Anxiety and the flood
Are you afraid of the flood?
It seems a simple question. But your answercan give you an insight into the complexities of your own mind, an excellent opportunity to understand yourself better. Let’s start with the main word in this question, the most dramatic, the most unusual. The flood. Like most people, I have never been in a situation like this before, where a huge amount of water is ‘looming over’ the place I live in. I have no experience, therefore I have nothing to go on.
So my feelings are not really about the flood, only my imagination of the flood. Driven, of course, by the images I see and the stories I hear. Since I have no experience and no firsthand information, the flood that I am afraid of is mostly my head.
My mind is trying to interpret the watery threat from the big unknown around me (just look at those maps…). So a lot depends on how I experience the world around me anyway. Is it generally a friendly or a hostile place? is it a place where sudden dangers assault me or is it more or less manageable? How solid or how fragile is the life that I have constructed around me and inside me?
During times of ‘looming disaster’ I have noticed that many people, some of them my clients, others my peers, my friends and my enemies, seem to react to the imagined flood very much in relation to their general level of anxiety. People who feel that their lives are precariously balanced and that many good things can easily get lost or destroyed, often transfer this feeling to an outside danger, such as darkness, big city dangers, burglary, strangers, diseases and general life conditions. If a big threat of unknown proportions comes along, their anxiety increaseseven more of it gets projected onto the disaster. A good example is the couple that started to fight angrily about flood barriers and then discovered a lot of cracks in their relationship. In couples or groups people also tend to take roles, such as the excited one, the scared one, and the calm one. It can be quite difficult to get out of those roles once you have been cast in them.
Fear is of course not the only possible reaction to a big unknown danger. Another way to react is denial, pretending (and hoping…) that nothing unusual is happening. If somebody appears very calm and rational during the threat of a possible flood, it might be because they can tolerate an unusual amount of uncertainty or it might be because they cannot even allow themselves to feel that there is great uncertainty. Theyare in denial and underestimate the danger just as much as the more anxious among us overestimate it. But what do we base our estimates on? In the present crisis I would say that unless you have way more privileged information from at least two independent sources than most of us do, you will be obliged to base your reactions mostly on your general construction of the safety or lack of safety of the world around you.
That is of course not to say that the flood isn’t real. It is very real and many people are suffering greatly. They deserve our help. Their situation, however, is very different from those of us who have (at least so far) not been inundated. They are no longer dealing with a threat but with a reality. On the one hand, the constructions they carry in their heads about the world around them will still influence their experience and their behavior, but at the same time they are up against a reality that is stronger and more powerful than any individual. They are experiencing a potentially traumatic situation and many will need psychological help for a long time.
The flood is a powerful archetype. Floods are a theme in many ancient stories, such as the epic of Gilgamesh from Mesopotamia, at over 4,000 years oldone of the earliest recorded narratives. It is an icon of our biggest fear. If you think about it, what is our biggest fear? That everything around us will collapse? That there is no firm ground under our feet? That everything we created will be washed away? Our death, and the death of everyone around us? (The end of the world, or at least of our world?)
From a psychological viewpoint, this is very interesting. We all fear death, and we all will die. This awareness is what people call ‘existential’. People deal with it in all sorts of ways, from denial to extreme panic. Existential fear is often an underlying factor in anxiety. And anxiety is often fed by unresolved childhood fears, fears about powers that were too overwhelming for us. And if those fears are unresolved, they are transferred to the world around us. To people, to situations, and, of course, to looming disasters. This can be a form of Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSD)), triggered by the present fear.
It may sound strange that our reaction to the flood is influenced by unresolved childhood fears, but I believe this to be true. The question is: how much uncertainty can we tolerate in our lives before we collapse? How can we tolerate setbacks, failure, and loss?
Loss is difficult thing to tolerate. We wish it would never happen, but it happens all the time. One of my counseling teachers used to say that most of her clients initially came to counseling because of an unbearable loss.
I have always been impressed by the quote from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar that says that we only need to go through the fear of death once. Only once, when we die. In other words, we could save the anxiety for when the disaster is actually happening. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be prepared for eventualities and it certainly doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to be informed. But it does mean that the anxiety many people are experiencing about a flood that may not come is not unavoidable.
If we look at it rationally, we run up against another interesting fact about humans. Our risk assessments are woefully inadequate. According to the WHO, there are over 13,000 deaths every year in Thailand from traffic accidents, with the majority involving motorcyclists and pedestrians. This is considered one of the country’s top health risks. In the floods, about 400 people have died so far.
Every death is tragic, and every preventable death should be prevented. It is heart breaking that people died in this flood. But in terms of risk assessment, the same person who is terribly afraid of the flood will easily take a motorcycle every day. (I know what I’m talking about since I have never been able to completely shake off my fear of flying, a fear that is similar to the fear of the flood: uncertainty, a different, un-survivable element that will not tolerate mistakes and can kill me any moment. I know the statistics about flight safety, and prove them by being alive to this date, but something inside me refuses to understand the rational argument.)
This inadequacy of risk assessment has been studied many times and seems to be a part of the human condition. Familiarity is misinterpreted as safety. So therefore something like the flood, completely outside the experience of most of us, is misinterpreted as the worst possible danger. 
On top of all this, we are certainly being manipulated by the images that feed our fears. Some of my friends called me from other cities and told me about the drama they had seen on TV. They didn’t particularly want to know what I, actually living in Bangkok, had witnessed. The flood in their heads, from a long way away, was more powerful than a reality check. Other people have insisted that they saw crocodiles in the streets of Silom.
On the other hand, I felt very relieved when I heard the Japanese experts characterize our situation (and the potential danger) as a ‘slow inundation’, rather than a flood. I also know that Thailand is a civilized country, that Bangkok has a sophisticated water control system and that even in the worst case scenario I won’t be abandoned. That last one, the expectation that I won't be abandoned, is both my rational assessment and also my internal state of mind. At least right now.
So what can we do? We can try to analyze our anxiety (and our denial). We can ask ourselves how much of our emotion really comes from the flood, and how much may be transferred from other parts of our lives. When did I feel like this before? And before? And before that? When was the first time that I can remember?
What is the worst aspect of my fear? This is actually a very good question to ask yourself and although it sounds counter-intuitive, it will help you to be safe. That big fear is there whether you acknowledge it or not, and the flood has brought it out. Reflecting on the worst aspect of the fear can also help you understand which parts are less scary, which aspects you feel you might be able to manage. You could see the fear of the flood as a tool for self-awareness. And the freedom to choose your actions, or at least more of them than before. None of this is meant to make you feel bad or to judge your feelings. Feelings cannot be commanded, they just appear. But you can investigate where they come from. Whether you flee to Hua Hin or stay in your house, whether you build a sandbag wall or feel compelled to volunteer your help, none of it is wrong or shows that you are somehow inadequate. All of these are perfectly normal human reactions. Which also means that they should be respected in others.
However, your fears or denial may want you to convince others, not just for their own good but also to support your own choices. If everybody else is doing it, then it must be the right thing to do… Many of us follow that principle a little too much anyway…
It has been very interesting to observe myself in this extreme situation. I realized that I was confronted with huge uncertainty and I tried to feel my feelings, investigate their origin, and act as much as an adult as I am capable of. I still don’t know if the flood will come to my soi, if I will have water and eggs, if I will be faced with real danger and if so, how I will react to it.
But the flood in my head has already done one thing for me: I know myself a little bit better.
Anette Pollner, NCS
Adv. Dipl. Couns. Humanistic/Integrative (UK)
