The Power of Fear
Introduction
Legend has it that an old dictator, when he
knew that he would soon die, picked two men whom he felt he could trust as
potential successors to his throne. As he lay on his deathbed, he summoned the
two men and asked his servant to bring him two birds.
When the two men came to his deathbed, he
said, “I have called you here to see which one of you is worthy to be the heir
to my throne. In order to prove yourself, you must take one of these birds and
make it remain in the palm of your hand for five minutes without killing it.”
One of the men took a bird from its cage,
but he held it so tightly, he suffocated it. The other man, determined not to
make the same mistake, took out the other bird and held it firmly but made no
attempt to restrain it. Therefore, it quickly flew away through one of the
room's windows.
“Fools! I will show you how to do it
properly,” said the dictator. “Bring me a bird!” he ordered his servant.
When the servant came back, the dictator
took the bird, plucked out all of its feathers, then held the bird in his
hands. The bird was now shivering without its feathers to warm him, and
although he was unmistakably terrified, he did not fly away.
"Do you see it? It is now helpless. It
is terrified. It is freezing. It is vulnerable. I have stripped it of
everything, and now it is thankful for the warmth I am giving it in the palms
of my hands," the dictator said.
The legend ends here, but the assumption is
that this is how the dictator controlled his people—by taking everything away
from them, then making them feel thankful for his protection. He essentially
got those people to “play frozen,” just as the bird was “playing frozen” in his
hands.
And he was able to take advantage of an
emotion that all animals and human beings have. This emotion is fear. It is
particularly important for autistic children, because fear is their primary
emotion. And when you strip them of everything they value in an attempt to
change them according to your values, as in an intensive behavior program, you
are unconsciously using the control technique of that old dictator and relying
on the child’s fear and helplessness to bend him to your will.
An
Analysis of Fear
So, let us ask, what is fear? Fear is what
you feel when you face something that is unknown or a perceived threat to you.
But fear goes beyond that. Fear is also related to the need to understand in
that if you don’t understand why something is going on, it is instinctive to
fear it. Virtually all human reflexes and instincts are connected to fear. Even
eating is connected to fear—when a person goes on a diet, the body
unconsciously fears it is starving and increases your craving of high-calorie
foods.
Fear is sometimes justified. If something
is legitimately dangerous, and you are terrified of it, that fear is in effect
protecting you from that danger.
But often fear is often created by the
mind. A child is terrified that a
monster will eat him in the dark, and thus is terrified. We adults know there’s
no monster, so we scoff at this fear and think of it as crazy.
Probably the most famous autistic expert to
talk about the power of fear is Dr. Temple Grandin. Dr. Grandin is an expert in
livestock management. She realized that every time a steer attacked a rancher
or refused to do anything, it was always because of fear. And because she knew
what was likely to terrify cattle, she was able to redesign livestock
facilities so that they would not terrify the animals, and thus reduce the
attacks on the ranchers.
Dr. Grandin’s work with animals is
important to autism because animal fears are similar to autistic fears. Animals
do not have the same understanding that we do, and so they base their behavior
on what they can understand. To an animal, a slight change in the environment
can mean a predator is about to pounce, and hence animals are extremely
sensitive to environmental differences. This is not so different from the
autistic child who has a full-blown meltdown when you move a picture from one
wall to another or put his juice in a blue glass rather than a white one. That
blue glass is an environmental change, and it becomes a life-and-death issue to
him because he lacks your understanding that the juice inside is the same and
he reacts like the cattle that Dr. Grandin talks about.
Autistic
Fears
As defined above, a fear is a response to
something that is perceived to be dangerous. Thus, an autistic person’s fear is
a response to something that an autistic person perceives to be dangerous.
However, many of those things are not perceived as dangerous to normal people,
as many normal people do them daily, and so the autistic person’s parents or
family are told that they must insist that he do the terrifying thing so he
“can get used to it.” Thus, the autistic person is forced to do terrifying
things every day, and he either resists by shutting down, or he does the
terrifying thing to avoid something that is even more terrifying—in some cases,
being punished, screamed at, or having his favorite things taken from him.
To the autistic person, life is war. The
world is a combat zone where everyone is warring against him. He has to defend
himself, fight everyone—or else he will suffer miserably at the hands of people
ready to hurt him in the name of help or therapy. And his motive for
resistance, for refusal, is fear of what he does not understand.
To the normal parent or therapist, his response seems illogical—why is he
terrified when others are not? They do not understand because they lack of
theory of mind toward him. To the autistic person, their response is cruel—why
are they forcing me to suffer like this? they must be mean and evil. He does
not understand that they perceive the dreaded thing as safe and no big deal. He
lacks a theory of mind toward them.
However, if you look at the terrified thing
in the way they perceive and
experience it, then their fear is very logical. Consider—as an autistic person,
I suffer from extreme sensitivity to loud noises, and therefore fear things
that cause loud noises. Whenever I hear a sudden, unexpected loud noise, like a
school bell or a fire drill bell, I am terribly shocked and I remain agitated
for a very long time. In fact, when I once gave an autism presentation, the
subject of school fire drills generated lots of emotional comments and stories
from the autistic members of the audience.
What makes a loud noise or other terrifying
thing worse is when it is unpredictable. If an autistic child who is terrified
of a fire drill has no way of knowing when it will go off next, he will be
terrified every second wondering, “Is
this the moment when the buzzer is going to go off?” For all he knows, it is.
Many people aware of their fears and who can talk about them have admitted that
what is the most terrifying part of their fear is the lack of control regarding
that fear.
This is only one example of an autistic
fear, and it concerns a specific thing that lasts only a short time. There are
other chronic fears that autistic people experience all the time. Consider the
fear of doing the wrong thing socially, and the fear of breaking rules. The life
of an autistic person is indeed a life of mistakes and faux pas. He constantly
is breaking rules that he had no awareness or understanding of. And this
develops into a fear that everything he does will automatically be wrong,
because it seems that no matter how hard he tries and no matter what he decides
to do, it is always wrong.
When you break a rule unknowingly and
you're punished, screamed at, or humiliated, you're going to start being afraid
of everything. You’re going to become cautious about everything you do, because
you don’t know whether you’re going to get in trouble. Wouldn’t you react that
way? Wouldn’t you become “once burned, twice shy”?
At the same time, we are told that autistic
children are obsessed with rules, and that this is a weakness and a part of
their disability. There is little awareness among parents and therapists that
these are children are obsessed with learning and following the rules because
they do not understand them. No one sees
this obsession as an attempt to make sense of a world where they are constantly
doing the wrong thing. Rules help them reduce their fear, and hence they
protest when you change the rules.
Fear as a Motivator or Paralyzer
Everyone has heard of the “fight-or-flight”
reaction in the face of danger. An animal or a human being either fights a
perceived threat or runs away. Therefore, fear is a great motivator. But what
if the fear is too great for the animal or human to react to? According to some
scientists, there is a third step: you “freeze.” In this way, too much fear
becomes the great paralyzer.
Let us assume an autistic child is involved
with a fight with the class bully. The bully is outside on the playground. The
autistic child is all alone. He’s got no adults to help him—no adults supervising
him. There’s no one there to help him except himself.
He feels hurt by the bully because he is
called horrible names by him, and feels that the bully does not deserve to get
away with it.
He doesn’t stand up to the bully at first
or report it to the staff—even though his social worker already taught him by
playing board game after board game about bullies that you should either “walk
away, state your feelings, or get a grown-up”--because he knows none of these
will work. He has tried to walk away but the bully followed him. He tried to
state his feelings, but the bully laughed. He tried to get a grown-up but no
grown-up would listen, or they told him it was his misperception, or what’s
worse, told him that he was the cause.
The autistic child tries to remain silent
until he can’t stand it anymore. By the time the recess aide notices what’s
happening, all she sees is an autistic kid attacking a normal kid, and the
autistic kid gets in trouble.
He goes home terrified, for at the end of
the day, his mother shrieks, “WHY DIDN’T YOU GO TELL THE SOCIAL WORKER?”
What the mother fails to recognize that by yelling
at the autistic child, she is only making the problem worse by creating more
fear, which is the reason why he didn’t go talk to the social worker in the
first place. She wants one thing but is doing the best she can to get the
opposite.
That’s how fear works. If you yell at someone for
being terrified, they might initially do what you want to get you to stop
yelling, but you will cause them to be terrified even more. They’ve now
developed a fear of your anger.
The next day when the bully strikes again, the autistic child now has four people to fear: the bully, the recess aide, the social worker, and his mother. This is too much for him, and he shuts down, or “plays frozen,” which is a common autistic response to extreme danger. It would be much more helpful for the adults in power to respect his fear, so that he can learn to trust them and rely on them for help.