The Anatomy of Fear
A few weeks ago, I wrote about The Other Side of Fear, and I shared why it mattered to face our fears. Today, I want to expand on that and explore three things:
Why we experience fear.
We are all afraid of something.
Not all fears are equal.
Why we experience fear
Fear is one of the basic universal emotions. It’s a primal life-saving emotion that triggers the body into a fight-or-flight response when the brain detects a threat to survival. So, we experience fear as a way to get us into action. Depending on the threat we are facing, we are either mobilized to fight and protect ourselves or our territory, or we are mobilized to run and get away from the threat – think fires, tsunamis, predators, a gunman…
So, we actually need fear. We need our bodies to warn us when we are in danger. I want to feel fear when I’m about to run into oncoming traffic. I want to feel fear when there is a bear coming my way or someone is running around shooting people. The fear response lets me know that I’m in danger, and mobilizes me into life-saving action.
Everyone is afraid of something
This brings me to my second point, which is everyone is afraid of something. We are all afraid sometimes. Some of us tend to spend more time in fear than others. And there are valid reasons for that too.
You see, what evokes fear will be different from person to person. Spiders for example. Some people are terrified of spiders. Some of us not so much. I’m not afraid of spiders – most of the time anyway. And yet, I can also understand what would trigger fear of spiders for some of us. Anything that is perceived as unfamiliar and potentially dangerous to our health or wellbeing would trigger fear.
That is why people jumped from buildings to their death during the Great Depression in the immediate aftermath of the 1929 stock market crash. The story the jumpers believed, was that they had lost everything. And that story evoked a primal response that they were doomed and would die.
If we believe that we need money to survive, and that we would die without it, that can evoke a primal response. If you grew up in poverty – and perhaps spent time living on the streets – that fear could be even more deeply programmed. Growing up in poverty has instilled a deep fear in me that I will end up on the streets, and that I will not survive. This fear – even though it’s irrational – will surface from time to time in my business – especially when I’m not creating the income I have told myself I need to create to stay secure.
For some of us money can become our source of security, and can evoke tremendous fear when it’s absent. It can also lead to the experience of never enough. No matter how much money we have, it’s never enough, and we never feel safe. This is primal fear that was learnt many, many years ago.
So here is where it gets tricky, and why we don’t all fear the same things.
Did you know that you were born with only two fears: the fear of falling (loss of physical support) and the fear of loud noises? These two fears are hardwired biological survival mechanisms that trigger an automatic startle or flinch response. And it makes perfect sense why we would be born with these two fears — they are essential for our survival as babies. Since we are dependent on others to be carried around and kept safe, we would be afraid of falling – or more truthfully, being dropped – and of loud noises, because we can’t yet turn our necks to identify the source of the noise.
What this also means is that all your other fears are learnt. And we learn what to fear through experiencing life. As we go through certain experiences as babies and young children (and even later as adults) we accumulate a list of stories and our brains store the fear so it can have a short-cut response for the next time you encounter a similar “danger” – regardless of whether that “danger” is real or merely perceived.
Another interesting fact about your brain is that your emotional brain develops before your cognitive brain. This is why you cannot recall anything that happened before the age of three. However, your emotional brain stored the emotional memories of those first three years of life. So, sometimes you might have a fear that you cannot even explain rationally. This is because your brain stored the fear and the emotional memory of the event that created that fear, but your cognitive brain – because it wasn’t fully developed yet – has no memory of it.
Not all fears are equal
Another interesting fact about your brain is that your emotional brain develops well before your cognitive brain. This is why you cannot recall anything that happened before the age of three. However, your emotional brain stored the emotional memories of those first three years of life. So, sometimes you might have a fear that you cannot even explain rationally. This is because your brain stored the fear and the emotional memory of the event that created that fear, but your cognitive brain – because it wasn’t fully developed yet – has no memory of it.
Trauma gets stored in the body as fear. And the fear response is the strongest survival mechanism our nervous system has to protect us from things that have harmed us in the past. For this reason, even something as “simple” as saying no when someone makes a request of you, or speaking your truth or your desires, or being touched can feel dangerous, if you have lived through experiences where you were hurt, disregarded, dismissed, disrespected, or punished for not complying, for being honest about your desires, or if your boundaries – physical, mental, emotional, spiritual – were violated by an authority figure in your life.
And here is where it gets even more interesting. When I started working with my coach, I remember once admitting to her that I was afraid of doing something. I don’t even remember what it was. I was probably afraid of reaching out to someone and extending an invitation to have a conversation, or I was afraid of sharing my fee with a prospective client.
She told me that FEAR is an acronym for one of two possible choices and we get to decide which choice we want to make:
F*ck Everything And Run
OR Face Everything And Rise
I wanted to be the person who could face everything and rise, and so I did. I faced the fear head-on, and sent the “scary” email. However, I also had an unfair advantage here, because I also ran a story on the inside that I was brave and tough, and that I can handle anything. I believed that to be true. And that made all the difference, because I trusted myself to be capable of facing the perceived “pain of rejection” if someone said no to my invitation.
The other day I was talking to a client who was engaged in some deep black-and-white or all-or-nothing thinking. She was being so hard on herself for not always being honest, even though she prides herself on being honest, and I pointed out that we are all 50-50. What I mean by that is that there are times when she is honest and direct, and then there are other times and places in her life where she is not.
And the times and places where she is not who she wants to be, is where her fear shows up. So, am I never afraid of rejection? Oh, hell no! I’m more afraid of rejection that most people I know.
And my fear of rejection is deeply primal, because it’s tied to abandonment wounds that were created very early on in my life. So, when I believe my survival is at stake, I will not face the fear and rise, I will choose the option to f*ck everything and run. And so will you, because that is what your brain does to ensure your survival.
What do I do if I’m afraid and I don’t want to be?
You might be reading this and realizing that you have some “irrational” fears that are stopping you from living fully, and you might be wondering what you do now, if your instincts are simply going to take over every time you face a situation that your brain perceives as scary?
Firstly, you can’t control your fear. Drop any idea that you can, because wanting to control it, is like trying to contain a wild animal. How you tame a wild animal, is to meet it as it is, without trying to force it or restrict it. It will become wilder and out of control if you try to suppress it. Yes, I literally mean that the more you try to suppress your fear, the more intensely you will feel debilitated by fear. What we resist persists.
Secondly, it’s important to know that the choice is always yours. You are not powerless in the face of your fear, unless you believe that your fear is more powerful than you are. And even that belief is a spell that can be broken.
I’m sitting here in hot Italy typing this after participating in an intense revealing ceremony the night before, where I have felt more exposed than ever before in my life, and where I felt the fear coursing through my veins with such intensity that I thought it would engulf me. I felt frozen in place, unable to move. And yet, I have lived through the experience and have come out on the other side with a sense of freedom I didn’t have before.
Facing your fear doesn’t mean confronting it. Facing you fear means welcoming it. Letting it be here. Allowing yourself to feel it in your body, and not make it wrong for being here. Only when you allow what is most uncomfortable to simply be here, do you get to choose. Choice is not available until that moment, because you will be trapped in the experience of your animal body.
The most encouraging and empowering words spoken to me during the revealing ceremony, was this: “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.” That felt like permission to choose what I wanted in the moment. Those words restored my agency, and I was empowered in the moment to choose who I wanted to be. Did I want to be the woman who travelled all the way to Italy so I could be seen and witnessed only to abandon myself in the last moment? Or did I want to be the woman who bravely rose to meet the fear and trust that my freedom was on the other side of that fear?
I chose to rise and meet my fear and the elation and sheer power that comes with that is something that only choice can provide. When you choose to face what feels impossible to face, you build trust with yourself. No-one can give you that. You must build trust within yourself. Only you have the power to do that.
More to come…