In my positive psychology coaching sessions, a good number of clients bring up the question of phobias. Facing those phobias head-on gives them courage and equips them to confront other situations.
And yet, when we ask people what their greatest fears are? The answers that come back to us are the fear of the unknown, of the dark, the fear of heights, of flying, of death, the fear of being poor, of losing one’s parents, of failing (in life), the fear of not living long enough to see one’s children grow up, and so on. There are very nearly as many fears as there are individuals on the planet. And broadly speaking, phobias range from highly critical situations such as cynophobia, the fear of dogs, to trivial ones such as the fear of bananas.
There is, however, one fear among the most subtle, the most unsuspected and the most harmful of all. Many people suffer from it without even realizing it, and sometimes without even knowing that such a phobia exists. And yet it is the one that shapes our most trivial reactions. It is the fear of being forgotten.
The fear of being forgotten shows itself in several forms:
- at work, it is what makes you feel bad when your supervisor hands a colleague a task you could have carried out perfectly well and for which you had the time, the energy, the desire and the skill.
- in friendship, it is what makes you resent your friend when she chooses to ask another friend to go shopping with her, and yet you were at home with nothing much to do.
- in love, it is this phobia that makes it so hard to bear that your partner writes to you neither in the morning on waking nor in the evening before sleep, and yet she was online the whole time.
Come to think of it, the fear of being forgotten surpasses and supplants jealousy. Jealousy is defined as a feeling grounded in the desire to possess the person one loves and in the fear of losing them to a rival. Which is to say that the fear of being replaced is the bedrock of all jealousy.
In other words, if we are jealous in love, it is not merely the fact of learning or observing that someone else enjoys an advantage we do not have, or that we would wish to have all to ourselves. It goes further still: it is the phobia of being forgotten and then replaced, because those privileges are from now on granted to another for the future, placing you in the position of the past.
Human nature is such that the only time we are fond of being relegated to the past is when we wished it ourselves. When we are confined to the past by a force majeure, that is, by a situation imposed upon us, we live through it with selflessness, fair play and self-denial. We have no choice in the matter, after all. But when it is imposed on us by someone else, it is very hard to bear.
All psychologists agree in recognizing that the best way to confront our phobias is to face them. Fortunately, the fear of being forgotten is no exception to the rule: to fight the fear of being forgotten, you have to expose yourself to being forgotten. In other words, it is advisable not to always be the one who leads others to remember that you exist, nor to keep performing acts that place you at centre stage. If you are the person who sends the most messages from waking until night and your partner is only ever "in reply mode", you will have to rein your presence in a little and let the other person think of you.
This exposure, as with any solution, carries risks. If, by exposing yourself to being forgotten, the other person notices your absence and reconsiders things, you gain the possibility of living a somewhat fairer relationship, one in which a form of reciprocity reigns in love and in attention.
If, on the contrary, you do end up forgotten, you would discover that you were not in the right place and that, all that time, you were carrying the relationship by your own "insistence". And so, allow me to tell you this: you are rich, you have assets to put forward and, not very far from you, there is a soul waiting only for your consent to live with you precisely that fair relationship in which reciprocity reigns. And so the fear of being forgotten will have brought you to discover true love.
M. Z.
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