The Next Osama Syndrome in Huffington Post

The book is stepping out in Huffington Post with an article that we hope will inspire Americans to wake up.

Wake up America!

There is a difference between fear that is useful and fear that is futile. We worry about sagging neck lines when we don’t think about our bloated and sagging national debt. We are afraid of getting old but not afraid of lives bereft of purpose. We are afraid of nearly everything the media tells us to be afraid of so that we buy (pills, perfumes, and policies) whatever they are selling.

It does more than make us afraid. It makes us insensate. It distracts us.

This came home to me once again in my psychotherapy practice in which one woman was so terrified by all the things she imagined could happen to her (to her loved ones, to her home, her career, her body, her car) that she felt absolutely paralyzed. Yet, she wasn’t afraid of the things she should have been afraid of: getting into cars with strangers, anonymous sex, relentless consumption of pills and other agents of distraction).

We worry about contracting the flu, when we should be more conscious about the fear that is infecting us with every advertisement.

Wake up, America.