Monday I mailed my registration for a 5Rhythms workshop in
Santa Fe. I heard about the workshop a month ago. I was immediately both drawn
to it and searching for an excuse not to go. Hah! Reading the workshop
description set off all kinds of introvert alarms…unknown teacher and almost 90
people attended the last time he taught in New Mexico. Yikes!
Yep, I scared
myself and mailed my registration anyway. After mailing it I realized I’ve been
scaring myself regularly since January of last year. And that’s a good thing.
Sometimes when I scare myself, I don’t feel afraid.
Fear is part of the human experience. It’s
our response to a threat or the possibility of a threat. We’ll felt that heart
banging, sweaty, fumbling, hands shaking fear that kicks in our flight, fight
or freeze instinct. But most of the time fear wears a different face.
We’ve all heard
that thing about how human emotions, at their core, all stem from either fear
or love. I’m not sure about that one as it seems too dualistic. I’d say fear,
love or a combination of both. Grief is a confluence of love and fear.
Over the past
year when I’ve scared myself I’ve felt anxious, restless, angry, doubtful,
small, confused, worried, judgmental and impatient…all different faces of fear.
So why didn’t I simply feel afraid? When we’re afraid we also feel open,
exposed and vulnerable. If the fear is strong enough we may even feel helpless
or powerless.
None of us want
to feel that way so unconsciously we may jump to an alternate manifestation of
fear because it’s easier to deal with. Anger is a big one here because it gives
us the illusion of being powerful rather than feeling vulnerable. I’ve often
wondered if there isn’t some mental mechanism that kicks in when we’re afraid
and redirects us to feeling anxious, worried, etc. as a way to avoid getting locked
into the physical fight, flight or freeze reaction.
But that fight,
flight or freeze reaction still comes up in response to alternate
manifestations of fear; it just looks different. In reaction to a physical
threat, the difference between fight, flight and freeze is obvious. When it
comes to other threats the categories begin to overlap and blur a bit.
Fight
This reaction is all about
making the threat go away either by destroying it or pushing it away. So fight
can show up as blame, excuses, justifications, rationalizations, attacking who
or whatever triggered the fear, getting angry and continuing to feed that anger
or mental scrambling.
Flight
Flight is
about getting away from the threat. It all comes down to some form of physically,
mentally or emotionally running away. So flight can show up as walking away,
making excuses, justifying, rationalizing, over thinking, looking for a
distraction and shutting down.
Freeze
When we freeze, we’re immobile. Although this
reaction may seem more likely to get us killed than contribute to our surviving
the threat, freezing is about hiding in hopes that the threat will pass us by.
Like the flight reaction, freeze can be physical, emotional or mental. Freeze
shows up as disconnecting from ourselves and our emotions, avoidance,
procrastination or simply pretending the scary thing didn’t happen.
So what’s the
point of all this? Why pay attention to the way fear shows up in our lives? It
comes down to a question of who we want to be in relation to what scares us. Fear
is a contraction. It makes our lives smaller under the guise of keeping us
safe. Staying safe means staying in our comfort zones and as the saying goes,
nothing grows there.
This is another
example of how what we resist persists. All of our emotions, including fear,
are vital sources of information. Feelings are one of the ways we talk to
ourselves. When we react by jumping into fight, flight or freeze we’re making a
choice akin to running through a dark house, yelling and bumping into the
furniture, instead of stopping to turn on the light.
Fear is warning
that we’re stepping into the risky territory of the unknown. It’s a normal
response to pushing the edges of our comfort zones and growing. Each time we
surrender to fear by retreating into that fight, flight or freeze response we
give the fear more authority over us. We
surrender to making our lives smaller. We confine ourselves to whatever space
we can carve out in the prison of what we fear.
The first step in
deconstructing the prison rather than making it stronger is recognizing when we’re
afraid and owning the fear.
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