The Coronaphobia Toolkit
Kindness, Clarity and Hope
As I said in my last book, Worlds Ends: Coronavirus, Frankenstein and Other Monsters, this is a book about Kindness, Clarity and Hope.
In a world’s end, we can strive to keep the quality of kindness safe. For ourselves and for others.
Kindness is not a thing. It is a set of techniques of thought, leading to practices of deed. We do as we think, and we can think more kindly. Kindness is not a function of weakness. It comes as a practice of thought and action only through strength.
Strength in turn is founded in clarity. To see matters as they are in reality. In CBT terms, to assess your reality directly, rather than through a fog of fear. Your reality is never the same as mine. But our explanations of our separate reality can bind us together with strength, when those explanations have clarity.
Clarity in turn prospers hope. It is difficult for hope to emerge from blindness. Hope is not some airy fairy will ‘o the wisp. Hope is not a longing for certainty: that is in fact pessimism. Hope is an expectation of opportunity.
From this covid crisis emerge so many potential opportunities that no single book could encompass even a tiny fraction of them. The societal response to covid itself provides so many opportunities that were unimaginable when we celebrated new year 2020.
Fear
Fear is not something we are born with. It’s a response to stimulus that we are conditioned to. Babies and toddlers don’t have fear. They learn it.
Conditioned responses can’t be un-learnt. But they can be overcome. The natural process for overcoming fear - for crowding it out of our consciousness – is anxiety.
That’s why you tense yourself up, tightening the screw in your nerves, muscles and mind, before you jump off a high diving board. Or taste food you’re not sure about. Or watch media headlines about coronavirus.
Living with fears is not a problem. There are events and circumstances that we are right to fear, and fear can help us avoid them. But it is anxiety which allows us to live at all. Anxiety and the inexorable natural soothing which always rises to match it: if we allow it.
The Anxiety-Soothing Cycle
My first CBT book I Want To Love But… Realising the Power of You, uncovered and explored the working out in our minds, emotions and life of this natural healing cycle, with us from birth. The core concept:
The Anxiety-Soothing Dance is a Learning Experience in Self-Balancing
As this Rhythm of Anxiety < > Soothing happens, over and over again, another layer of magic emerges:
Baby-You is LEARNING to Self-Soothe the Anxieties.
Baby is Realising the Power of You.
Baby experiences that power as a learning process (in Geek-Speak a “Heuristic”): by having repeated the Rhythm of Anxiety < > Soothing.
I see this Learning Rhythm of Anxieties-Action < > Soothings-Reaction, as something profound and beautiful. We are all born like this. It is a gift from nature. The ultimate blessing from god, or a higher power, if that’s how your philosophy works for you.
The Anxiety-Soothing Rhythm is Perfection Born in You
I hope you can share this sense of wonder with me. It is a true Gift: we don’t need to do anything to deserve it. It’s not a reward for anything. It is, quite literally, the Birth right of all of us. This is the gift of growth for you, me and all of us. And we are all born with this Perfect gift. You were born being Perfection.
Geek Speak: human-kind’s natural nascent mechanism for survival & growth is Heuristic Homeostasis.
Our individual psychological problems come from interference in the Anxiety-Soothing dynamic.
The Slices of Personality
Another key concept in I Want To Love But… Realising the Power of You, is how our personality is formed in a dynamic of 5 “Slices”:
5 Slices of Life:
The key concept here is dynamic harmony: not equality.
The 5 Slices are a way of understanding how the Anxiety-Soothing dynamic, and our individual interference patterns and habits, manifest themselves in our personality: and in our life choices.
Fear and Deprivation
From a CBT perspective, the CVD crisis is hitting two “hot” buttons of the human psyche: fear and deprivation.
Fear:
· Fear of infection, illness and death: for oneself, and loved ones;
· Fears arising in the course of living in lockdown;
· Fears from the results of lockdown: for jobs, business, relationships;
· A special type of fear: Armageddon Fear, of the sort not seen since the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Armageddon Fear concerns the end of the world as we know it. This seems not to be a fear that we are psychologically equipped by ordinary life to handle.
A crucial CBT insight is that we all are equipped by ordinary life experience to handle Armageddon Fear. In fact, we deal with this sort of fear all the time in our ordinary individual lives.
So, we do have the psychological and emotional tools to deal with Armageddon Fear. The hope is that this book will help to explain how, and bring comfort through that.
Deprivation:
· Loss of life and loved ones (although that is not in any way novel to covid);
· Loss of liberty in lockdown;
· Economic loss, now and later.
CBT can’t restore health, or life or a job or a business. But CBT, at its core, is about helping us to think and feel better about bad stuff: whatever that bad stuff is and wherever it comes from.
Summary Injustice
It may not make much sense, this terribly compacted summary of the much more detailed explanations in I Want To Love But… Realising the Power of You.
That’s OK. It doesn’t need to make rational sense to you right now.
This is your Coronaphobia Toolkit: how the tools work will explain itself, as you practice using them.
This is an old technique in CBT: it’s sometimes called “fake it till you make it”. You practice with tools which change the person who is using them. It happens without any need to think or reflect. There’s on old (20th century) Euro-Philosophy concept of Praxis. That’s in the same territory: how doing certain sorts of thing changes the mind which is doing them.
Essentially, though, both these concepts are simply extensions of the basic idea: you learn by doing.