Fear of the abyss

I’ve been thinking about how I experience the fear of the unknown in the context of constructive-developmental theory, this fear of what’s beyond the edge of my current capacity to make meaning, the fear of the abyss.

This fear pops up when I am experiencing something that is incongruent with the reality I construct, something that I can’t reconcile and make coherent according to my current understanding of the world. I may experience it as something that is grabbing at me, trying to “get me”, something to be feared.

The subject-object shift in constructive-developmental theory refers to a developmental transformation of how I make meaning, where invisible is made visible. I see this shift as me improving my capacity to make meaning, to see an ever-increasing context. With each jump to a larger context, I start seeing things that were driving me, invisibly influencing me, being part of me, or part of the unknown become things that I see and have the capacity to hold apart, things about which I can reason. 

For example, let’s suppose that I am subject to some principle and value-making device. That is, I accept my principles and values as “things that are”, rather than something I can author. When I see that someone else has different principles and values, I experience the fear of the abyss: how can it be that someone else has different “things that are?”. In that moment, I may also be subject to the fear itself, and thus be subject to cognitive distortions (I am guessing those are an outcome of being subject to fear),  experiencing anxiety, shame, depression, anger, etc.

Once my meaning-making capacity grows to see a principle and value-authoring device in myself, I am no longer seeing principles and values as “things that are”, but rather things that people have. I can see how they can be different across people and the fear of the abyss no longer overcomes me when I encounter someone with a different set of principles and values. With the subject-object shift, the fear of the abyss has moved on to the next frontier of my meaning-making.