This is the sixth in a series of articles where I take a look at key words and phrases that play an important role in the work I do, helping people discover ways to live and love like they mean it.
Last month we explored E for Emotional Mindfulness, and you can read the article here.
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We can’t speak. Our bodies shake uncontrollably and it feels like a force field is enveloping us.
These are just some of the physical symptoms of fear, a basic and powerful emotion.
Fear arises not only when we feel physically threatened, but also in social situations, and even sometimes without warning or reason. Whatever triggers fear, it’s easy to see how anyone under its sway will struggle to communicate with others. And it’s just as easy to see how we can grow to fear the return of these symptoms.
But even though we can all feel at the mercy of fear at times, it need not rule our lives. With practice and constructive guidance, we can overcome all kinds of fears, whether it’s a fear of being emotionally present and authentic in our relationships, or a fear of fear itself.
Where does fear come from?
Fear is perhaps the strongest and most essential of all human emotions. We cannot hope to eliminate fear from our lives entirely and should not even seek to do so. This is because sometimes we need to experience fear, such as when we’re facing real danger, as it prompts us to do what’s required to reach safety.
But it is our fearful responses to situations in which we’re not in immediate danger that many of us seek to change. These types of fears were likely established in our earliest days, when our caregivers reacted negatively to our emotional needs. If they became frustrated when we felt afraid and needed their reassurance, or they withdrew when we needed to be soothed, or admonished us for being angry, we learned to fear expressing our emotions, as they threatened our relationship with our caregivers whom we needed to survive.
These lessons eventually became embedded in our amygdala, the almond-shaped cluster of neuro circuitry deep inside our brain where fear originates. The amygdala has the power to overwhelm rational thought, overlook reality and overtake emotional experience. It controls the automatic responses to our feelings and is where we store the blueprint of how our relationships and connections work.
The amygdala’s response to situations is often based on outdated lessons from our past that are stored in its neural library. On the basis of these previous experiences, our brain predicts whether something bad is about to take place and our body responds in kind.
But the important thing to know is that this situation doesn’t have to be permanent. We can reprogram the amygdala to have a friendlier response to our feelings of fear.
How fear shows up
Fear manifests itself in many ways that vary from mild to severe. At the milder end of the scale, we can experience concern, worry or wariness in certain situations. Distress, nervousness, dread and anxiety are stronger forms of fear, while panic, fright and pure terror represent the most extreme examples of this emotion.
Symptoms vary from person to person and can include cold hands, shallow and faster breathing, sweating, trembling arms and legs, a tightness in the stomach, an all-over sense of shakiness, and a strong impulse to escape or run out of harm’s way.
We may view these symptoms as weak and foolish and seek to resist them and make them go away. But this reaction doesn’t allow us to learn how to deal with fear and use it to our advantage.
The things we do to protect ourselves from fear
In order to protect ourselves from the unpleasant symptoms of fear, we try all sorts of things to ensure we don’t experience the emotion in the first place. When it comes to a fear of being emotionally present and open in our relationships, we may try to minimize, deny, or hide our true feelings. We pull away from our partners and avoid being direct. But reacting like this does not serve us. It causes problems in our relationships, and often leads to us feeling resentful, disinterested, even depressed. This is why a different approach to fear is needed.
Changing our relationship with fear
When we were young, our thinking was black and white, and our world was a small place made up of just a few people. At this age, the possibility of losing connection with a caregiver was catastrophic, as we would not be able to survive on our own, so we did all we could to maintain that connection, adjusting our emotional dynamics in ways that became deeply wired into the circuitry of our brains.
As we grow into adults, this approach to our emotions stays with us, because letting go of these old ways of doing things feels so threatening. However, with practice and awareness, we can learn to face our fears, calm our body and connect with our true feelings.
So how do we free ourselves from fear that is no longer warranted?
The answer lies in developing our capacity to be emotionally present. To open up and communicate what’s inside of us. The more we do what I call being emotionally mindful, the more our fear will dissipate, and the more we’ll be able to stay present and share our feelings without feeling anxious or overwhelmed.
By practicing emotional mindfulness, you will actually be rewiring your brain, breaking the old associations between fear and emotional connection and creating new, updated mental models of relating in which sharing your feelings will be seen and experienced as something beneficial and not something to fear.
When we drop inside ourselves, we begin to observe and attend to the feelings from which we’ve been running. We turn toward the emotions, needs, and desires that we’ve been conditioned to fear and resist.
By staying with our emotions instead of reflexively exiting the scene, by leaning into our discomfort and moving through it, we’re challenging the fallacies of our early conditioning. We’re calling its bluff and loosening the hold that fear has had over us, freeing ourselves from the past.
When we face our fears, when we lean in and share more of ourselves, we loosen the grip of our early programming, and our range of options widens. Our perspective broadens, and our vision clears. We’re able to see and experience ourselves, our partners, and our relationships in a more nuanced way. We’re able to inhabit each moment more fully. And we’re able to respond more sensitively and skilfully.
The result is that our experiences become richer. Our relationships grow stronger. And our love deepens.
Something to try
Close your eyes and think about a recent relationship experience you’ve had in which you got activated or defensive. Recall what happened. Picture it in your mind’s eye in as much detail as possible. As you do, notice what happens in your body. Find the place inside of you where you’re feeling physically activated.
Focus on it. Stay with it. Breathe into it and give it a lot of room. It is likely that fear is operating at this moment. Allow yourself to feel into it. Touch the quality of it. Describe it to yourself. Notice what happens as you do.
Let yourself get curious about your fear. Not from an intellectual place of trying to make sense of things, but from a place of openness and discovery, allowing for whatever comes. Listening to whatever is there.
Try to look beyond your distress to see what feelings might be underneath. Ask yourself, “What’s coming up for me?”
Just notice what reveals itself. Notice how it manifests in your body. See if you can identify and name the emotions you are feeling. For example, maybe you’re feeling angry, vulnerable, sad, or ashamed. Just do your best to stay present and allow the feelings to move through you. Surf the waves of energy inside you. Feel them move through you. Stay with them as long as it takes for them to begin to shift.
If you start to feel overwhelmed, pause and focus on your breathing for a moment. Take a few deep breaths and let them out slowly. Use your breathing and grounding tools to help regulate your experience and make it more manageable. Do whatever you need to do to bring yourself back into your window of tolerance, where you’re able to stay present to your felt experience without exiting in any way. Find a balance between leaning in enough so that you can be present with your feelings but not so much so that you get ahead of yourself or feel overwhelmed.
If you’re having trouble getting out of the story or putting your defenses to the side, you might wonder what you’re afraid will happen if you do. Ask the fear, not your head, what it anticipates. Your defenses developed long ago as a way to protect you. So, try asking the fear what it’s protecting you from. Listen for the answer. Ask yourself what you might feel if you were to let go of your defenses. What might you do? What might you say? What might happen? Notice any resistance or tension in your body and breathe into it. Try to soften it and let it go.
Then, come back to your emotional experience and give it another try. Picture the triggering moment and notice what comes up for you now. If it’s helpful, you can alternate between focusing on your breath (or some other neutral point of focus) and touching back into your emotional experience. Keep coming back to your emotional experience and staying with it until it shifts.
What was that like? What did you experience? Were you able to stay present with yourself? Was it as difficult as you anticipated? Did it help to observe and describe your emotional experience? Were you able to identify what you were feeling? What did you learn about your inner experience? About your fear? Did you discover any feelings you weren’t aware of?
There is no right or wrong answer to any of these questions. There’s only your experience. What matters most is that you’re trying to stay present to yourself. You’re stretching and expanding your emotional capacity. You’re loosening the grip of an old, outdated fear and learning to be present with yourself. You’re becoming mindful of your process, of what’s happening for you, instead of mindlessly going along for a ride. And you’re creating an opportunity to be able to move forward in a healthier way.
