How Anxiety Becomes a Cultural Norm
David Levine is a regular On Caring contributor.
Photo by Suzy Hazelwood from Pexels
Though some have more than others, we all have much to worry about. This was true before the pandemic and it will be true after it ends. It was true before the Republican party was taken over by Donald Trump and it will be true when the threat he poses has passed, if it does. Some experience significant levels of anxiety without realizing that they do. Others employ defenses against anxiety that cause more or less significant problems for themselves and for others. While those who employ defenses may not experience their anxiety directly, their lives are significantly affected by anxiety.
Excessive anxiety has harmful effects partly because its associated suffering empowers emotion to determine what we do. By empowering emotion, high levels of anxiety promote action unmediated by thought and deliberation. We rush to act! The pressure anxiety places on us is too great to resist and it often demands immediate relief; in my last blog post, I speak of the rush into action as an expression of the inability to contain emotion.
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I linked this inability to the child’s early life where caretakers failed to provide an uninterrupted assurance that a caring relationship will not be lost, in other words, that we will not be alone. Indeed, failure of continuity of care fosters a sense that the world is an unsafe place. The conviction that the world is an unsafe place creates a preoccupation with, or fussing over, what to do about it, which then threatens to take over our lives. Because fussing goes on internally, we might assume that it is a personal matter. But the individual’s experience of parental failure may not be an isolated event. Instead, it may be an instance of a larger shared experience. If it is collective, then we are not alone in experiencing an emotional state that threatens to spin out of control. This means that we share with others an early experience marked by emotional abandonment. And when our experience is shared with others, this may well indicate that parental failure has become an accepted cultural norm.
Making parental failure a cultural norm creates its own set of problems since, typically, moral judgments become attached to norms. Making failure a norm can bring with it the judgment that failure is a “good” thing, in other words that it is not failure at all. When this happens, failure of care has a larger purpose: to create in children a psychic reality suitable to their participation in the shared reality of emotional abandonment and loss and to experience the heightened anxiety associated with that reality.
The problem might seem tractable if we assume that it operates primarily at the conscious level of decision-making and choice. This would make intergenerational transmission of anxiety a decision parents act upon; and, if they can decide to do it, they can decide not to. But, if there are unconscious factors at work so that what we do is driven by forces acting outside our awareness of them, then this solution will likely fail. To say factors are “outside of awareness” (or “unconscious”), typically means that we have in mind that these factors are present in us but not known to us, or at least known as what they actually are. They may, for example, be enacted instead, as is the case with things we do without allowing ourselves to think about them. Alternatively, the factors driving what we do may be known to us as something other than what they are; we sometimes turn them into opposites. We try to avoid thinking about them by thinking about something else, something that stands in for them. We don’t know we are doing this, but we are. When the causes that drive inadequate caring practices are kept outside of awareness, the practices can also become a cultural norm of care; and it turns out, in reality, to be its opposite: deprivation of care. A good example is childhood day care. If what the infant/young child needs is consistent and reliable care from a known caretaker to whom a powerful emotional attachment has been made, providing intermittent and therefore uncertain care from a changeable or little-known caretaker can mean using the term “care” to refer to its absence. The reversal hides our collective anxiety because “Day Care”, as a cultural norm, refers to the daily absence of the actual parent that the child identifies with. Caring for children is not an event or a series of discrete events but the provision of a relationship, an essential element of which is continuity and reliability. When the presence or availability of care takes the form of its opposite, rather than assuring the development of the capacity to manage anxiety as an adult, the caretaking experience assures impairment in that capacity. When defenses are deployed against awareness of a failed caretaking reality, the words we use can refer to the opposite of what they ostensibly mean. At the same time, they also retain the other meaning. We know that both meanings apply, although we know them in different ways. One we know consciously as the presence of care. The other we know emotionally as a sense of being lost, of something missing, of loneliness, and anger. We know the hidden but real meaning as a heightened and persistent experience of anxiety.
My point is not that we should ignore or dismiss the fact that some parents, especially single parents, must choose day care as a necessity. It is, and always will be, an imperfect world. There is, however, a difference between the inevitability of failure in an imperfect world and defining the failure of care as “care”. The former connects the child to the reality principle, which is the inevitable presence of other people in the world, people with their own needs and whose concern is not exclusively with that of the child. The latter undermines the child’s developing sense of being safe and it undermines the possibility for the child to accept the presence of others (i.e., that the Other has needs besides one’s own). Assurance of care that is constituted by the relationships within the family makes the world a safe place to be. Not only, however, does the absence of assurance of care undermine the feeling of safety, but so does the emotional state of the parent when present, so far as that includes a significant measure of anxiety. The emotional state of parents defines the “atmosphere” of the relationship. What should be an atmosphere of safety becomes an atmosphere of danger. The less capable the parent is in managing his or her own anxiety, the less safe the child’s relationship with the parent feels. When this anxiety-invested relationship is internalized in the child, it becomes a source of eternal anxiety.
Intergenerational transmission of anxiety can take different forms. As an example, consider the important case of racial conflict. If parents’ encounters with people of a different race provoke anxiety, their attachment of anxiety to a world of racial difference will be transmitted in ways overt and covert to their children. There are many ways to communicate the message, for example, that all black men are prone to commit acts of violence, or all white people are racists. The message can be conveyed in so many words; or it can be conveyed in the form of a heightened level of anger and/or anxiety when in the presence of, or when speaking about, people of the other race. Of course, it is possible to consider that negative remarks are a way of protecting children—caring for them—by alerting them to an ongoing threat in the form of people who pose a danger to them. But where the danger is not reality based—and racial difference is not always, or even typically, an indicator of a threat—the emotional communication between parents and children serves not to protect them but to create in them a heightened anxiety that mirrors and affirms the parent’s internal experience of living in a dangerous world. Indeed, the parent transfers an imagined external world of danger to the child’s inner world in the form of an emotionally charged representation (often negative) of people of a different race.
The anxiety attached to the idea is experienced as an anxiety about the world outside the family, although the source of anxiety is internal to the family. In other words, anxiety is not a response to living in a dangerous world, it is the source of the belief that the world is a dangerous place. [among cultural examples, the rise of militia groups in the United States is exemplary, see blog}
The transmission process to which I have just referred works whether the danger is real or not, and it continues to work where the danger once was real but no longer is. If the danger once was real but no longer is, then the transmission process serves to block the learning from experience that adapts the individual to a changing reality. Furthermore, the continuing presence of the intergenerational transmission of anxiety can create over time the danger from which it is meant to afford protection. When our response to the other is shaped by a significant measure of anxiety, it is likely also to include a significant measure of aggression. This is because we mobilize aggression to defend ourselves against a real or imagined threat and our anxiety is the signal that such a threat exists. Embedded in this heightened level of anxiety is an increased impulse to use aggression to defend ourselves against a threat, even one that no longer exists in reality. This heightened level of aggression can assure that the threat will not disappear as it will likely provoke a response in others that mirrors our response to them and therefore exhibits a comparable or heightened measure of aggression. [Political polarization has this mirroring response. Each side experiences the other as a threat; see the blog winner takes all.]
Emotions take the form of concrete representations of people and interactions with them: emotionally invested memories and fantasies. Emotions are not tested against reality but define reality for us. Without openness to learning from experience, intergenerational change cannot take place. [Scars We Keep, “How can I keep my mind open when my eyes are shut”, by Ordinary Elephant, makes Levine’s point here, but in song and lyric.] By blocking learning from experience, we assure that each generation will live in an emotional reality much like the ones that preceded it, even if circumstances in the other reality have, in fact changed.
For an example of the role of anxiety in fostering resistance to change, consider the comments of John McWhorter, Professor of Linguistics at Columbia University, who, in his article “Living in Blackface,” explores the problem to which I have just referred. He notes, first, the widespread conviction among some in the black community that, “however black lives look from the outside, to go about as a black person in these United States remains an ongoing, almost daily, burden” and that “the changes in the black American condition since 1968 have largely been rearrangements of the deck chairs on the Titanic.” At the same time, and without denying the facts that indicate the real challenges many black people face in their lives, he questions whether those challenges imply that the outside world, for blacks, has not changed over the past half century, but remains a dangerous place to be. While he insists that “racism exists for sure,” he rejects the idea that the experience of black people in the 21st century is a “constant firehose spray of slights and dismissals:
“I can also attest, as a black man who has been attending academic conferences at hotels for 30 years, … that I have not waded through hotels’ hallways and ballrooms with people asking me to gather up the dirty water glasses or get started mopping the foyer, and I have never seen it happen to any other black academic.”
Here, McWhorter illustrates how an emotional (or psychic) reality resists acceptance of change. Instead, our psychic reality insists on the reproduction of an experience that makes it the same across generations. In other words, on the level of psychic reality, there is a powerful impulse to hold onto the anxiety linked to the knowledge that the world is a dangerous place, whether it is, or not. And to grab onto whatever data can be found to support that knowledge, or even to reject data altogether, because as Ellis Cose, puts it “[i]n the real world … statistics are almost irrelevant, for rage does not flow from dry numerical analyses of discrimination or from professional prospects projected on a statistician’s screen” (quoted in McWhorter).
McWhorter, J. (2020) Living in Blackface, Persuasion, October 20, 844331://www.persuasion.community/p/living-in-blackface, retrieved 10/26/2020.