Fears and phobias

Fear is an emotional state that expresses an evaluation of danger. Something is experienced as threatening and we must try to avoid or cope with it with prevention.

There are rational, justified fears. They make us be aware that there is a real, possible danger. Fire, cliffs, snakes, traffic accidents, thieves, unemployment, loneliness, social rejection, germs, toxins, disease, pain ... are real states and agents that have the negative condition that justifies fear.

When the theoretical possibility of threat is associated with a negligible probability of the dreaded actually happening, fear becomes a phobia. The aircraft can fall into the void, the bee can sting us, we can make a fool of ourselves if we open our mouth, we can get stuck in the elevator, food can be poisoned ... but well, probably that won’t happen.

Our empathic, socialized condition is our downfall. We tend to represent other people’s events as our own. We are supportive. We feel envy and compassion.

- Don’t be afraid, flying is safe.

- Yesterday there was a plane crash. All passengers died.

There are also irrational fears, extreme phobias. They are constructed by attributing danger to states and agents that are always irrelevant.

- My astral chart...

- I ate chocolate. My head is in danger.

- I’ve used the computer too much, my head is going to explode...

The brain doesn’t have an aversion to irrationality. We only have to look at ourselves, register our behaviors.

Homo sapiens (ma non troppo) is governed by a brain that manages reality from virtuality. It attributes the environment all sorts of possibilities. It’s no longer just getting carried away by the possible even when it is improbable (phobias). It also gets carried away by the impossible.

- You’ve been using the computer for two hours already. Your head will explode.

The cerebral irrational fear to computers is expressed to the individual through pain. The individual has a rational, logical fear to suffering, to having a migraine. The brain expresses somatic irrational fear with realism. It seems that the head is about to explode, really, given the violence of pain. But nothing is happening.

- I’m afraid that my head will hurt.

The justified, rational fear to pain moves (excites) the individual to seek causes and cures. Antidotes and spells.  

The brain requires the individual to take consistent actions with its irrational fear. It can detain the individual in a dark room, motionless, nauseous, intolerant to stimuli. It forces the individual to find and apply the antidote, something that danger conjures, the reliever, whatever that leaves the sufferer alone.

- The sedative started to take effect and now it doesn’t hurt as much.

The individual attributes the virtue of the soothing relief to painkillers. He or she believes that there is a chemical that puts in order some molecular disorder but, really, what the remedy dissolves is cerebral fear. It is the ritual, the action, what the brain requires. If the individual meets the requirements, the brain releases the poor sufferer.

- The danger is gone now. ‘Back to normal’ authorized.

Once the crisis is over, the brain revises everything closely. It looks for associations wherever culture shows responsibilities. Many times it can’t find any and tightens the nuts of pain even more. It becomes more frequent, intense, persistent and refractory to painkillers.

Homo sapiens (ma non troppo) as well as being empathetic and imitative is also educated, indoctrinated. The Homo sapiens (ma non troppo) builds irrational fears instilled by irrational cultures.

Homo sapiens (ma non troppo) is touched by the tendency to obey what he or she believes even if it is irrational.

A brain with migraine is sissy, empathic, imitative, obedient, politically correct.

The sufferer must be aware of this and object, rebel... disobey.

What were you told in the emergency room?

- You have a neck contracture. Use this collar for two weeks.

We know that a high percentage of citizens who have suffered a cervical whiplash in a collision will later develop chronic pain, fibromyalgia and/or PTSD.

Experts have tried to find the keys to turn an acute episode (mechanical trauma) into a chronic problem.

The problem affects women more, there is coexistence of psychological factors, fear of pain, lack of control, catastrophizing... and correlation with the severity of mechanical impact can’t be seen.

Experts do not include in their search something that, for me, is important:

- What did they say or do to you in the emergency room?

So imagine you're standing at a traffic light and receive a subsequent impact of another car that decided to skip it.

The ambulance comes. Someone places the collar. Neck x-rays...

- You have a contracture. A cervical sprain. You must wear this collar. Be careful when moving your neck. Take this anti-inflammatory and muscle relaxers. You might feel a little dizzy...

Well, you might be alarmist, have had stress in your childhood, sexual abuse etc. All of these have an influence, but it’s also about the professional. There are two types:

Type I: alarmist, interventionist, ominous, hypervigilant, hipertherapist...

Type II: calm, reasonable, weighted, alarmed by alarmism...

Type I makes takes x-rays, puts collars and gives muscle relaxants but gets the opposite of what was wanted: alerting the nociceptive system of a sensitive sufferer.

Type II disarms the alarm with arguments and encourages citizens to resume normal life while warning them of the ominous.

Experts do not include in their studies if the sufferer has been treated by a Type I or Type II professional.

- What did they tell you in the emergency room...?

Invariably, my patients were put a collar and were told they had a contracture. The Type I put fear in their necks.

Probably, I only see patients that were attended by Type I professionals. Those attended by  Type II professionals go home without a collar and fearless and are less likely to suffer from pain later in their lives.

So, if you go to the emergency room with a "cervical whiplash", you risk having type I or II.

Children think, too

- As a kid I did not think in my head. But it hurt...

In absence of necrotic damage we consider that pain has a lot to do with learning. The brain learns to make mistakes, to unnecessarily activate the areas responsible for pain perception.

When leaving the doctor’s office, logically the sufferers will meditate about what they heard and their brain will present all kinds of objections in its tendency to uphold standards that have prevailed so far. A common objection is that of childhood.

"Kids do not think, but they feel pain, so they don’t feel pain due to their ability to think..." "I had pain as a child, so everything that this doctor is saying doesn’t really convince me..."

The child's brain thinks from the moment it starts existing, it processes all the huge amount of signals that arrive to its neurons to organize them, to attribute meaning, predict consequences of every action. All of this happens, at first, in the "womb", a protected place, presumably with no dangers and, therefore, no pain.

As soon as the creature leaves the womb to the extra-uterine world, uncertainties, risks, weaknesses, fears projected from an alarmist brain begin. The copying function of our neurons, the mirror function, reproduces motor patterns of what it sees, attributing emotional relevance.

Genetics imposes its law. The human brain is an imitator. It’s dictated by genes. The child's brain picks up what is happening around and builds programs influenced by outside events and copies the adults’ behaviours of response.

The anguish of the parents eases the anguish of their creatures. The use of painkillers is contagious.

- The child has migraine. It's genetic. It was inherited from you.

It makes no sense analyzing the effect of growing up exclusively by genes. If there is a time when there is somatic fear and dependence on what caregivers do and say, it is childhood.

A biologically alarmist brain raised in an environment of caregivers which were indoctrinated in the sensitizing concepts and practices of contemporary culture on pain is likely to generate biologically unjustified switch-ons.

The brains of children make mistakes in their practices. It is essential that caregivers help them be correct, banishing the somatic fear, enhancing self-control and minimizing dependence on external therapeutic actions.

There are children with migraine, fibromyalgia, atopic dermatitis, irritable bowel syndrome, allergies ... that’s logical. The brain is learning.

- There are migraine and fibromyalgia in children... so...

It is concluded, in my opinion wrongly, that the presence of these sufferings in childhood is an argument that contradicts the thesis of those that defend the learned, cerebral origin and strengthens the thesis of the disease.

The brain is plastic, namely, vulnerable, especially in childhood. Let’s take care of the children's learning. Let’s be afraid to them cultivating biological fear, expressed through symptoms. Let’s not interpret them as evidence of disease when there is no evidence of it, but as a mistake of the process of learning.

If we promote the idea of illness and struggle to get an external solution, a therapeutic one, we will turn physiological errors of the child’s brain into horror. We will condemn our children to something worse than disease: unjustified suffering, limitless, irrational, misunderstood, hopeless, even despised.

Think. The child's brain thinks... copies.

Treatments

- Am I not going to get any treatment? Is it just like that, just talking...?

This comment may come up after an hour long explanation of neuronal origin of pain. It is assumed that instruction is not a valid treatment, approach or option.

It seems, for citizens and professionals, that there must be a coupled action that gives substance to the simple instructional discourse, the talk. Emotions should be worked on, seeing a person and not just a brain. Therapies, sessions, methods... I don’t know, something.

I don’t really understand the reluctance to validate the brain work, the reconstruction of the story that the brain is bit by bit writing on the body, the relevance of what has happened, its origin, its prognosis, what the future looks like.

- Only training, rescheduling, chip changing...? It will not be enough. We must do something else.

Important concepts such as the relevance of somatic (cerebral) fear to necrosis as a possibility, the addictive-phobic brain structure, organism’s psychopathology, error in decision-making, dysfunction of error detection, acculturation... are irrelevant, apparently.

The schema or body image, how the brain evaluates the state of the organism, its vulnerability, has a powerful influence on what the individual perceives as news of oneself or of one’s inside.

- Here. We will try to approach the story that your brain has been building of your body and of its interaction with your intentions and projects.

If I started explaining it that way, I would, in a few days, run out of patients. However, it should be the main goal, trying to put ourselves in the shoes of the brain as the scope of decisions that affect us.

- How am I?

- Your real body is fine, the virtual one is profoundly mistaken ...

- ?

- I’ll explain it to you.

Many sufferers apply the tactics of St. Thomas: Believing is seeing. If pain goes away after acupuncture, I believe in acupuncture, even when after a while it stops working and I stop believing.

Beliefs are plastic, adaptable.

In brain issues we not only have to be like St. Thomas. The strategy of visual validation must be supplemented with belief, knowledge: Seeing is believing.

Sometimes, the band should be removed in order to see.

Pain for everything

Evolution selects, slowly but surely, by chance and necessity, any biological resource that demonstrates its ability to collaborate in the first and last goal of survival of the individual, the group and the species.

Each perception contains a biological-historical process through which its meaning and purpose is slowly shaped.

Pain is not an exception. Its biological and evolutionary insides arise and develop in the heat of the violent events of cell death, necrosis. Try banging your head against a corner, put it in the oven to check on the chicken, get a tourniquet on your arm... Pain will show up to indicate that there has been violent cell death due to your action.

Try not to eat or drink anything for a few days or swallowing handfuls of salt. Thirst will emerge to indicate that your cells need water. Thirst perception is linked to lack of water or salt excess, hunger perception to scarcity of food, feeling cold to low temperature and feeling hot to high temperature. Pain, to cell necrosis.

- I’m thirsty. I'm worried. I have all the water I need. I drink several liters a day but I can’t calm it down. Am I losing water?

- It could be. You may have diabetes.

There are pathological situations (for example, diabetes) in which the body is unable to save something as necessary as water and eliminates it through urine, compromising the life of cells.

Analysis may show a high quantity of glucose in blood and urine.

- You have diabetes. That’s why you are so thirsty. Your organism loses water and forces you to replace it through thirstiness.

- My head hurts.

- You have meningitis, bleeding, sinusitis, a bump...

In the absence of dehydration or excessive salt everyone would understand that they drink water without any biological justification. The brain has created a paradoxical habit of seeking liquids in a world full of taps.

- I'm really thirsty. I need water.

- You have nothing.

- Then, why am I so thirsty? Can’t you give me something to stop this? I don’t want to spend all day walking around with a water bottle.

- We don’t know. It’s a mystery. Stress, hormones, food, wind, pollution, domestic electromagnetic radiation, psychoneuroimmunological alterations, genes (of course) ...

Pain, along with hunger, thirst, heat, cold ... is a homeostatic perception. It finds its way in maintaining the physical integrity of the body, in avoiding anything that kills cells in a short time.

Culture does not respect the biological sense of words. It misappropriates them and places them wherever it’s appropriate for its speech.

Anything works when justifying pain. Each professional explains it self-fulfillingly from his or her culture.

- It’s your sight. You need glasses.

- It’s the tooth ...

- Stress ...

- Hormones, feminine ones, of course ...

- Yes, yes, it’s the genes ...

The first obstacle to overcome in the doctor’s office is to explain the primitive, evolutive biological sense of pain.

- Pain is only justified from biology when a situation of violent death (consummated or imminent) occurs. From the different cultures you can justify it to your liking, namely, your brain’s liking.

Each brain defends its cultural identity of the origin of pain and takes it to the extreme.

- I am not convinced. You can say whatever you want but, in my opinion, what causes me pain is cured cheese ... I’m sure of that!

Culture, always culture... Ah, these sapiens...

The loneliness of the sufferer

Pain makes us feel small, vulnerable, defenseless.

Homo sapiens (ma non troppo) is raised under the caretaker’s protection, someone who is close to be requested when uncertainty projects anxiety, fear ...

The caretaker detects and cares, thoughtfully, the creature’s complaints and calms the abandonment with actions.

If the caretaker fails, does not listen or look, even when caring thoughtfully, he or she can not avoid confessing his or her powerlessness, anguish at the failure as a caretaker. The sufferer comes down, sinks into the pit of despair, of helplessness, of abandonment. The suffering creature is certain of loneliness. The promised land of remedy and relief for everything doesn’t exist.

- We don’t know what’s happening. It’s a mystery. We've tried everything and I don’t know what else I can do.

- How can it be that, with all these advances...?

All the caretaker can do is shrug and show the harsh and stark expression of helplessness and detachment.

When the sufferer was still a child, the caretaker showed up with the painkiller and the glass of water, with the crushed aspirin in a teaspoon with some sugar. The scoop contained certainty of relief and so it was. The headache vanished with the simple logic of childhood.

- My head hurts ...

- I’ll bring you the painkiller.

Over the years the children remained with their complaints, but each time the gesture of the caretaker was less confident and effective. The home reliever was no longer useful. First a doctor, then the specialist ... until reaching the edge of the cliff.

The suffering (troppo) Homo sapiens (ma non troppo) remains the same creature, educated in the figure of the omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent caretaker, but has lost the certainty or, even worse, has the certainty of fraud.

- It hurts so much... somebody help me!

Experts continue to increase the list of "Science’s” spectacular progress.

- We can take a picture (in color) of pain. We know where the brain creates it.

The sufferer gives an uncertain sigh of hope: "If you knew where the factory of pain is, you could drop some chemical bombs there and stop it..."

There are experts for everything. Those politically correct (as politicians) like anticipating results, but there are also those politically incorrect and scientifically honest that add their point of incorrection (political) embittering the sweetness of promises.

- Actually, the brain areas responsible for pain are also responsible for all relevant states, including the perception of social exclusion.

Brain facilities allegedly responsible for the pain, the so-called neuromatrix of pain, also show off their red color in the Functional Magnetic Resonance when something relevant happens or someone is very lonely.

- It hurts, something is going on in there, I feel helpless and misunderstood.

- You were right .... Look, this red area indicates that your brain is hypersensitive and that it activates the areas responsible for giving importance to things even if they’re not important, and making you feel lonely even when you’re accompanied. You have hyper relevance syndrome and social self-exclusion. It could be the serotonin, dopamine ... or of course the genes ...

- Is there any treatment for this?

- At the moment, we have no drugs that turn the brain into what we wish, but the only thing you can do is accept your situation. You must identify everything that your brain considers important and avoid it, without leaving aside your relationships with people, so you don’t feel that alone.

- You told me to get into a dark room and not talk to anyone...!