When Being Extraordinary Still Isn't Enough...
What Michael Jackson’s life reveals about fear, love, and the Automatic Brain
My wife and I recently watched Michael, the film about Michael Jackson’s life. As I was watching, I couldn’t help but notice how much of his life could be understood within the framework I write about in my book Fear Is a Liar.
As I have discussed, the protective part of our brain, which I call the Automatic Brain (AB), is fundamentally shaped during the years from birth through adolescence. And for humans, we learn early on what those circumstances are or things that we will reflexively fight or flee to remain safe and protected. In my book, I discuss three danger brain folders within which memories are stored, and I call them the One-Up Folder, the Unknown Folder, and the Loss of Love Folder. As we grow, we subconsciously learn how we need to behave in order not to be one-upped (or therefore stomped out), what is unfamiliar so that we are not met with unknown terror or humiliation, and what we must do to maintain the security of being loved.
Once the brain associates certain circumstances with danger, it becomes very good at detecting future events that may only vaguely resemble those that populated the folder.
Watching Michael’s childhood depicted on screen, I kept wondering what his young brain may have learned.
He wasn’t raised. He was drilled. Rehearsals that ran past exhaustion. A father who used a belt as a teaching tool and silence as a threat. His AB never registered rest as safe, because the AB doesn’t register safety at all. It only registers danger and triggers the fight-or-flight response. And in that house, rest meant he wasn’t performing, and not performing was exactly the kind of moment his AB had learned to flag. Sleep wasn’t filed as recovery. It was filed as exposure, the moment his guard would drop and something could reach him.
That’s the part of his story that stops me. I don’t see the insomnia that followed him into adulthood, and the eventual dependence on propofol just to lose consciousness, as entirely separate from those childhood experiences. Through the AB framework, I see the same folder, still open, still detecting the same threat decades later. To an AB shaped this way, staying awake is the familiar response, the one that has always kept the alarm from getting worse. The fact that he ultimately turned to a surgical anesthetic in an effort to sleep tells you just how desperate that struggle had become.
Then there’s the Loss of Love folder, and I think this one explains more of his life than any other. To the AB, love isn’t an emotion. It’s a signal for security, and the AB doesn’t feel safety directly; it only registers when a threat has been fought off or escaped. Approval in that house wasn’t unconditional. It arrived after a flawless take, a sold-out room, a father satisfied with the performance. A child’s AB draws the obvious conclusion from that pattern: love isn’t something you have, it’s something you earn, over and over, with no version of enough. I read his drive to be extraordinary through that lens: the behavior his AB had learned was required to keep the threat of losing love at bay. Worse, the love he did earn came wrapped in pain, discipline that left marks, correction that only sharpened into praise once the suffering was over. His AB filed that as the rule. Love that came from people cost something. I’d read some of what he did to his own body the same way, not as vanity but as another attempt to earn acceptance on the only terms his AB had ever recorded — terms that required suffering as part of the price.
His AB had also discovered one kind of love that asked for nothing and hurt nothing: a stuffed animal, a pet, later the menagerie, the rides, the whole constructed childhood at Neverland. Objects and animals don’t withhold, and they don’t critique a performance. They offered his AB something it had never once flagged as dangerous — closeness without the cost. I think the pull toward the trappings of childhood, long after his own had ended, was an attempt to recreate the one form of love his AB had never needed to fight or flee.
That’s really the whole point of the book’s title. Fear told him the way to quiet the alarm was more rehearsal, more surgery, more distance from sleep, a world built like a permanent, painless childhood. None of it worked, because none of it addressed the danger his folder was still detecting. Being the most extraordinary person on earth couldn’t do it either, because the AB was never listening for applause. It was only ever watching for the next threat, and evading each one over and over is not the same thing as the threat itself going away.
