Fear is something I’ve grappled with for a long time. It’s always been with me.
It was my one friend before I knew how to make friends. And for the longest time, it was the only thing in the world that I felt understood me. And I understood it. At least I thought I did.
For me fear wasn’t an abstract idea, it was (and is) very visceral. I’m scared of lots of things but fear to me feels is different. For me, real fear has always manifested when it comes to the thought of being seen. Digging even deeper, it’s a fear of what others might find when I am seen. The real me.
Digging even deeper, that fear comes into clearer focus. A fear that once they see the real me, they won’t like what they see.
Rejection.
This primal fear affects most of us and yet, how many of us stop to think about this powerful feeling inside our bodies?
Better still, how many of us give ourselves the permission to just feel the emotion without running away from it? Where does it live in the body? On which occasions does it arise?
Too often we conflate comfort and fear but what is actually happening is comfort serves as a go-to to mask the intensity of fear.
If I’m afraid of having a difficult conversation with someone, I may turn on Netflix or scroll social media to distract myself. That difficult conversation still needs to happen but for the moment I’ve forgotten about it. Comfort has masked the fear.
Sometimes comfort isn’t a temporary mask but a default mode meant to replace fear. We can live our entire lives chasing comfort all in the name of avoiding fear.
When I was about 6 years old, about a year after immigrating to the US, my first grade teacher asked me to read a line from a book during circle time. Sheer terror took over my body from the thought of what sounds might come out of my mouth. Not only was I scared I’d have trouble mouthing the words. I was afraid of outing myself as an outsider. An “other”. Unlike everyone else.
Later in life this manifested in even stranger ways. For years I refused to speak my mother tongue at home. To assimilate into my new country I felt that speaking my mother tongue, even with my parents, even in the privacy of our home, might drag me back into feeling like an other.
I was afraid of trusting adults after my parents divorced. I was afraid of losing friends after my best friend took his life at the age of 17. I was afraid of losing economic stability after being fired from my first job in my twenties and then failing at my first business. And I was afraid of developing deep relationships after a ten year partnership ended in divorce.
But each time I faced a choice.
Seek comfort to mask the pain, or go into the pain.
The feeling of fear in the body is the mind interpreting stimuli and springing into action to make sure we are safe.
But who is “we” and what does “safe” mean?
The neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux pioneered the study of the amygdala and its relation to fear. Feelings of fear, LeDoux found, is borne of a complex set of reactions that involve both the secretion of hormones in the body and chemicals in the brain that together trigger attention systems in the region of the brain called the neocortex.
Imagine your brain is a detective. If it sees something it recognizes as scary, it pulls out a “fear” file from its memory drawer. The scared feeling you get (fear) happens when all of the brain detective’s steps – attention, perception, memory, arousal – come together and end up making you feel “fear.” But to really feel scared your brain needs to be smart enough to think about the concept of “me”. It must have an idea of who you are first.
The autonoetic self is our ability to mentally place ourselves in the past or future. Coined by Canadian psychologist Endel Tulving, it is our ability to mentally time travel.
That’s what our mind is doing when it recognizes something that might harm us. It remembers. And it springs into action.
By understanding these phenomena we can begin to unwind this otherwise gripping feeling.
While on a meditation retreat in 2017, the guides has us focus on the breath to reduce mind wandering. When the mind would begin to wander as it does, we were instructed to bring our attention back to the breath by releasing the thought and letting it pass.
Letting an emotion, a feeling in the body, pass is a bit more difficult.
But that’s how fear is overcome. You first recognize its arrival. It might manifest for you as sweaty palms. For me it always seems to feel like a burning hot weight weighted-vest increasing my body temperature while holding me down in place. Whatever the experience is, push yourself to feel it fully. In that moment you have a choice. A choice to answer your mind’s burning question of “are we safe?” with a resounding Yes. To leave behind the mind’s egoic connection that wants to protect you at all costs, and to step into the present moment.
To be alive.
To be here.
