The Fear-Love Continuum

Today, I want to share a rather experimental idea with all of you, and I should start by stressing the “experimental” part. Some may get a useful flash of insight. Others will probably find it rather academic. If you’re in the latter group, I can only wave an apologetic hand and urge you not to worry about it.

So.

Starting from our long-established foundations on love and fear—fear is short-term, survival-oriented, naturally self-centered, and rooted in our animal nature. At its root, fear is a reaction to perceived danger. It mutually excludes love and is the source of practically every problem we can have that is more abstract than being chased by a bear.

My own methods have always been based around the idea of healing traumas within our memories, and that got me thinking: shock is a clinical term for a sudden trauma caused by extreme fear or pain. So I started wondering how the definition of clinical shock could apply to the work we do here.

Major news rocked the medical world recently, with the acknowledgment that the criteria for clinical shock used by the DSM5 are fairly meaningless. Those criteria are:

1. What are the symptoms?
2. How often does it recur?
3. How big are the recurrences (as opposed to the original event)?
4. What are the effects/results (on your daily life)?

There are a couple of things to note here. The first is that you could apply these questions to practically any problem (which we may well do). The second is that although doctors use these questions to determine whether a trauma is severe enough to fall under clinical shock, those of lesser perceived severity can still drastically affect your quality of life—which is why some are beginning to say that the diagnosis is fairly meaningless in the first place.

For us, the upshot of all this is that every problem falls somewhere on the shock continuum, and it may be useful to inspect ourselves according to that definition. Think of a person who has just been in a car accident. Even if they are pretty much unhurt, they may be unresponsive. The brain responds to a severe trauma by shutting down or suppressing the incident.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? It bears a whole lot in common with how fear causes the unconscious mind to take over and hijack our free will. Through this week and the next, I’m going to be touching on ten different subcategories, ten different continuums where this type of shock can manifest. I don’t have time to cover each of them here, so if this concept is helpful to you, then I would encourage you to pay our YouTube channel a visit for a more detailed discussion.

Have a blessed, wonderful day!

Dr. Alex Loyd