Perhaps you’d start by inquiring about his personality traits. Is he an anxious, neurotic person, lacking in overall confidence? If so, that could help explain things. His fear of driving is but one manifestation for his overall personality style.

Perhaps you’d inquire too about the condition of his car, or the road conditions where he lives. If his car is old and unreliable, or if he lives in a shattered war zone, then that may explain his fear.

Source: IconTrack for Wikimedia Commons

Perhaps you’d want to inquire about his life history. Did he experience or witness a car accident as a child, thus developing a lifelong aversion? Was he involved in a recent accident, after which the symptoms emerged?

Perhaps you’d inquire too about his relationships with his parents. Perhaps his abusive father was a truck driver, and the client’s fear of driving manifests his unconscious resentment of his father.

All the above are good questions, and may yield important data. But the most important question you’d want to ask first is altogether different, simpler, and potentially more useful: Is he a good driver?

Owing much to the legacy of Sigmund Freud and his followers, therapy in the popular imagination is often viewed as a deep dive into the dark, convoluted mysteries of the unconscious, unearthing clients’ traumatic experiences, tangled relationships histories, and personality quirks.

In the real world, however, clients’ difficulties often relate more to skill deficits than to deep, obscure, or complicated motives. Most meaningful life projects—relationship, work, love, sex, parenting, health, money—require a measure of skill. At the end of the day, we can only do what we know how to do, and we do it only as well as we know how.

Your personality traits, environmental conditions, and past experiences are important, and a big reason why is that they often relate to your skill level. But these are not one and the same and should not be confused. Traits are behavioral tendencies. Skills are behavioral abilities. Environmental conditions and early experiences create (and limit) opportunities for skill development, but they are not sufficient to produce skill. Having a piano at home is not the same thing as knowing how to play the piano.

Still, our traits, circumstances, and early experiences may help us to develop some skills over others. An extraverted person, who grew up in a socially open and safe environment will likely end up with better social skills than an introverted, isolated, timid individual.

Alas, the fact that your personality, circumstances, and early experiences have conspired to deprive you of certain life skills doesn’t render those skills less important; quite the opposite, in fact. Money doesn’t cease to matter because you were born poor. It matters more.

To wit: If I’m an introverted child growing up with timid parents and used to being ignored at school, then my self-assertion skills will remain underdeveloped. Such underdevelopment may underlie my current problems in finding intimacy and advancing at work. The solution is not to rage against my history or try to alter my biological makeup, but to acquire the missing skill.

Skill acquisition is effortful and may often require us to bump up against our temperamental tendencies, our experience, or our environmental conditions. If you’re an inhibited, introverted individual by personality, then you are less inclined to put yourself in situations of social interaction. This may over time lead to deteriorated social skills, and thus higher social anxiety and more social avoidance—a self-perpetuating vicious cycle.

To gain adequate skill, you’ll need to reverse the cycle, accept the discomfort, and move counter to your tendency. This is difficult, but worthwhile, because, as the work of psychologist Gilbert Gottlieb has shown, just as biological temperament may drive behavior, so behavior may drive biology. To evolve teeth, a species has to start biting first. Likewise, over time, skills may evolve into traits (if what you learned how to do becomes what you tend to do), re-shaping character, affecting experience (doing something well feels different than doing it poorly or not at all) and environmental conditions (improved skills lead to improved circumstances: social, financial, occupational etc.).

Once we agree that skills are important for mental health, the question arises: what are the most important mental health skills? A new article in Psychological Science attempts to answer this question. In the piece, authors Christopher Soto of Colby College and colleagues argue that in addition to the effects of personality, experience, intelligence, etc., “success in life is influenced by … social, emotional, and behavioral skills (SEB skills): a person’s capacities to maintain social relationships, regulate emotions, and manage goal- and learning-directed behaviors.” Summarizing a large body of research on such skills, they go on to propose “an integrative model that defines SEB skills as capacities (what someone is capable of doing) rather than personality traits (what someone tends to do).”

Noting that personality traits and skills are often correlated, the authors then organize these life skills by five major domains that parallel the Big Five personality traits, as follows:

Social Engagement skills (linked to the personality trait of extraversion): Capacities used to actively engage with other people, including leadership (asserting one’s views and speak in a group) and conversational skill (initiating and maintaining social interactions)

Cooperation Skills (linked to agreeableness): Capacities used to maintain positive social relationships, including perspective-taking (understanding other people’s thoughts and feelings) and social warmth (evoking positive social responses from other people).

Self Management Skills (linked to conscientiousness): Capacities used to effectively pursue goals and complete tasks, including goal regulation: (setting clear and ambitious goals), and task management (working persistently to complete tasks and achieve goals).

Emotional Resilience Skills (parallel to low Neuroticism): Capacities used to regulate emotions and moods, including stress regulation (regulating stress, anxiety, and fear), and anger management (regulating anger and irritation).

Innovation Skills (openness to experience): Capacities used to engage with novel ideas and experiences, including abstract thinking (engaging with abstract ideas) and artistic skill (creating and appreciating art).

The authors argue that while many SEB skills likely relate to personality traits and measured intelligence, they remain distinct enough to capture unique information.

A focus on skills is also useful because we cannot yet control our genes, early experience, and early environment, and we often have limited ability to control our current circumstances. Our skill level, however, is to a considerable extent under our control. We can get better at stuff, and one place in which to do this is in therapy.

Indeed, much evidence has accumulated in recent decades to show that life skills of the kind discussed by the authors can and do improve with therapy, as clients learn how to regulate emotions, set appropriate goals, manage stress, interact usefully with others, increase empathy, and appreciate abstraction.

Thus, the goal of therapy—and the hard work of it—is often for clients to find which important life skills are underdeveloped, and to develop them adequately.

Often, the way to eliminate your fear of driving is to become a better driver.

[Article revised on 27 April 2020.]

The Death of Socrates, by Jacques-Louis David (detail).

Source: Wikicommons

In his paper of 1943, A Theory of Human Motivation, psychologist Abraham Maslow proposed that healthy human beings had a certain number of needs, and that these needs are arranged in a hierarchy, with some needs (such as physiological and safety needs) being more primitive or basic than others (such as social and ego needs). Maslow’s so-called ‘hierarchy of needs’ is often presented as a five-level pyramid, with higher needs coming into focus only once lower, more basic needs have been met.

Maslow called the bottom four levels of the pyramid ‘deficiency needs’ because we do not feel anything if they are met, but become anxious or distressed if they are not. Thus, physiological needs such as eating, drinking, and sleeping are deficiency needs, as are safety needs, social needs such as friendship and sexual intimacy, and ego needs such as self-esteem and recognition. On the other hand, he called the fifth, top level of the pyramid a ‘growth need’ because our need to self-actualize enables us to fulfill our true and highest potential as human beings.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Source: Neel Burton

Once we have met our deficiency needs, the focus of our anxiety shifts to self-actualization, and we begin, even if only at a sub- or semi-conscious level, to contemplate our bigger picture. However, only a small minority of people is able to self- actualize because self-actualization requires uncommon qualities such as honesty, independence, awareness, objectivity, creativity, and originality.

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs has been criticized for being overly schematic and lacking in scientific grounding, but it presents an intuitive and potentially useful theory of human motivation. After all, there is surely some truth in the popular saying that one cannot philosophize on an empty stomach, or in Aristotle’s observation that, ‘all paid work absorbs and degrades the mind’.

Many people who have met all their deficiency needs do not self-actualize, instead inventing more deficiency needs for themselves, because to contemplate the meaning of their life and of life in general would lead them to entertain the possibility of their meaninglessness and the prospect of their own death and annihilation.

A person who begins to contemplate his bigger picture may come to fear that life is meaningless and death inevitable, but at the same time cling on to the cherished belief that his life is eternal or important or at least significant. This gives rise to an inner conflict that is sometimes referred to as ‘existential anxiety’ or, more colourfully, ‘the trauma of non-being’.

While fear and anxiety and their pathological forms (such as agoraphobia, panic disorder, or PTSD) are grounded in threats to life, existential anxiety is rooted in the brevity and apparent meaninglessness or absurdity of life. Existential anxiety is so disturbing and unsettling that most people avoid it at all costs, constructing a false reality out of goals, ambitions, habits, customs, values, culture, and religion so as to deceive themselves that their lives are special and meaningful and that death is distant or delusory.

However, such self-deception comes at a heavy price. According to Jean-Paul Sartre, people who refuse to face up to ‘non-being’ are acting in ‘bad faith’, and living out a life that is inauthentic and unfulfilling. Facing up to non-being can bring insecurity, loneliness, responsibility, and consequently anxiety, but it can also bring a sense of calm, freedom, and even nobility. Far from being pathological, existential anxiety is a sign of health, strength, and courage, and a harbinger of bigger and better things to come.

For theologian Paul Tillich (1886-1965), refusing to face up to non-being leads not only to a life that is inauthentic but also to pathological (or neurotic) anxiety.

In The Courage to Be, Tillich asserts:

He who does not succeed in taking his anxiety courageously upon himself can succeed in avoiding the extreme situation of despair by escaping into neurosis. He still affirms himself but on a limited scale. Neurosis is the way of avoiding nonbeing by avoiding being.

According to this outlook, pathological anxiety, though seemingly grounded in threats to life, in fact arises from repressed existential anxiety, which itself arises from our uniquely human capacity for self-consciousness.

Facing up to non-being enables us to put our life into perspective, see it in its entirety, and thereby lend it a sense of direction and unity. If the ultimate source of anxiety is fear of the future, the future ends in death; and if the ultimate source of anxiety is uncertainty, death is the only certainty. It is only by facing up to death, accepting its inevitability, and integrating it into life that we can escape from the pettiness and paralysis of anxiety, and, in so doing, free ourselves to make the most out of our lives and out of ourselves.

Some philosophers have gone even further by asserting that the very purpose of life is none other than to prepare for death. In Plato’s Phaedo, Socrates, who is not long to die, tells the philosophers Simmias and Cebes that absolute justice, absolute beauty, or absolute good cannot be apprehended with the eyes or any other bodily organ, but only by the mind or soul. Therefore, the philosopher seeks in as far as possible to separate body from soul and become pure soul. As death is the complete separation of body and soul, the philosopher aims at death, and indeed can be said to be almost dead.

Neel Burton is author of The Meaning of Madness and other books.