Blog

The early developmental years are crucial for children when it comes to their relationship with fear/anxiety and other aspects of their innate and conditioned life-orientation to: Is Life Trustable or Is Life Untrustable? [1] There are more people now a days starting to ask questions about what the impact of COVID-19 pandemic (shock and awe and isolation) had on this new crop of COVID children (and their care-givers)? I have not done research on this but I have heard more than one person in the field of education and daycare field talking about this connection. Are the young children especially (but not only) really impacted more negatively by COVID-19 than we can even imagine as adults? Are these a more disregulated and mistrustful, and anxious group of children now who are going to grow up and create a whole lot more problems (and costs) for society, from within families, daycares, schools and beyond? I'm calling this the COVID-Fear-Bubble phenomenon. OF course, it is just speculation at this point. 

On the recovery and rehabilitation side of things, however, there are some good stories of pro-active interventions into children's well being in relationship to fear, for e.g., John Coleman, of the Apocatastasis Institute just published his summary of an article recently published on offering various nature interventions with children to help them overcome some of their fear of nature (and of life itself, perhaps)--see the BEE BRAVE presentation he gives: https://www.bitchute.com/video/P5YqcYT5niyU/

Let's keep the conversation going about fear/anxiety [2] its positive and negative sides, including the impacts of COVID-19 especially and how can we teach not just about being braver, but being more courageous, being more fearless. I have a great deal of experience and research and thoughts about this connection of a spectrum of means in how to live life in a better relationship to fear than being so paralyzed and harmed by its excesses, individually and collectively. So, also check out The Fearology Institute happenings. 

Note: 

1. Life-orientation education, as I am calling it, has many levels of evidence and reality, but there's at least an important one in Erik Erikson's emotional/affect development research and model puts "Trust vs. Mistrust"  (or Love vs. Fear) at the foundational base of child development as universal. My colleague Four Arrows (Dr. Don T. Jacobs) has more or less offered an analogous conceptualization with overlapping meanings and implications in his worldview education distinction. My other fearwork for decades has played with these ideas but only very recently am I seeing how important this is in bringing a universal ethical basis to education--and, philosophically, arguably it is a telos of education..

2. For a good video on fear/anxiety in the individual and coping strategies and the way society conditions us, especially in parenting, and by offering children distractions and other means of "isolation"--there are chronic problems that accrue, especially with the "attachment" bonding ecology, and this is where fear/anxiety will grow, and even panic patterning that will affect people for life--see talk on this by Dr. Gabor Mate' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39RyGEVRbWk

I'm delighted to share the first advertisement for the book my partner and I just completed. It is our second book together on the use of spontaneous creation-making process (we label a "fear vaccine"), in which our first book on our experiences of using this method and the guide for how to do it came out in "Opening Doors: A Guide to Spontaneous Creation-Making" (pubished by In Search of Fearlessness Research Institute). Many years later, in this new book we reflect on the process in greater detail, and offer readers a look at how we applied this method to the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown around most of the world, and for a year we invited a group of people to share this experience creating online and building a community of care. Hope you can take a look at this work, as it also provides a guide of how to use it in any communal setting.  -rmf

International Journal of Fear Studies

Interdisciplinary and Transdisciplinary Approaches

Call for Papers and Creative Submissions:

Theme ISSUE: “Living and Learning in Pandemic Times”

Submissions Due Aug. 1, 2020 for the 4th issue of IFJS.

Covid-19 (coronavirus) pandemic dynamics have really changed our lives. What are we learning in this context of such pervasive fear... and more...? Are there better ways to handle all this?   

FOR the full details of Submission and about the Journal IJFS fourth call Apil 12 .docx

Quantitative Data:

The basic summary of data of FM ning sign-ups (memberships) intrigues me, and shows, that after an initial 'burst' in 2015 when we started the FM ning and invited lots of people, then a drop, and finally a slow organic process of slight increase each year (with no membership drives being done) to a maximum (n =21) in 2018 for some reason? Then a slight decrease but holding to the levels of the initial year of opening the ning AND, most noticeable is that 2020 (especially in May, with effects of Covid-19 mounting, increasing fear in the world population collectively), indicating that the membership level (predictably) will reach well beyond 21 by the end of the year. Note: four new members signed-up in six days (May 16-22, 2020)--then two more signed-up by end of the month, this rate has never been even close to happening over the 5.5 yrs, except the week we started the FM ning... something is happening(?) that is unique... Now, I added another graph to show May sign-ups, and clearly, statistically, it is significant the correlation of "lockdown" (and pandemic) with the interest to sign-up to the FM ning. We ought not take this correlation lightly, and ask how we can work with this growing interest productively. 

Qualitative Data: 

I have not done any statistics on more subtle qualitative aspects of the growth and development of the FM ning. I would say that, I am very looking forward to a vast growth in the numbers and exchanges and actions taken by FM ning members in collaborations to improve the aims of which the FM ning was started in the beginning... please join in, and please invite others to join us too. May we learn great lessons from the Covid-19 global experience and advance fearlessness into the world like a 'fear' vaccine. 

Dr. Bruck Liption, a cell-biologist and spiritual philosopher, offers his latest 10 min. video on the coronavirus (Covid-19) 'flu' problem in the world right now and he has strong statements about the nature and role of fear in this pandemic and quarantine. The first few minutes of the video he teaches about the immunological perspective. 

"Fear" is the "biggest problem" in terms of where this virus pandemic is, is going, and will continue to go. That's his view. I tend to agree. I have always respected Lipton's research and teachings going back into the early 1990s and he has always had interesting theories about "fear"... that said, I do not agree with everything he says. I'll leave it up to readers of the FM ning to discuss this and/or ask me about my critiques, at this point. 

Lipton starts the video off with "Stop the fear, take care of yourself." -- and, of course, that can mean a whole lot of things, including, how do we best define what fear is, and what if we do not know completely what it is and there are unconscious fear aspects that are affecting everything as well related to Covid-19 reactionary actions (?)... Lipton assumes we already know everything we need to know about fear, and he does his "scientist" thing in the video ...