I. Ontological anxiety: existential anxiety When you feel truly alive, it is a state of chronic tension, which is also known as existential anxiety (also known as ontological anxiety). This is a uniquely human condition because humans worry about their own mortality; animals do not have existential anxiety. The difference between humans and animals is that humans have the ability to perceive the life-blood of their existence and the complex interpersonal relationships that accompany this discernment. This anxiety about death is huge and incomprehensible, beyond reason and beyond control – a state of permanent ontological anxiety. Rollo May says May says: “Animals have an environment, but humans have a world. Existential anxiety is one of the characteristics of the human spiritual world, which also includes the fear of non-existence. Therefore, humans are always in a state of deep unease. People perceive the ego as fragile and limited and feel a deep anxiety in the face of it. In order to deal with this anxiety, each person develops his or her own particular way of life. This pattern of life lays the foundation for family, friendship, culture and social structure. When this pattern does not respond appropriately to the lowest level of anxiety, people establish more patterns of behavior that lead to more anxiety, and so anxiety grows on its own in a cycle that is uncontrollable and debilitating. Anxiety can also be reflected through physical, mental, and emotional symptoms as a pattern of psychogenic anxiety. Often individuals are reluctant to experience much proprioceptive anxiety, either defending against it or transforming it into psychoceptive anxiety, so people rarely experience pure forms of proprioceptive anxiety. Psycho-ergic anxiety is a scaled-down version of ontological anxiety because it is found to be easier to master the defenses and patterns of conversion to psycho-ergic. Psycho-functional anxiety can have these symptoms: obsessive thinking, compulsive behavior, and other addictive or self-harming behaviors. Basically, on a psychological level, most people would rather suffer from psychotic disorder than deal directly with existential fear. Residual ontological anxiety can also arise from feelings of isolation, meaninglessness, restlessness, dissatisfaction, or doubts about life. For humans, ontological anxiety is a great challenge; one must embrace deep insecurities in order to be fully oneself in the face of anxiety. People often ask themselves with ontological anxiety what they want and why they want to live. Sometimes they experience a sense of despair that lurks at the bottom, or they feel lost or abandoned, and life loses its color and intensity; in extreme cases, they choose psycho-functional solutions and become depressed, feeling that nothing is worth working for. They may even lose the will to live. This is a dangerous situation, but it is also an opportunity for people to face the challenges of life and find meaning and the will to live. Not all anxiety is pathological Western conventional medicine views anxiety as a sign of an underlying disease or the cause of many physical and mental disorders, and therefore emphasizes the need to eradicate or suppress it. Existential philosophers and clinicians hold a different view that anxiety is a fundamental phenomenon of life and exists behind all change, growth, development, and social and cultural achievement. From this perspective, not all anxiety is pathological. Indeed, anxiety is a condition of existence, without which we would not be as dynamic and human. Medical treatment can only intervene when anxiety becomes so severe that it causes the individual to lose or hinder the resilience of life and takes on the characteristics of a psychotic disorder. Yet most people (including physicians), have difficulty distinguishing the difference between proprioceptive anxiety and psycho-functional anxiety. Whereas organic anxiety may lead to positive adjustment in a person’s life, psychoactive anxiety leads to many debilitating syndromes. Because people do not fully understand these two different forms of anxiety, they assume that all anxiety is the same. As a result, some people blindly take physician-prescribed sedatives or use socially acceptable chemicals such as nicotine or alcohol in an attempt to treat or alleviate anxiety. Non-medical drugs such as marijuana or cocaine are often used to enjoy pleasure and reduce anxiety at the same time. We become a group of people who cannot tolerate frustration or experience a little physical or emotional pain. Drugs help us alleviate our symptoms, but do not allow us to understand the true cause of our illness. At the same time, drugs dull the sense of life and turn people into sedation and mediocrity. We create a peace without progress, a calm without a sense of meaning. Such a dilemma is described by the British playwright Peter Shaffer. This dilemma is dramatically illustrated in Peter Shaffer’s play “The Horse Lovers”. In the play, a psychiatrist struggles between moral entanglement and therapeutic intervention: I want to make this child a devoted husband, a loving citizen, a worshipper of a unified and abstract God. Yet, my achievement was more like creating a ghost! Human beings use a variety of definitions, activities, and goals to ameliorate, mask, and deal with this fear of nothingness, and the meaninglessness of life. At birth, the child’s experience of the world must be one of confusion and anxiety: how can the meaning of life emerge from such chaos? The constitutivist view is that reality is composed through language, logic, mathematics, music, space, the body, a sense of touch, and the use of individual intelligences. Through the use of these intelligences, along with the use of information provided by parents and others, children gradually develop a sense of self in their interaction with the world around them. This sense of orientation and finding one’s way provides a foundation that can help deal with underlying ontological anxiety. The more this intelligence matures, the more secure the individual feels. Many people feel great anxiety when they are in a foreign country and are unable to communicate effectively in words; this is made worse when body language is misunderstood. When these intellectual losses are complete, they are considered symptoms of mental illness; the confusion caused by incomplete intellectual loss can also lead to confusion about the meaning of life. Childhood anxiety: It was a small step from being a five-year-old child to where I am now, but it is a frightening distance from newborn to five-year-old. When an infant is held in a parent’s arms, he or she feels protected from the threat of death; this sense of security is important to the development of the inch bucket child. When a child experiences meaningful relationships, feelings of loneliness and fear are temporarily relieved; this is why humans spend their entire lives searching for and maintaining intimate relationships. The more relationships are seen as the answer to existential problems, the more dependent, stubborn and compulsive (in thinking or behavior) they become. The relationship can then become mired in fear of abandonment, as well as situations of external dependency, low self-esteem, manipulation and control, power struggles, and fixation on romantic feelings. During infancy, the most common and profound way to address ontological anxiety is through the mother-toddler dependency relationship (attachment). This pattern plays out again and again in each person’s life in various guises. The structure and meaning it creates affects the person’s later interpersonal and social relationships. The most common masks for the meaning of life are power, control and prestige. But the more acceptable solutions are spirituality, morality, religion, culture, creativity, and the mastery of skills and personal growth! Ontological anxiety is ever-present and all of this activity is driven by ontological anxiety. It is the person with courage who can blossom in the face of the constant threat of death. Roles and Meaning: Each person develops roles to accommodate ontological anxiety, first through parental instruction and then through popular education. These roles provide a sense of purpose for life, direction for expressing inner energy, and a sense of transcendence and authority among one’s peers. Because roles are tied to the context of each person’s developing life, this also makes the individual more dependent on the external environment. When one loses a role (a real loss or a crisis of loss), one often uncovers latent ontological anxiety and experiences helplessness or depression; when a child grows up and leaves home, the mother loses her role as caregiver and provider; when a person is fired or a relationship ends through divorce or death, he loses his original role. In these cases, the degree of helplessness and anxiety caused by the loss of their roles was related to the degree to which they had relied on their roles to define their selves. A person who is honest with himself and develops a sense of meaning in his life by being aware of his true nature can accept these role losses with peace and conviction in the face of the expectations of others. When individuals are able to live peacefully with their ontological anxieties in a way that accepts rather than represses them, there is less interdependence in their interactions; the relationship becomes more like two autonomous individuals sharing with each other, rather than just trying to blend into one. This is when both people can have more of themselves in the conversation, rather than their diminishing selves! The relationship becomes like a garden in which each person thrives and is free to choose to connect with others. Unfortunately, most relationships are like traps where each person is restricted in many ways, unable to move, and dependent on each other out of fear. When people are independent and autonomous, they can deal constructively with their own ontological anxiety; when people are dependent on others, ontological anxiety is masked and ignored. Both of these different types of relationships are ways to cope with ontological anxiety. A satisfying relationship provides a sense of intimacy and can successfully deal with ontological anxiety. Without such relationships, individuals experience a sense of relative isolation, and when isolation is extreme, a sense of isolation is generated. Embracing Ontological Anxiety As long as ontological anxiety remains connected to the real me, it strengthens our drive, gives us the power to self-express and pursue the meaning of life; and adds spice to the joy of life. As one becomes increasingly dependent on the approval of others, ontological anxiety can turn into psycho-functional anxiety due to the fear of losing one’s authority in life. If we treat psychoanxiety with only chemical drugs such as sedatives, we run the risk of taking away the joy of life in addition to the ontological anxiety. People who give up their true self in order to play a good role in life also lose their enthusiasm for life because they are afraid of taking risks in the pursuit of happiness.