Why We Worry All the Time and How to Cope

来自The School of Life

(原文来自The School of Life)

It’s not an illustrious category to belong to of course, but there are plenty of us at least.

We worry about work, money, being left, illness, disappointing, over-promising, madness and disgrace, just to start the list. We worry in the early hours, we worry on holiday, we worry at parties and we worry all the time while we’re trying to smile and seem normal to good people who depend on us. It can feel pretty unbearable, at moments.

来自The School of Life

A standard approach when trying to assuage our blizzard of worries is to look at each in turn and marshal sensible arguments against their probabilities. But it can, at points, also be helpful not to look at the specifics of every worry and instead to consider the overall position that worry has come to occupy in our lives.

There is a hugely fascinating sentence on the topic in an essay by the great English psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott: ‘Thecatastrophe you fear will happen has in fact already happened.’ When we worry, we are naturally fixated on what will occur next: it’s the future, with its boundless possibilities for horror, that is the natural arena for exploration by our panicked thoughts. But in Winnicott’s unexpected thesis, something else is revealed: the disaster that we fear is going to unfold is actually behind us.

来自The School of Life

There is a paradox here: why do we keep expecting something to happen that has already happened? Why don’t we better distinguish past from present? Winnicott’s answer that it’s in the nature of traumatic events from childhood not to be properly processed and as a result, like the dead who have not been adequately buried and mourned, to start to haunt us indiscriminately in adulthood. But they do not make themselves felt in straightforward.

For example, we may panic that we are about to be humiliated and shamed. There are no particularly strong grounds for this in objective reality, but we are utterly convinced nevertheless because this is precisely what happened to us when we were tiny and at the hands of a parent. Or we worry intensely that we are about to be abandoned in love not because our partner is in any significant way disloyal, but because someone who once looked after us at a very vulnerable point definitely was.

来自The School of Life

A benefit of understanding how much our worries owe to childhood is a new sense that it isn’t so much the future we should be distressed about as the past. We can replace dread and apprehension with something sadder yet ultimately more redemptive: mourning. We can feel profoundly sorry for our younger selves as an alternative to being panicked for our future selves.

Appreciating the childhood legacy worries, we also stand to realize that we can adapt and improve on how we respond to what alarms us. If we have been well parented, we will have been bequeathed a repertoire of good moves to latch on to when crises occur: we know how to reach out, seek help, perhaps move away and only take as much responsibility as we are due. We have access to a corridor through our troubles. But when we have lacked this kind of tutelage, we remain insignificant ways, in relation to our troubles, like the frightened children we once were. We may be tall, drive a car and sound like a grown-up, but faced with concerns, resort to our toolkit of childlike solutions: we overreact, we go silent, we scream, we have a little sense of other options, we feel extremely limited in our powers of protest and agency, we lose all perspective.

来自The School of Life

To which it is appropriate, and in no way patronizing, to remind ourselves of what can –in our deeper psychological selves – still be an entirely implausible thought: that we are now adults. In other words, in response to the kinds of terror we knew sowell at the age of four or eight, we don’t have to be either as afraid or aspowerless as we were. We can mount a direct protest, we can make an eloquentcase for ourselves, we can complain and defend our position, we can rebuild ourlives in a new way elsewhere.

来自The School of Life

There are two ways to mitigate risk: to try to remove all risk from the world. Or to work on one’s attitude to risk.Knowing that many of our fears have childhood antecedents as do our responses to them can free us to imagine that history won’t have to repeat itself exactly. Adult life doesn’t have to be as terrifying as our childhoods once were and our responses to our fears can have some of the greater vigor and confidence that is the natural privilege of grown-ups. We’ll still be worried a substantial portion of the time, but perhaps with a little less fragility and fewer burning convictions of total upcoming catastrophe.

我们为什么一直担心以及如何应对

这当然不是一个卓越的类别，但是无论如何，我们很多人都属于它。

我们担心工作，钱，被离开，生病，失望，过于承诺，疯狂，和丢脸，这些也不过是清单上的前几个。我们在一天开始的几个小时担心，在假期担心，在聚会上担心，我们无时无刻不在担心，即使是当我们试着微笑，试着被那些相信我们的好人看起来正常，我们也在担心。在那些瞬间，这真的不可承受。

来自The School of Life

当我们试着去平息像暴风雪一样的担心时，一个标准的方法是，一个一个地看它们，然后对它们发生的概率进行理智的论证。但是，在某些方面，不去看每个担心的特殊性，而是综合地考虑它在我们生活中占据的位置。

伟大的英国精神分析学家唐纳德•温尼科特在一篇文章中，有一个极其迷人的句子： 你害怕将来会发生的灾难，其实已经发生。当我们担心时，我们会自然地关注接下来会发生什么，它是未来，随着它使得恐惧发生的无限可能性，是我们恐怖的念头进行探险的天然的舞台。但是在温尼科特出人意料的论文里，揭示了一些别的东西：那些我们害怕显现出来的灾难，实际上已经过去了。

来自The School of Life

这里有个悖论：为什么我们会期望已经发生的事情去发生呢？为什么我们不能更好的从当下，把过去区分出来呢？温尼科特的答案说，它的根源在于，童年的创伤事件没有被适当处理，结果就是，像没有被适当埋葬并哀悼的死亡，开始在我们成年后，一样萦绕在我们周围。但是它们不会被直接体验到。

比如，我们可能怕我们会被羞辱并感到羞愧。这么想在客观事实中没有特别强的依据，但是我们仍然全然地相信，因为这些在我们很小的时候，通过我们的父母，真真切切地发生在我们身上。或者，我们强烈地担心我们会被抛弃，不是因为我们的伴侣确实不忠，而是因为曾经照顾我们的人非常脆弱，而她在某些方面，的的确确抛弃过我们。

来自The School of Life

了解到我们的哪些担心是童年时期造成的，我们会有一种新的感知，就是未来没有那么多需要我们像过去一样担心的。我们可以将恐惧和担忧替换成更加伤心，但是却最终可被挽回的：哀悼。我们可以深切地为年轻的自己感到抱歉，以此替换对未来的自己的恐惧。

感谢童年担心的遗物，我们也可以站立起来，去觉察到，我们可以适应，并且对于如何应对让我们惊恐的东西有所长进。如果我们被很好地培养长大，我们将来会在坏事发生时，得到一系列好的举动作为遗赠：我们知道如何伸手，寻求帮助，也许抽身并且只承担我们应该承担的责任。我们有通过麻烦的走廊的入口。但是如果我们缺乏这类的指导，我们依然在某些方面，困在我们的麻烦里，像我们曾经是的那个受惊的孩子。我们也许高大，开着车，说话也像大人，但是面对担心，凭借儿时的工具：我们会反应过度，我们沉默，我们尖叫，我们很难意识到其它的选项，我们感到我们抗议和委托的能力受到了极大的限制，我们失去了所有的远见。

来自The School of Life

它适时地，没有任何庇护地，提醒着我们：我们现在是个成年人了——虽然在我们深层次自我中，这依然是一个完全不可置信的想法。也就是说，面对那些我们4岁或8岁熟知的恐惧，我们不必再像当时的自己一样害怕或无力。我们可以组织直接的反击，可以为自己有力地辩护，我们可以控诉，可以捍卫自己的立场，我们可以在别处以新的方式重建我们的生活。

来自The School of Life

有两个降低风险的方法：移除世界所有的风险；或者，以冒险的态度工作。知道很多我们的恐惧有儿时的反应参与，就可以让我们自由地描绘：历史不必要重演。成年人的生活，不必像童年一样可怕，我们对我们恐惧的反应就可以更加有活力，而且更加自信，而这，正是成年人天然的特权。我们仍然会很大程度上担心，但是对于即将来临的灾难，几乎不会虚弱，并且不会烧毁信念。

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