Can we pursue happiness when we are so busy running from fear? A commentary and exploration of the media's effect on American's when they are the most susceptible. Written by Judith Acosta, who started as an advertising copywriter and became a psychotherapist.

1. It Could Happen Tomorrow:
Fear-Based Resolutions for a Happy New Year.
c. 2007, Judith Acosta, all rights reserved.
Originally published on www.AmericanThinker.com
I may be one of the only people in the United States who does not indulge in the
frenzy of resolution-making between Christmas and New Year’s Day. I am not entirely
clear whether that makes me either disinterested or impervious, but it is true. I figure,
what’s the point in a “resolution” if I’m not willing to make the right choice right now? If
I live today, then I choose today, whether that choice is to be kinder, to be firmer, to say
“I’m sorry” to those who need to hear it, to eat well, to eat less or to get in at least a half-
hour of exercise. Personally making a resolution is a subtle and sneaky way of saying “I
don’t want to do that” but pretending I do. It’s also a way to join the resolution club.
Everybody makes resolutions for the New Year.
The question that has me curious, however, is what it is that motivates most
people to make these resolutions, to promise they will do the thing they least want to do,
to frustrate themselves with clock-like regularity every year by doing what they know
from experience is almost always futile. When people are banging their heads on the wall
and complaining about the headache, I feel free to assume that the motivation for the
head-banging has to be not only unconscious but very strong, indeed.
As I alluded to in another article (see: The American Limbic System, 2006, on
www.AmericanThinker.com), Americans, like other human beings, are motivated by a
complex interlacing network of instincts both inbred and inculcated: hunger, greed,
power, ambition, fame, pleasure, revenge, compassion. But perhaps one of the most

2. important and particularly American factors is our need to belong. Even though it is a
great paradox – we are simultaneously fiercely independent and secretly needy – it is
true. It is what advertisers and marketing managers at major companies have been
counting and capitalizing on for going on 150 years. Our need to belong to a tribe is so
strong and so pervasive (even cross-culturally, that some advertisers have gone so far as
to study the psychology of cults (e.g., why people join them) and apply those principles
to their marketing strategies. One man I used to work with used to say that the product
has to be more than a product, it has to be an icon, it has to reach into a person’s soul and
resonate.
The next question flows naturally from that. What do we feel we have to do or be
in order to belong? What do we resolve at resolution time?
The American Club
I believe that’s self-evident for anyone with even a minimal amount of social
exposure: We need to be thin, to be hip, to be up on the latest “thang.” We need to be
perfect mothers, perfect friends, perfect bosses and perfect employees. We need to wear
the right clothes, have the right date, watch the right shows so we can join in on the water
cooler gossip. This last one is evident in children as young as 5 or 6 years old.
In yet another life, I worked as a clinical social worker in a small school system
along the Hudson River in NY. I can recall clearly this small boy with red hair playing
with wood blocks and babbling about a cartoon character. I think it was one of the Ninja
Turtles. Three other children were playing with him, building something that looked like
the beginning of a castle. One of them, a little girl who was clearly Hispanic, looked at
him sideways and said in a thick accent, “Who’s that?” He turned to her and, with a tone

3. he could have only learned from an adult, said, “You don’t know? You’re stupid.” She
hung her head and walked away, tears filling her eyes, shame filling her heart. Over the
last thirty years shame has been berated as “toxic” and banned from a parent’s tool chest
of consequences. Psychology shamans have even tried to get us to ban it from our
emotional repertoire, to lead “shameless” lives. But, in my opinion, it is not possible for
three reasons: 1) It is one of the oldest human emotions; 2) shame is thoroughly
necessary if we are to live with one another in any form of structured society; and 3)
shame is hugely motivational because it is so closely related to fear.
Resolutions – which is really a promise to avoid doing something until later – is
partially built on this need to avoid shame, to be included, to be an integral part of the
pack. Its foundation is a practically limbic fear that if we do the wrong thing we will be
excluded. I believe this is traceable to the limbic system primarily because exclusion in
our earliest history would have been tantamount to a death sentence. No one could
survive alone. And in many ways psychologically and emotionally we still can’t. We are
pack animals. Like dogs, horses, primates, meerkats and beavers (among many others)
we work, love, play and thrive in groups. Loners either become ready prey to the
elements or the local predators. We make resolutions because other people make
resolutions. Who wants to be left out of the biggest conversation of the brand new year?
And in a culture where self-improvement is the shrine at which we bend our knee and
power gurus now reign via fiber optic cables, who at the lunch table would dare to say he
had nothing he needed to do differently, nothing he needed to improve, nothing she
wanted to learn from Tony Robbins? What colossal nerve that would seem like and what
a price the poor soul would have to pay in the currency of corporate politique.

4. Fear, That Old Acquaintance We Should Like to Forget
So, the question arises again for me: Why bother with the whole pretense? Why
go to the trouble of saying you’ll do it (whatever “it” is for you) tomorrow? Why not
make the right choice right now? What would keep us from doing that which is obviously
more rational and more life-giving? Why would we project the promise forward that we
don’t want to make in the present? The only answer I could come up with was, once
again, fear.
A woman I know used to have a roommate who had a colorful little compulsion.
She was addicted to M&M’s and she would pop them one at a time into her mouth while
no one was looking. She also would only go grocery shopping late at night when no one
was there because she believed (inaccurately so) that she was “fat” and didn’t want other
people at the checkout line looking at her and judging her purchases in the context of her
obesity (as she perceived it). Every year she would make a resolution to break free from
those little chocolate beasties and to lose the weight she didn’t really need to lose. And
every year she would white knuckle her way through a week or two or a month and then
cave in. Who was she making that resolution for? Was it for herself? Or was it because
she so feared the opinion of others? Perhaps, as my friend said, it doesn’t make a
difference what the precise fear is. Perhaps what is important for our purposes is the way
fear manipulates and motivates us not only without our conscious consent, but without
our knowledge.
Once again, to illuminate the point I raise the specter of advertising at this time of
year. What do we see and hear? What chord are they plucking?

5. “You’ve got just a few hours left, gentlemen. It’s panic time. But you can get the
gift you want at….”
“It’s beginning a lot to look like weight gain…get PRODUCT X and head those
pounds off at the pass…”
“What’s happening with the flu this holiday season? Stay tuned to see where it’s
been, where it’s going, and if you and your loved ones are at risk. Also….we’ll have DR.
X from PHARMACY X to help you prepare your medicine closet for those shivers and
fevers.”
“If you don’t have high-definition, you don’t have what it takes…”
“We deal with the serious diseases. Together we can prevail…”
And so it goes. As I see it, our resolutions reflect two things: our fear of being left
out (which, if pulled to its biological essence, is the fear of being shamed or rejected and
therefore of dying) and the external, imprinted fears that are driven into us like a hard
rain by the media. Advertising has become even more intrusive and quietly manipulative
in that it is now embedded into entertainment programming. No longer do we hear, “Buy
our new, improved…” No longer are commercials announced for what they are, sales
pitches. Products are introduced into the fabric of television shows such as Queer Eye for
the Straight Guy. They are shown in Sex & the City in ways that weave into our psyches
without our knowing so that we unconsciously associate Absolute Vodka with incredible
sex appeal, and who doesn’t want or need that?
The medium is more sophisticated, but if we’re smart and aware we can see the
same old messages over and over. We are told we are too fat, so we better resolve to lose
weight. We are told we need a makeover, so we resolve to get new clothes and change

6. our style. We are told we are unattractive to the opposite sex if we’re over 25, so we
better get a credit card with a low APR for that face lift we have to have. It’s all about
“buy me!” “No, buy me!” “Hey you! I’m over here! Buy me!” The snake oil has been
repackaged, but it’s still snake oil.
Some resolutions we make are good ones. These are the ones we usually don’t
have to wait to accomplish. We resolve to do it as of right now, today. The thought itself
is the harbinger of the change and the behavior follows dutifully. If we resolve to be kind,
to be on time, to manage our tempers or to lose weight when we really need to, and if we
make these resolutions because we want to and not because we’re afraid, I’d say
“hurrah.”
I know someone who resolves every year to lose fifty pounds. And it would be
good if she did. She would be healthier and have more energy. But it’s not critical and
she never makes it past the five pound mark. Ever. Because the truth is she doesn’t really
want to lose weight or change her diet. But she wants everyone to think she does because
that’s what she’s told to do. Maybe she should resolve to not care what other people
thought one way or the other. That would at least have a chance of making her new year
really happy.
Judith Acosta is the co-author of The Worst Is Over (2002, Jodere) and Verbal First Aid
(2010, Penguin). She is currently a licensed psychotherapist, hypnotherapist, classical
homeopath, and crisis counselor in private practice in New Mexico and a national speaker on
trauma, stress management, animal-assisted therapy and Verbal First Aid. She writes regularly
on the effect of media on American culture.
Ms. Acosta is a Phi Beta Kappa, Summa Cum Laude from CUNY and Fordham University. For
10 years, she was a writer with major advertising agencies and periodicals. She created the
Somamente Group with Tullie Ruderman, CSW and Dorothy Larkin, RN in 1994 to train health

7. care professionals and first responders in neurolinguistic strategies to increase compliance and
promote healing. She currently trains civilian, para-military, EMS, and military groups in the
use of Verbal First Aid and has a column on therapeutic communication in JEMS online.
She may be reached at www.verbalfirstaidforchildren.com, www.wordsaremedicine.com, or
www.viralfear.com.