Atychipohobia is the persistent fear of failure that often leads to a constricted lifestyle, and is particularly devastating on a person’s willingness to attempt certain activities.
Carl Rogers, one of the founding fathers of the humanist movement in the field of psychology, believed that the instinct of humans is to strive for approval: We have an inherent need to feel validated, and only once we accept ourselves and are accepted by others are we able to reach our full potential. When we do not feel validated, he says we begin to experience rejection, alienation, and detachment. Simply put, we feel like failures, so we avoid.
As children, we're encouraged to experience a myriad of activities. Dance classes, piano lessons, soccer practices. We figure out early on what we like, what we don’t like, and what we have passions for, and we do this all of uninhibitedly. We don’t know what other people think about us and we don’t care. We participate because it's something active to do, it helps us make new friends, and yes, because our parents often make us.
If only life always stayed that innocent and beautiful! As a college student, I'm surrounded by opportunities every single day: job interviews, competitions, career fairs. They’re all terrifying. Real life hits, and it requires accepting and acknowledging the fact that things can’t remain stagnant forever. And with that realization, it's difficult to avoid the inclination to just hide from it all, to avoid the risk of possible failure, and to remain in our comfort zone where we feel safe, warm, and protected.
So we get scared. We second-guess. We overthink. We harp. We stop doing. We become paralyzed.
And that’s not living.
All too often, we concern ourselves with the opinions of others. We want people to accept us, to hold us in high regard, to admire us. But that need evolves into a fear of taking risks. We avoid activities and opportunities with unknown outcomes so that we don’t appear inferior if or when we fail. We protect ourselves from that anxiety, a defense mechanism that Carl Rogers calls subception: the protection from negative stimuli and stress.
But quite honestly, at the end of the day, when we're lying in bed trying to calm the chaos in our minds, the only opinion that matters is our own. If we can calm that chaos by believing we're good people, that we have potential, and that everything will be okay, then that’s the most powerful thing of all. Sometimes, telling ourselves “I tried my best” is enough, and if we fail, we're now one step closer to figuring out what will help us succeed.
This process of the good life is not, I am convinced, a life for the faint-fainthearted. It involves the stretching and growing of becoming more and more of one's potentialities. It involves the courage to be. It means launching oneself fully into the stream of life. Yet the deeply exciting thing about human beings is that when the individual is inwardly free, he chooses as the good life this process of becoming.
- Carl R. Rogers
