When a person is born, he is already surrounded by fear. The little man does not know this world and can not comprehend it completely. Time passes, the child begins to walk, talk and ask questions to which adults sometimes do not know the answers. The child begins to accept this world and his place in it. So what is fear? First of all, I would like to turn to the official source in a psychological vocabulary and to define the word “fear”.
Fear is a condition that occurs primarily in situations in which avoidance motivation can not be realized. Fear arises if the individual has the motivation and conscious goal to leave the situation, but continues in force for external reasons, to remain in it. In such circumstances, the local fear can be generalized. As shown in the experiments, I. Pavlov and J. Volpe, on the basis of generalized fear of being violated and the fear of becoming non-localized form of personal anxiety, or communicating with a range of more or less random objects or situations, it becomes phobia. According to H. Eysenck, predictors of anxiety are the high rates of personal factors such as neuroticism and introversion.
What happens to a man when in the process of getting acquainted with the world, he understands that he differs from others in movements, speech, growth, behavior and even thoughts? He gets to be afraid of people and events; he hides from himself, from the surroundings and the nature. He withdraws into himself and does not want to go ahead and change himself and the world around him because fear is the lack of willingness to accept the world, the self, other people, present, future, etc.
What happens to the parents, relatives, friends, or other people who surround the man? People usually exhibit two reactions: pity and fear to harm the sick person.
The fear to make harm. I have a life example, when a mother of one of my classmates was afraid to make him learn to walk although all doctors told her that her son must learn to walk by himself. As time passed, his mother did not listen to any doctors or teachers because she was afraid to hurt him, to evoke pain. In the end, time was lost and my classmate lost his chance to walk by himself. His mother died, and the guy was left alone with nothing to hope for. And I know thousands of such stories. The results of such fear are not just disability but also loneliness.
The other reaction to the fear is pity. In general, the pity that results out of fear is death, in the literal sense of the word. A disabled person does not realize that when people feel sorry for his physical shortcomings, it humiliates the man. Everyone has an identity, to feel pity to his identity means to humiliate him. Thus, people help develop laziness and self-pity in this individual. It is not supposed to be because the consequences of fear will be the inability to survive, exclusion, complexes, loneliness, etc.
If you see that a disabled person really needs your participation and sympathy, only then you can show the sympathy and support this man.