[This article appeared in Huffington Post in the first week of July, 2011)

There's a man I know who is talented, empathic, possessed of a keen intellect and frightened of everything. The fear has been built the way thunderstorms gather over mountains — imperceptibly at first, then slowly, silently but with great force. With every approaching rumble, it has shut his world down piece by piece. First it was work, then it was social activities, then it was driving and finally it was family. His universe has folded in like a sheet, corner over corner, until it has reduced his life to spending the day in front of the computer trolling YouTube. He didn't understand how it all happened and his anguish was palpable — so was my confusion.

"You're living other people's lives," I said.

"They're giving me their lives," he answered tersely. Clearly I had no idea what was going on in cyberspace or how such a thing could happen to someone so gifted.

"What do you mean?" I asked.

He explained that there were people who addressed their audiences daily, sharing from their own lives and "interacting" with their fans about everything from hair care to emotional and physical intimacy. Nothing was verboten. The video monologue disguised as discussion might as well have been occurring between lovers. There was no pretense of "expertise" in any particular field, just one human being talking to another (well, sort of) over high-speed cables.

"They give so much," he added poignantly.

"Wouldn't someone real?" I was baffled.

"But you'd have to go and find someone real. These people are just delivered to you."

"Like Chinese food," I thought, but didn't say. In my mind I became lost in my own past, when I was very young and very foolish and due to various all-nighters was unable to get into a car or walk to a grocery to get food. I thought of the times that I had called for delivery and what motivated that avoidance — whether it was lethargy or fear.

I believe it was mostly lethargy, but there were a few times when it was fear. It didn't happen often and it wasn't with the ferocity or chronicity of this fellow's experience, but it was enough to begin to understand the call to sequester he was hearing. It's a formidable thing, fear, particularly when it is not rational. A rational fear (there is a bus heading for me and I must move or die) can be argued for or against. There it is — or isn't. Either there is someone following you or there is not. An irrational fear — that which stems from within as opposed to without (like a bus or a real stalker rather than a paranoid delusion) — is a much harder thing both to face and fight.

The times I called for food to be delivered so I could continue "hiding" in my apartment were, as I recall, times I didn't feel particularly good about myself. My fear was of being seen and judged. I fully admit that the fear was decidedly not rational, because there was no particular reason for any judgment (who knew me and who cared? It was New York!) Furthermore, I don't believe retrospectively that I looked especially bizarre or off-putting. I felt bad about behaving badly and believed, erroneously, that someone else would see right through me. I was afraid of the judgment I was already indicting upon myself.

Internet Effects on Love

A man who is very dear to me is a recovering alcoholic. When I asked him if he had ever been afraid of going out of his house, he answered in no uncertain terms, "for more than two years."

His story takes place moments before the internet became de rigueur, around the turn of the millennium. He has not had a drink in nearly a decade, but those last struggles are still painfully vivid. His liver was moving toward a meltdown, his faculties were frayed, his hitherto well-planned life a shambles. "I became afraid of everything: of collapsing in public, of being judged, of having a panic attack and being out there with no help. I was afraid of being afraid, of breathing, of being without alcohol, of needing more alcohol. It was so overpowering, I stayed home. I couldn't do anything else."

If he had been connected to a thing such as YouTube as a substitute for human relationship, it is entirely possible that he would have never gotten out of the house. What he believes saved him were the relationships in his life. His friends called him and he answered the call. He went out, even if sporadically. Those friends were the ones who drove him to rehab. For some reason — and I admit I still don't know what that is — his fear did not overtake him the way it did our other fellow and he lives to talk about it with others.

I am sure there are numerous studies about the effects of the Internet on relationships, just as I am equally sure of the numerous effects and speculations that result from it. How could there not be? I know that texting has had a profound effect on people's (particularly young people's) ability to speak in full sentences. But this essay is not about the effect of the internet on us. Rather the opposite. It is fully about us. It is about what is in our hearts (or not in our hearts, like faith or courage or self-worth) when we sit down at a computer. It is about what we bring to the cyber-table (like a fear of being seen or judged) that makes us mortally vulnerable to a system of pseudo-intimacy that offers free delivery.

It is a human story, not an empirical one. The sad truth is that while YouTube may sometimes be fun, it is not a relationship. Nor can it ever be a relationship. It is a one, not even a two-dimensional format. It is a dead-end street. It is delivered, yes, but nothing more may be asked of the deliverer and nothing may be given back.

I wonder, now, if that isn't precisely what keeps our first fellow sitting in front of the screen, if the fear is that someone real would require something in return? Or, worse, that he may find a swell of love in his own heart and wish to give something back only to be refused or rejected?

What is the ultimate consequence of this behavior? It is not, as some people falsely conclude, that people are hoodwinked by the internet's false promises. It is actually worse. It is that their fear cuts them off and they are kept from ever loving. For to love one must be able to give either selflessly or in return for being loved. It is, in fact, the a priori definition of love. This is perhaps the worst and saddest sort of emotional twinkie, the kind we keep insisting should make us feel better but never, ever does.

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This is not a rhetorical question, though, according to my husband, it may be one that I come to regret asking in a public forum like this.

When I told him I was going to write an article about what happened in a gun shop the other day, he winced, "I hope you're ready for the fallout."

I guess I am, because I want to tell you the story and ask you what you think. I have come away from the whole experience with less "knowing" than I thought I had when I went in.

Allow me to start by saying I am a gun owner. I have several weapons and I respect all of them. I treat them with the care they demand and I am properly licensed. I have, thank God, always used them solely for target practice. I do not eat meat and do not hunt (though I admit that if there were ever an emergency and I needed to hunt in order to feed my family, I would reluctantly do so).

Mostly, I have them for home defense. I also, however, have a concealed carry permit. In my mind, carrying a gun in public has always had a dual consequence. It has not only implied that I can take care of myself, it has also meant that I have to be able and ready to to defend someone else if that is appropriate and necessary. I do not suffer from the delusion that I am a cop, nor am I secretly looking for opportunities to be a hero. I pray it never ever comes to that, but it is part of the deal (and responsibility) as far as I've been concerned.

The Case of The Sweltering Pup
In any event, this is what happened. It is an ordinary day. We are walking into a gun store to make a purchase. As we approach the building, we notice a dog languishing in a car with the windows only cracked open. It is in the mid-90's and the sun is searing. I point it out to my husband and he cringes, already knowing that I'm going to do something.

I have to sidetrack for a moment to acknowledge that he and I come from different worlds. In his, where everyone carried a gun, a person didn't get involved in another person's private affairs, even if those affairs were morally offensive. "Live and let live" was the Rocky Mountain tao by which he was raised.

My conscience was directed by different forces. What was perhaps the strongest code in my family was Edmund Burke's maxim: "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." We not only believed in intervention, we actually intervened. We picked up clothes that other people dropped in department stores, stood between abusive parents and their babies, or wrote to congressmen and marched on Washington or the U.N.

When you saw something wrong, particularly something life-threatening, Justice was spelled with a capital J and doing nothing was not an option.

In any case, he was right about what was soon to happen. I walked into a store full of men with guns and told the clerk about the dog. "If you guys don't take care of it, I'm calling the cops." They said they would deal with him.

With a few questions, they found the man who needed to bring his dog to the firing range so he could leave him in a closed car in the parking lot in summer. They told him it was "unacceptable" and then they let him go back into the range to continue firing. The dog was still in the car. I waited a little while, then I went outside and called the police.

They came within about five minutes. And the guy, squealing and bleating in shamed protest, finally took his dog home, where hopefully he will live to see another day.

A Psychological Reality Check
I expressed my utter confusion about this to my husband when we got home. I couldn't understand how a store full of men with guns couldn't promptly and properly deal with a coward and a dog bully.

He said I misunderstood or misinterpreted gun ownership and that a good number of gun owners do not have guns out of any sense of duty and don't necessarily develop a sense of duty out of having guns. They have no bearing on one another. Many gun owners are profoundly honorable and benevolent people. But not because they have guns. Rather because they were raised well.

Most, he said, have guns for either sport or self-defense. It is a private matter. And it has no bearing on a sense of responsibility for anyone else.

I was surprised and still confused. But, but, but … I kept asking him: Didn't the having of a gun at least bring some semblance of duty to bear on a person? All he could do was say, "They're just not the same thing, is all."

So, I called a friend of mine, a detective and CSI whose opinion and intelligence I have come to trust. I told him the story and he laughed and asked me, "So, you're living where?"

I told him.

"And the culture there says what about privacy and animals?"

I shut my mouth and let him continue. I had already begun to see the light.

"To stand up, they'd first of all have to agree it's wrong. What's the mentality of the place you're in? To them, you're probably crazy. Plus, you think that because you know mostly people who do get involved — like cops or fire fighters or medics — that everyone with a gun is thinking the same way. They don't necessarily want to be involved at all and don't want anyone else to be involved with them. They're not all that interested in being helpful. They're interested in maintaining a perimeter between them and the rest of the world."

It came to this: guns don't make the man. Quite the reverse.

So, sadly, it seems that the world is still as apathetic as it was when Kitty Genovese was killed in a parking lot in Queens, NY with a dozen people watching, none of whom called 911. I may have to accept this, but I don't have to like it. Just like I will never become the person who walks past the panting dog or crying child in the car and clucks their disapproval without putting any punch in their protest. Some things are worth the risk and the alienation, as far as I'm concerned. And to tell you the truth, I'd do it again.

A while back I was visiting friends in a suburb of NYC. We are walking down the street minding our own business. A woman screeches up to the sidewalk, yanks her kids out of the car, screams at them and leaves them sitting and crying on a park bench. She takes off in the car. My friends and I look at each other in stunned silence for approximately .05 second and immediately corral the children. I call 911.

They put me on hold! I should've known right there that something was up. But, caught up in the moment, I stand there like a numskull and wait. The mother drives back up and whines about how no one understands how hard her life has been and how they were driving her crazy and it was just a little lesson…etc… I told her to back away and wait to give her story to the police.

As things went from terse to truly tense, out of the bushes pop up a sound man, a couple of 20 year old girls with release forms, and John Quinones from "What Would You Do?"

I guess we answered the question our way. And no one was carrying a gun.

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Death Fear: Why Do We

Dread Being Dead?

A New American Phenomenon

I spent probably the first half of my life in one or the other state of acute fear. Due to a variety of circumstances, one of them asthma, I came to know the fear of imminent death. It was so visceral, so primordial and pre-verbal, it still defies description for me. I can fully understand why someone would do almost anything to make that feeling stop and to live his life as if death were someone else's problem. But over the years, as I've gotten healthier, I've become less and less afraid. I don't believe that was just because of my improved physical state. There were at least a few times that I thought death was possible if not within proximity. On looking back, it seems to me that the process actually worked in reverse. I think I became healthier because I became less afraid. In particular, I became less afraid of death. One reader, Synduatic, commented on one of my recent Huffington Post blogs on suffering. He implied that a good portion of our well-being stems from our ability to meet death. He paraphrased a few great thinkers who concluded that to avoid death was to avoid a free life: A rich philosophical tradition, to which you gave passing reference, surrounds these ideas, too. Plato said that philosophy is a meditation on and a preparation for death; Seneca said that he or she who learns how to die unlearns slavery; and Montaigne said that to philosophize is to learn how to die. I had to agree. He pointed to a deep fracture in the American psyche because there is no culture that shuns death (or suffering) the way ours does. And what we shun, we fear. And what we fear controls us.

The rest is at the link above.

Blessings to all.

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It was a long time ago. I was young. I was writing for Madison Avenue, hobnobbing with celebrities, going to parties. It was as far from a meaningful life as I've ever been, but it was the 1980's, Reagan was president, we were selling and everyone was buying. Life was "good."

Then one day I got an ad order for one of the firm's big clients. They were pushing a new diet pill that would expand in the stomach and fool the person into feeling full so they wouldn't eat. I read the marketing stats carefully. Their targeted audience was young, female and anorexic.

I don't know what made me suddenly so sensitive or intolerant of such an obviously necessary strategy — who else would you sell a diet product to? — but I got angry. And in a pique of rebellion I hurled my typewriter against what I felt to be a nasty injustice and sealed my fate when I submitted an ad with a picture of the little expanding pill and a headline that read: Fat Chance.

Needless to say, they never ran the ad…

To see the whole article, go to Huffington Post.

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Human nature may be the same, but there are new rules of engagement.

With every major invention, every technical ratcheting forward, human history has been irrevocably altered. Some of the most pivotal alterations have been the result of the least dramatic and perhaps least glamorous discoveries, such as the toilet and interior plumbing.

Massive changes followed the introduction of those little white bowls in the average home, most notably the decrease of acute epidemic disease and the increase in the human lifespan, which in turn has had a ripple effect on everything we think and undertake…

To see the whole topic:

Huffington Post

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The reason I've done this is because of what I've seen in my psychotherapy practice–people who are afraid, truly afraid, and look to all sorts of products to make them feel better: breast implants (so they feel younger and aren't so afraid of losing their luster or facing their mortality), viagra (so they feel more virile and aren't so afraid of the normal aging process), more and more insurance (so they're supposedly protected against everything the insurance companies can make them afraid of).

I will be releasing a host of new articles on this topic–how the culture and particularly the media perpetuate needless, pervasive and viral fear and, not only what this does to us, but what we can do about it!

As they say, stay tuned.

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Everyone is different when it comes to their addictions.

There was one woman who needed surgery.

Se was in her 80's when he went to see a colleague of mine for an unrelated ailment. She had been beaten and cut by her husband for years. To deal with it, she took up drinking. She took it up so well, that she forgot about the abuse but became physically ill. She finally succumbed to the alcohol and had to go in for surgery for her gall bladder.

"They told me my liver was so soft, they almost couldn't do the surgery at all. So, I said to myself, 'Barbara Ann [name changed], you may not be very smart, but you ain't dumb enough to drink yourself to death neither.' So I just quit."

That was in 1981. She's been sober since.

Fear, as they say, can be a great motivator.

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According to experts in neurobiology, when we are afraid we are at our least intelligent. Literally. We stop thinking like grown human beings with our cortex and frontal lobes and start thinking with that small walnut of a lizard brain we call the limbic system.

The other day I had a personal experience of just how foolish fear can make a person. With all my training in psychotherapy, trauma, and crisis counseling, with all my years in the trenches seeing the very worst that humanity is capable of, with all the professional composure and philosophical peace I have made with the suffering and idiocy of the world, I still acted like an ass in a thunderstorm. One little peel of thunder and off went my adrenal glands, madly galloping away with my cerebral cortex, disappearing into the sunset, never to be thunk [sic] of again.

It’s all about a small insect…well, he wasn’t very small at all and that was where the first problem began. He was a six inch, armored tank of a whip scorpion, what locals in New Mexico call the Vinegaroon.

Baby Whip Scorpion

My husband and I were sitting outside in the morning with our teas, watching the slow trickles of last night’s rain slide from the roof into the canals and down the side of the house. It was a cooler morning than we’d had in weeks of 103 degree temperatures and we were relaxed in the western breeze.

I watched the rain and thought about a catchment system, following the water upwards to the canal when I saw him.

I nearly dropped my mug.

“SCORPION!” I thought.

I pointed. That was the only word that came out of my mouth for about 3 seconds, which is a long time when you’re trying to speak.

My husband looked where I was pointing, saw nothing (it was still early and the sun hadn’t fully risen) and kept asking “What? What?” The more he asked, the less I could speak.

I’d seen and reluctantly dispatched scorpions before. But they were less than an inch long and pale, seeming somehow less threatening. This one was on our portale, it was about 6 inches long if you don’t count the whip at the end of his thorax, it had an exoskeleton to make a Hummer jealous, and it was MOVING.

“It’s a scorpion!” I finally eeked out.

How pathetic, I thought even as I was being pathetic. A damsel in distress over a bug. But I was already in the hooks not of the bug but of my own neurobiology. My limbic system had been turned on, the adrenal glands were on red alert, and all I could think of was that damned thing could kill our little dog and do some serious damage to our bigger one. In my fear, I forgot about everything I ever said I believed in–the sanctity of all life, the intricate balance of the ecosystem, the divinity and love of God in all His creatures. And I do feel that way, now. Then, I had all the philosophical wisdom and forethought of a swamp croc.

After we both went over to look at it, my husband, being the saner of us, asked, “Are you sure it’s a scorpion? It kinda looks like that bug we found by the garage that time and it turned out to be a big nothing, remember?”

“NO! What about the dogs?”

“Well, I don’t know…what if we put him in a bucket?”

“How?”

“A shovel.”

As he went to get a shovel and a bucket, I herded the dogs inside and kept a watchful eye on what I thought was the most venomous creature I’d ever seen.

By the time Dave walked across the house, into the garage, got back out and crossed the courtyard, my fear had infected him and his limbic system had apparently kicked in. So, instead of scooping the poor fella into a bucket, he picked up a shovel and swung hard enough to crack the stucco. The bug never knew what hit him.

While knowing his death was quick and hopefully painless gave me some measure of absolution after my adrenalin crawled back to the walnut whence it came, it didn’t make me feel less stupid or remorseful when I found out that he was in fact not a scorpion at all, but a vinegaroon—a rather harmless, non-toxic night stalker that eats crickets and other unpleasant pests. So not only was he not a scorpion, not only was he not harmful to my dogs or me, he was an asset to our garden.

They say it takes 1/12,000^th of a second to go to red alert but that it takes a lot longer to think a situation through.

Stupid is fast. And, as I found once again in my life, fast is also pretty stupid.

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It's axiomatic that you get what you pay for. On observation, however, I believe that there are times we get more than we bargain for, not all of it good. In the case of current media-incitements, we get much more and we are rarely aware of it.

Viral fear, that generalized anxiety induced and spread by the media in all its forms, is evident not only in advertising but in most television programming. There's the famous It Could Happen Tomorrow series on the Weather Channel and that important reminder Armageddon Week on the History Channel. For the thoroughly inured and brain-injured there's also a 24-7 fear channel on cable in case someone needs to scare themselves to sleep. Of course, it's not enough to watch horrifying dramatizations of our last days on earth. Advertisers do their duty when they alert us to the more imminent dangers to life and limb if we don't buy their ________ (insert one or all of the following: security system, flu vaccine, dietary supplement, colon cleanser, or SUV).

There are statistics that suggest that while our diets are no good (by in large, they're awful), they're not the sole culprits in our poor health. While our intake of alcohol is high, that too is not the bullet that hit the artery. Same with cigarettes.

The Europeans eat and drink and smoke and suffer fewer heart attacks and less cancer. The Japanese eat very little fat and suffer fewer heart attacks than us but the Mexicans eat a lot of fat and suffer fewer heart attacks than us. The Chinese drink very little red wine and suffer fewer heart attacks than us.The Italians drink a lot of red wine and suffer fewer heart attacks than us.The Germans drink a lot of beer and eat lots of  sausages and fats and suffer fewer heart attacks than us.

Something else is at work, then.

I've been a psychotherapist for 25 years. Licensed in five states at one point. Seen hundreds, if not thousands of people. The one thing that seems to be the most prevalent and devastating to the most people is the constant fear, the unrelenting stress to perform to some impossible standard, and the agonizing inability to meet those standards and resulting inadequacy. This is just observation, not analysis.

But I did have a question or a thought on the topic. Is it possible that part of our cultural nature as adventurers and conquerers has something to do with it? When we are not scaling sheer cliffs, jumping out of planes, or conquering the west, where does that energy go?

There's a truism in Homeopathy that a remedy exists on a polar spectrum. It can be bright red (for instance) with heat or appear to be so white it looks cold. It can be enraged or as silent and coiled as a snake. It can be delighted or deranged. Each one existing within the same remedy state.

Could the same be true for Americans? That when we're not engaged in the extremes of conquest, we're trapped by our televisions? That the kissing cousin of adventure–fear–grabs us as soon as we stop leaping off of cliffs. And one thing I DO know is that fear kills us faster than anything else I've seen.

Just a thought to consider.

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