If this is your first visit to my blog, you might also want to read the
===========================================================
Fear
Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) often said in the depths of the Great Depression, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.” Most of the time, that is incredibly true. But he also could have said “We have nothing to fear but pain” and that would have also been very true.
While situations that are actually life threatening are cause for genuine fear (like a gun aimed at you, or diagnosis with a “fatal” disease), even those situations only threaten our expectations. We expected to live a long life, now we may die “before our time.”
Most of us don’t have to deal with this sort of reality, at least in our younger years. But we have other losses, heart breaks, disappointments, job losses, realizing that we’re not as wonderful or special (in the eyes of the rest of humanity) as we hoped, and other genuine traumas. Episodic situations can leave a huge mark on a person. Losing a child, or a partner, any loved one through sudden causes (accidents usually), all of these leave a huge mark on us. This sort of sudden loss has it’s own life, and the process of dealing with it has it’s own markers.
Elizabeth Kubler Ross identified the five stages of loss and grief: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance. Or “DABDA” if you need acronyms to help you remember.
We don’t move through these with mechanical precision. In fact, they sort of swirl around us, like a helix, gradually pulling away our layers of defenses, like peeling a piece of fruit in one long round cut. Gradually our defenses wear away (if we are lucky) and we finally stare this new and unwelcome reality in the face.
If we’re lucky, we realize that this unwanted reality is simply life, uninvited, intrusive and persistent, but also a part of us, a longtime companion or partner, that for better or worse, we must make peace with. If we don’t, we leave ourselves to a life on ongoing torment, held prisoner by our own humanity, trying to flee, with nowhere to go.
In the movie “Out of Africa” the protagonist played by Meryl Streep has a coffee plantation that is mortgaged to the hilt. She stakes it all on her coming coffee crop, which comes in abundantly. Long hours are spent at the roaster, turning the green beans into marketable product that will pay off her debt. The roaster is in the same area as the stored crop to be sold. After hours of exhaustion, she goes to bed. In the middle of the night, her chief servant, who is Muslim, comes to her exclaiming, “God has come!!” The next scene we see the roaster, barn and all the beans engulfed in a huge fire. Her crop is lost, followed by her estate, and all of her dreams of a life in Kenya that she had hoped and struggled for.
While the event does shatter her dreams, and is life changing, it does not kill her.
And that is why the FDR comment is so pertinent. Generally speaking, we have nothing to fear but fear itself. But we don’t deal with our fears very well in 21st Century America.
As Brene’ Brown (in her TED talk, "Power of Vulnerability") points out, most of us immediately look for someone or something to blame. She goes on to describe blame as “a way to discharge pain and discomfort.”
Few of us ever consider that at the core of this struggle with fear might be a spiritual element that we are ignoring. Decades ago, I had a friend (long deceased) in Miami named Danny Torres. One night we had dinner with his mother, Violet Torres, a widow who worked in a factory in Hialeah. Violet was not a highly educated woman, but she had educated herself in the ways of the human heart, and how we humans function. She was also a deeply spiritual woman, and kept God at the center of her universe.
The first thing she said was that fear is the most powerful emotion in the human experience. “If a person surrenders to their fears, they will even destroy that person’s ability to love.” This truth is echoed over and over again in psychological literature, most recently by Dr. Brene’ Brown, whose research had concluded that the inability to be vulnerable in life and relationships is the principle cause of our skyrocketing rates of indebtedness, addiction, obesity, and medication in our culture.
We do this to numb vulnerability, because we live in a state of fear.
Violet went on to say one of the most important things I have ever heard, “Every choice a person makes in life always comes down to one thing, love or fear. Most people choose fear because they think it’s easier.”
Being inclined to study and meditate on things, I spent time reflecting on her words. I realized, “Of course, when I make the fear choice, I THINK I know what the outcome will be, and I’ll be safe. When I make the love choice, I take God by the hand, we jump off the cliff together, and I can’t see the bottom.”
When I choose fear, I enshrine my safety above everything else. And everything else suffers, including (eventually) my health and well being.
When I choose love, I partner with God, and my loved ones, and we figure it out together. It is my willingness to embrace vulnerability, and the possibility that I might lose, that opens up all sorts of possibilities.
But when we are in the midst of these decisions, it is hard to follow our hearts when our heads are screaming things that sound “logical” and safe. We seek “certainty” where there is none. We “hedge our bets” and push back reality. It is a mild form of gambling addiction, except I call it fear addiction.
Fear is the most addictive situation in the human experience. Not only does it cause actual addiction to a person, place or thing that will “save” us, but it assures the “It’s never enough” cycle because there is no amount of assurance that can counter the power of fear.
In other words, there is no “logical” way out of fear, because fear is not based in logic. It is based in emotions, and usually triggered by unresolved past pain and traumas.
Since long term childhood trauma almost always creates low self esteem (“I am not worthy or good enough”) the mix of pervasive unworthiness and fear of more torment or pain becomes the central reason for living. The beast must be fed at all costs, and nothing can appease it. And the beast is our overwhelming sense of emptiness that comes from not being “enough” no matter what we do.
So the child who grew up in a home, or any home that is not “child centered” (the home exists to meet the emotional needs of the children first) is forever vigilant for any signs of being hurt again. And since both life and people are imperfect, the person WILL get hurt again. But instead of accepting that hurt as a part of the imperfect nature of life, the person blames his/her self, the “see, this proves that I’m not good enough” mantra continues into infinity.
A classic example of how childhood trauma and loss can affect adult life is found in the movie “Saving Mr. Banks” which is about the transformation of the book “Mary Poppins” into the movie. The author is quite “high maintenance” insisting on complete control of all aspects of the development of the film, even though she knows little of film making. We eventually discover that all of this relates to the loss of her father to alcoholism when she was a child, and her never having grieved that loss, blaming herself for not being able to save her father from himself, and therefore carrying the pain and guilt into her adult life. The pain of it creates a highly opinionated, angry woman, displaying neither vulnerability or tenderness. She has been consumed by her fear of not being able to be in complete control.
It is Walt Disney who realizes that Mary Poppins did not come to save the children, she comes to save Mr. Banks, their father.
I could go on about this for a LONG time, but I will close for now with this thought. Our fears reside in our heads, where we tumble them around like clothes in a washing machine. Even if we make sense of them, they still scare us, and we never really find any peace in our thoughts because we are constantly doing the “Yes But” dance in our heads.
Love resides in our hearts, in our best emotions, in our generosity, our ability to forgive, first ourselves and then others who have hurt us.
It takes a conscious decision to decide and commit to listening to our hearts first, to feel our intuitions, and trust our feelings. Much of life in this culture has conspired to tell us we are wrong to do this, that our hearts cannot be trusted, etc. Yet consistently, the most successful people are the ones who listen to and honor their hearts first. Oprah Winfrey is a shining example of this. She shares this in an interview at Sanford University, here on YouTube.
A lot of my work with clients, particularly ones who have anxiety issues, is spent just working with this simple understanding of the importance of honoring our emotions and listening to the still, small, certain voice of our spirit, not the cacophony of chatter that harasses us in our heads.
It is challenging, but the rewards are great. To pose Violet’s question, are you choosing fear, or love?
Good article!
ReplyDelete