What's the difference between anxiety and fear?

Here is a feeling that reacts to a clear discernible threat or danger

that anybody would be able to see or understand.

Anxiety is the fear apprehension of or dread of conditions or feelings that have not arisen.

In other words, it's the suspicion, anticipation, concern, worry that something bad might happen either externally or internally.

But anxiety is based entirely on anticipation, whereas fear is based on actuality.

And so tonight's talk is not about fear,

because in most cases, people's fears are generally very accurate. If there's a clear and present

threat in front of you I do urge you to follow your fear and let it determine how to behave in many circumstances at least to be very helpful.

But anxiety is quite a different beast.

Now I'm going to sort of talk about anxiety in the stages that it's developed

in life. The first and earliest anxiety is the anxiety of annihilation.

When we are infants, we feel very, well I don't know about you, I certainly felt I suspect,

very vulnerable helpless very incapable of

defending myself against anything so the anxiety of annihilation is just the infant's recognition that it is in a large world

with very little body control, very little defenses, very little to protect it.

And so it feels a sense of vulnerability which creates an anxiety. And so the mother, the caretaker, generally

establishes a sense of security by lifting us up when we're infants and holding and

cradling and creating a sense of protection security in the world being looked after.

They transmit security not through words at first but by touch,

holding us, caressing, giving a sense of protection, that feeling of movement,

the soothing of the facial expression, the wooing tone of voice,

...