Continuum

To construct this threat continuum I use the anxiety definition of (May R. , 1977) “Anxiety is the apprehension cued off by a threat to some value that the individual holds essential to his existence as a personality” (p. 205), and the distinction he draws between fear and anxiety: “A fear is a reaction to a specific danger (...) anxiety is the feeling of diffuseness and uncertainty and the experience of helplessness towards a threat” (May, 1977, p.162).

To construct this continuum we relate the threat based words as labels to refer to certain types of experience. We can use therefore prototypical situations that would evoke certain threat based feelings as the experience that is referenced by the label.  Doing this means our application of the label will not be unequivocal as there would be argument about similar experiences that would be better attributable to one label or another. The worth of the continuum then is because it shows the different types of threat and their constituent parts. For example you can have fear of a specific object and this can provide relief from anxiety which is situational. Likewise you can see the different types of response to different aspects, avoidance to fear, and constant activity to anxiety to give a sensation of being in control in the face of helplessness. The label in itself seems less important than what it describes and its relation to other labels and what they describe.

If we start from mild threat we might talk about apprehension, then we might move through fear, through anxiety to dread and angst maybe. 

What makes for a lesser threat is a factor of probability, significance of threat and ability to respond. So if  it is quite unlikely (probability) that I stub my toe kitchen (significance of threat) when I walk in then I might say this is a low threat and describe my feelings as apprehensive, as stubbing my toe is no big deal to me (response ability), I’m a hardy soul and it’s quite unlikely.

As the probability and significance both rise so we move up the threat continuum let’s say to nervousness and then to fear. One significant thing in terms of all these things so far I’ve mentioned on the continuum is that they are specific.

The responses we have to apprehension, nervousness and fear as there is a specific threat, is to focus on the threat, and we can avoid it, or challenge it. The main point being is when the object of our fear is not around, our fear isn’t activated. So if we are afraid of dentists, then this would only be activated in the presence of dentists and if that happened, then I would either try to avoid dentists or reduce the threat by some soporific.

There comes a point where we move from a specific threat, e.g. stubbing my toe in the kitchen, to a general threat, e.g. I could die, or walking in the woods is dangerous.  Here we have an increase in threat because I don’t know where and when I will be threatened, the threat moves from an object, to a situation, which could be the woods when we’re walking through them, or the battlefield, or the garden as I’m being chased by the police. Here the response may be hyper-vigilance, being continually “keyed” up, with a feeling of helplessness. You might see responses of high levels of unfocussed activity.

As you go up the threat scale from anxiety we might talk about dread or angst. As we increase the scale, then we increase levels of probability, of threat significance and the sense that it is impossible to deal with the threat.  A prototypical situation might be for a young child who sees his father trying to kill his mother, he says he will call the police to his father to save his mother, his father replies that he will leave him if he does this. So the feeling the child may have would be helpless and in an impossible situation, either his mother may die or his father will leave him. So the feeling we have here we can describe as a high level of anxiety, maybe angst, where the parents represent a crucial part of the child’s identity and he is in an impossible situation.

As you get higher up the threat continuum probability increases, threat significance increases, and also the futility of response. At the top end of threat that which is most important to you is threatened, it is highly likely it will happen but you are not sure when and there is nothing you can do about it. Sartre’s example of anguish captures this “Vertigo is anguish to the extent that I am afraid not of falling over the precipice, but of throwing myself over” (Sartre, 1943, p. 29), so the source of the threat is yourself. In short with the areas of angst and dread, you are powerless and helpless in front of the apocalyptic threat to that which is most important to you.

The below diagram illustrates the above ideas

The Triggers to anxiety

To recap, what constitutes my identity is a collection of beings, which are the result of internalised relationships or their conditions. These beings have different importance, some being more significant than others.  Each one of these beings is constituted of my ideal and actual being, which is in turn constituted by Cognitive/Behavioural/Emotional/Relational/Resource aspects which are applied against the three factors of time.

Each being can relate to other beings in a variety of ways, for instance by intersection, or by being subsumed, or within a hierarchy. The more central a being is in this structure to more its importance rises.

So anxiety is the threat felt to an important being or a theme held by many beings. So for instance my physical identity as a strong person, may support many other beings I have, as being a necessary part of being a popular person, or being a sexually attractive person etc. Now a threat to my strength say through a muscle wasting illness would be held as anxiety provoking.

In some ways we can understand the level of threat by thinking of the self as a community, as a theme is threatened, how significant is this threat to the community?

The Maintenance of anxiety

Anxiety is an unspecific situational threat to a significant part of the self, for example walking through the woods with the fear of attack, speaking at a conference where I could be ridiculed. What however keeps anxiety going, what prevents a solving of the threat?

There are two aspects of anxiety, one is the threat, the other is the being that is threatened. Thus anxiety is maintained if I continue to think that the threat real and the consequences to the being threatened are as significant as I think.

There seem six aspects that maintain anxiety

1. Avoidance
2. Conflicts
3. Substitution
4. The internalised other
5. Association
6. Secondary gains

Avoidance

Avoidance keeps the threat alive as it is never evaluated. For instance if I am anxious about public speaking and  I always avoid it , I never find out that generally I’m not ridiculed and then if I was ridiculed the consequences aren’t as dire as I think.

Avoidance can also prevent the client finding out that their being as it is, isn’t as important to them as they thought. So if they think being a successful business man is highly important to them, all the while they remain acting on this belief they never get to find out that it might not be and people could love\value them for other reasons.

Conflicts

These keep the anxiety going both in terms of threat and the importance of the being as the conflict prevents any response to the anxiety and ameliorating it.

There seem three major types of conflict:

1. Impossible situations
   1. I love mum and dad and need them both, my dad is fighting with my mum. My mum says call the police or I’m dead, dad says call the police and I will leave you.
2. Double binds
   1. Being told by my mum I must love my sister. As love is non-volition then if you follow this rule you fail. So achieve it or don’t achieve it you can’t win.
3. Something I can’t face in myself
   1. I need to be physically strong, which effectively protects me against intimacy which I fear as part of my physical strength is to posture which leaves me at a distance from people. I also think that the fear of intimacy is a weakness which I can’t admit to myself, so I focus on being physically strong, so I don’t have to acknowledge my fears of intimacy.

Substitution

If a child has a heavy responsibility placed on them, their parent’s leave them regularly alone to look after their siblings they may feel anxious. We could understand this anxiety as a threat of:

1. I must look after my siblings (parent injunction).
2. I must do what my parents say (parent injunction).
3. But I feel overwhelmed by this and can’t cope with these demands.

 In the face of this unbearable anxiety they turn away from this, and start instead to develop rituals and start ordering their possessions in their room. Having control over these objects, ordering them gives them relief from the lack of control and chaos that they feel. The more they turn to their ritual the more they can turn away from the act or the effect of the burden of responsibility that has been put on them.

As time passes and they grow up, then there is an associative link set up between anxiety and ordering things. When they feel anxiety, they can reduce this by ordering things which gives them a feeling of control in the face of the helplessness of anxiety.

As time passes they might find their ordering to be a problem for them, although it is a substitution for underlying anxiety.

The Internalised Other

As we looked at how beings in the self are maintained we saw how relationships are internalised and then maintained by the mechanisms of the original relationship. Whilst this relationship could have many aspects a chief one is punishment and reward, which internalised would be:

Punishment would be of the order of

1. Self-criticism
2. Lack of self-care
3. Lack of self esteem

Praise would be

1. Self-aggrandisement
2. Caring for the self
3. Holding the self in high esteem

So anxiety can be maintained through the effects of the internalised other who threatens and uses punishment on other parts of the self.

Association

As Pavlov showed association is a mechanism for relating stimulus and response. This can then associate a stimulus with the response of anxiety.  Pavlov constructed his theory via showing that the bell ring was associated to being fed which could evoke saliva. Of course if the bell is rung and no food comes sufficient times then the association breaks.

So to be able to use association as a mechanism for relating a stimulus to an anxious response, then the relationship needs to be maintained. If you take then trauma, where a person sees a terrible plane crash and is standing on a red carpet then red could be associated with the anxiety provoked by the plane crash.  Now when red is seen the original memory is evoked and anxiety is felt. What keeps this going is the sense of now-ness in the memory and the cognitions that support this now-ness.

With other anxiety situations again there has to be a sense of now-ness to keep an associated anxiety going. For instance, when I was at school, I felt a lot of anxiety standing up in front of the class. Now when I stand up to present at work I feel anxiety.  Now we could say that there is an associative chain going back all the way through prior presentations to the time when I stood up in school. The current threat is maintained by the fact I still see my audience as a threat and see myself as someone who could not deal with it.  Again there might be the memory of shame felt in childhood that comes to mind just before I stand up, or the shame I have felt on previous events, that would in turn relate back to the original event.

Association therefore works only by maintaining a current sense of anxiety. This association can only be maintained if there is avoidance of the presentation or some safety behaviour that enables me to get through the presentation such that I can maintain the belief “I am anxious with public speaking as I am threatened by the audience and have not got the resource to deal with it”.

Secondary Gains

If the consequences of having anxiety produces something useful then it will be maintained. So if a client gets paid attention when anxious but they get no attention when they aren’t, then the pay-off of getting attention can keep the anxiety going. Whilst it is painful, it is for the client worth it.

The Treatment of anxiety

The theory detailed above has three aspects

1. The self is constructed out of internalised relationship/condition of relationships where love\care\value are sought
2. There are multiple beings within the self, thus all therapy is group therapy
3. Anxiety is a situational threat to something significant within the self

Given the ideas above what would be a clinical approach to anxiety on this basis?

To this I offer a sequential, almost boiler plate solution which I have done for ease of presentation as opposed to rigid clinical adoption.

1. Formulate
   1. Is what is presented direct anxiety or a substitution?
   2. What part of being is threatened?
   3. What group(s) constructed this part of being?
      1. What is the current relationship with this group(s)?
   4. What are the coping mechanisms to the anxiety?
2. Impediments
   1. Is there a conflict that might prevent you from responding to the threat?
3. Response
   1. Synthesise the threat and the threatened, the thesis and the antithesis, to construct a new aspect of being.
   2. Dialectic understanding
      1. The other is both the threat and the saviour, the aim is to not to see this as one or the other but both

Formulate

Stage 1: Anxiety or substitution?

You need to know if you are working with direct anxiety or a symptom formation, i.e. a substitution. If you have a symptom formation, you need to connect it with the original anxiety to make sense of it with the client and to engage their emotions.

To understand if something is direct anxiety then you and the client will see the thing being threatened as an important part of themselves. Seeing something as a substitution then you will hear the client not fully engaged with it so they say things like: “I know it’s silly but I do it anyway”, when they talk about checking the door four times on leaving. Likewise it can be noticed that there is something about what they are doing that doesn’t really fit in with the rest of the rationality of their life.

A substitution can also be the case where the problem is the sensation of anxiety, I just couldn’t bear the feeling, if I’m in a crowded place, but there’s no rationality of what the fear is of.

Stage 2: What being is threatened?

This step presupposes that we are working with direct anxiety and not a substitution, so we know the actual threat.

The threatened entity can either be a whole being in itself, so for instance, being a footballer, or it could be part of being, such as being responsible. The part of being, would then be a constituent part of other beings. Indeed the whole being threatened can also form part of other beings, for instance being a footballer can also represent me as successful, as athletic as strong etc.

To know that you have found what is significant in terms of the part of being threatened you need to see that anxiety felt is relevant to the significance of the being threatened. So you aim to find enough significance in being to be able to explain the anxiety. So if the being threatened is a part, for instance “being responsible”, then what you need to find is some way of being that would be threatened. So for instance, if I wasn’t responsible, I wouldn’t be able to work, no-one I like would like me, so there you have a work-being and social-being. In some ways then what you are doing is making the abstract concrete, connecting the abstract with the rationale for the anxiety, i.e. the loss of love\care\valuation.

Stage 3: What group(s) constructed this part of your being?

Here the aim is to find the key groups that constructed the being that is threatened, to find the significant events that led to this.

So whilst there have been many groups that have contributed to my work-being, then I might point to key events and times being for instance:

1. Group: My mother and father who placed large importance on getting a good job
   1. Key events=seeing how they spent all their time on their jobs
2. Group : School
   1. Key events=the continual message if I don’t work hard I won’t get a good job
3. Group: Media
   1. Key events=the current importance that I see of having a good job in TV shows
4. Group: Social groups
   1. Key events=noticing how people ask status based questions about your job and seem to be less interested in you if you have a low status job

Stage 4: What is the current relationship you have with this group?

Here the idea is to evaluate what the current relationship is with the groups derived in stage 3. Are you getting the love, care and valuation that your construction of being thinks it should? Does the current relationship actually depend on that which is threatened? Do you notice that actually the effects of this group are more via an internalised model, so how I talk to myself, act towards myself  and care for myself?

At this point we should be able to see how the threatened aspect of being relates to the love, care and valuation of the group. The following realisations could be made:

1. This part of my being used to be crucial for my relationship with this group now it is less so.
2. Actually I can relate to this group in another way that would better suit me.
3. I no longer have a relationship with the group, the biggest relationship is via an internalised representation of them.

Stage 5: What are your coping mechanisms with this threat and are they now the problem?

Here the aim is to understand how the client responds to the threat. So if we think of a socially anxious client who avoids social interaction with their peer group so they won’t be rejected and this then leads to a boredom and a loneliness that is distressing to them. This would then lead to either the avoidance being the target for work or the problem solving of the boredom and the loneliness.

Impediments

Stage 6: Is there a conflict that might prevent you from responding to the threat?

At this point we should have the being that is threatened and the group or mechanism that the being derives, love, care and value from.  To respond to the threat then you can defend against the threat, create a new aspect of being that doesn’t depend on it to relate to the group, or drop the being and its relation to the group and seek love, care and value elsewhere.

So given the variety of response that you could take to the threat, is there anything that prevents you responding to it, is there an impossible situation that you are part of? The impossible situation can be constructed through an external or an internal conflict, for instance between parents to a child, or between beings within your client.

In facing an impossible situation then it seems that the way this can be overcome is to fully understand what each side of the impossible situation means to your client and then on the basis of that to seek a synthesis of the two positions that overcomes the impossible tension. For example I really want to stop drinking but I don’t think I can cope without drinking. In this instance then you would look to understand phenomenally both sides, the values that are involved, what the desire to stop points at, what the not coping says of your world. As Polster argues being fully with each side will provoke change in itself:

“The task in resolving the polarity is to aid each part to live to its fullest value while at the same time making contact with its polar counterpart. This reduces the chance that one part will stay mired in its own impotence, hanging on to the status quo. Instead, it is energized into making a vital statement of its own needs and wishes, asserting itself as a force which must be considered in a new union of forces.” (Polster & Polster, 1974, p. 62)

Response

Stage 7 Synthesis

At this point we should have elicited at least one opposition which can then be synthesised. This can be the threat and the threatened or the threat and the coping mechanism. This would be in the above example the threatening social situation and its avoidance.

The aim then of the synthesis is then to find a new ground where the previous conflict doesn’t exist. In doing this I follow the narrative therapy approach within postmodern thinking:

” Psychotherapy is the process of shifting the client’s current ‘problematic’ discourse to another discourse that it is more fluid and allows for a broader range of possible interactions” (Lax, 1992, p. 69).

So if the threat is either mum or dad will leave me and what is threatened is my ability to cope and be loved, then the synthesis can be where I learn to become self-sufficient for my functional needs and to find other people to give me the love that I need, that I not in a dependant, but rather reciprocal relationship.

If the conflict is between social situations and avoidance, then the synthesis could be to re-evaluate the importance of the people in social situations I fear and make friends with people I don’t fear rejection from.

Stage 8 Dialectical Understanding

Here the aim is to see how the problem was constructed in the first place and will draw on the understanding of the earlier work.  The construction of the problem then is that the client seeks love and value from a group, which is threatened.

So there are a series of events:

1. The group is valued by the client (although it could be because there is little choice, with the example of the primary care giver, or the dominant culture they are born into) as it enables what they see as an important way of being in the world.
2. The client internalises the group’s beliefs, interactions with the group, to produce a schema that consists of thoughts, feelings, behavioural responses etc.
3. The client then values this part of themselves and uses internal mechanisms, e.g. punishment and reward to maintain it.
4. Someone, something in the world or in myself threatens the group’s internalised schema.

The dialectical understanding that we aim at is that the client valued the group in the first instance as it gave themselves something important in the world and something now threatens that group membership.
The original rationale for group membership is now being questioned. In response to that question, then the question is asked:

1. Do I still want to be in the group and defend my membership?
2. Has the world changed?
   1. Should I find a new group?
   2. Change my membership of the group?

If the only response is to try to manage the feeling of anxiety, as opposed to the source question it poses, then it is likely the anxiety will remain.

Summary

In this paper I have offered a theory of development of the self that sees the self constructed out of a collection of beings, which are internalisations of a relationship, or the conditions of these relationships with a significant other that love\care\valuation is sought from.  I then understood anxiety as on a continuum, where at its upper ranges it is the threat to something important in the self where I feel powerless to respond to.

Using this theory then I outlined a dialectical response to this where the thesis and antithesis would be: “my membership of the group is threatened” and “I seek love\validation from the group”. The aim of therapy is to achieve a synthesis such that I realign my needs from the world with how I and the world currently is.

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