What Experiences Contribute to Fear of Authority Figures?

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There are four negative experiences which can contribute to your fear of authority figures.

  1. Strict, critical or overbearing parents or guardians who made you feel inadequate and powerless to do anything other than as they dictated you should.
  2. Traumatic incident involving a person in authority who publicly embarrassed, humiliated, rejected, or punished you for some perceived infraction.
  3. Conditioned response to some authority figure who made you to feel negatively evaluated, judged, and rendered powerless over time.

Status is something you consciously and unconsciously concern yourself with. This is because of its accompanying authority and requirements for what you should do and should not do with respect to those who have this high status. Having some acknowledged social value, high-status includes social status, financial status, business status, celebrity status artistic status, and political status.

Everyone makes social comparisons with other people. You do it naturally to see how you compare with others on success, wealth, attractiveness, education, privilege, job, pay, job perks, abilities, experience, interests, and talents. You compare yourself to see if you are in sync with the expectations of your society, the culture, a group or individual you value, or with specific beliefs and attitudes you consider important.

You do it to see how you are similar to those you admire or dissimilar to those you don’t like and devalue. You do it to see what you might do to make yourself more like those you admire.

However, not all social comparisons are equal. Some social comparisons can create problems when you do not use them to positively enhance your behavior to achieve your goals—if you use them, instead, to negatively point out possible “inadequacies by comparison” in yourself.

Negative comparisons tend to create anger, a sense of powerlessness, low self-esteem, and maladaptive thoughts, feelings, and behaviors—things that can get in your way in your personal and work lives.

In the workplace negative comparisons can affect your level of productivity, mood, interpersonal interactions, and make you vulnerable to the authority’s use of the power that you fear. When you feel you have to obey or respond to specific others in a standardized, structured way, you tend to see them as being more entitled and deserving because of their status or authority.

Because you lack their accompanying power, you tend to automatically feel yourself as less deserving by comparison. This helps keep your fear of authority figures alive and well.