Fear

 

When threatened, humans protect themselves using three main strategies: fight, flight, or freeze. It's our build-in system to use fear to keep us safe from danger or imminent threat. 

In the movies, these three human fear responses to threats make sense given typical literary conflict examples playing out in a 90-minute story arc with a clear hero or heroine and clearly defined threat. In a man versus man conflict, for example, people fight in various ways, flee the scene in sometimes fantastic scenarios, and freeze with unusual and occasionally deadly consequences. Some of the most memorable and iconic movies include layered fear responses in movies such as, the movie Halloween in which there were all three examples of fear response: fighting, fleeing and freezing much to the horror of onlookers.

However, in the case of a person with a chronic illness, the conflict or threat actually changes over time. The illness is almost never staying the same. The trigger for the fear is almost never staying the same. It is getting better or getting worse. The threat is never staying the same. Sameness would be a luxury.

The initial threat, the diagnosis, the original presentation of the illness, is not the same later in the illness. Symptoms progress and presentations change. Inflammation increases and decreases. Inflammation damages joints. Joints respond and move differently as a result of damage from inflammatory processes. Muscles and tendons adjust to joint changes. The person with the chronic condition responds to the ever shifting landscape, but often with the same set of tools used at onset. 

Think about a person with a chronic inflammatory condition. Maybe he uses running as one of his main coping strategies to keep his illness controlled or to keep his fear at bay. However, over time, inflammation causes hypermobility in his joints which leaves him with overextension pain in joints, muscles, and tendons. Hypermobility leaves him more susceptible to exhaustion from having to compensate for the changes in movements. His risk for injuries rises too. He is more likely to suffer sprains and dislocations as a direct result of the coping strategy he uses to fight chronic condition.

Chronic illness is the threat that human fears, but it isn't the only threat. Secondary conditions are also threats. Hypermobility, vision challenges, heart disease, and more, are morbidity and mortality concerns for people with chronic inflammation and should be feared as well.

Fighting the chronic inflammation can include aggressive battles with strong medications that include formidable side effects and challenges of their own.

Flight or fleeing the chronic condition as a fear response makes sense too. Would it manifest as willful disregard or ignorance of the information and symptoms to the overall detriment of the patient? So the patient receives the information, understands it, and demonstrates a terrified flight response.

Freezing as a fear response is definitely a threat. What if the person is so terrified of the illness, the life-long consequences, or the possible treatments that s/he/they do nothing? Inaction is still a choice. Inaction has consequences too. Freezing as a threat response results in the inability to do anything. Quite literally, the body freezes in place and requires an outside force to move it.

Fear drives all three responses, but rarely do we consciously choose our fear response. The response just happens reflexively unless we have deliberately collected skills or tools to address the fear in different ways. 

Responses are uniquely personal to each of us combined with his/her/their lens and lived experiences, but can be completely exhausting regardless of personal competencies. 

Fighting drains you.

Fleeing fatigues you.

Freezing terrorizes you.

AND as a bonus, fear weakens the immune system. The state of being afraid can cause gastrointestinal ulcers, cardiovascular damage, irritable bowel syndrome, fertility obstacles AND...

both acute and chronic inflammation.