The Secret Life of Fear
For a long time, I thought I was chosen by the old gods & new, to have this inner commentator inside my head. As I grew older, I realized, that many human beings had this voice, if not all. It’s actually one of the personality traits of the mind. For some of us, it’s more pronounced than the others.
My inner commentator is heavily judgmental and critical of me. The order of action in my life with my inner commentator is as below:
- Action inspired instinctively or naturally (like raising my hand to be picked in the girls soccer team in high school)
- When action was repetitively put into practice, naturally one would make mistakes to eventually learn the art of doing it right. However, each mistake was accompanied by a cynical comment so the inner commentator simply reacted to events that took place. For example, “You tried kicking the ball yesterday and you kinda sucked. Most girls are way better than you. Are you sure you want to do this?”
- Now, the action was inspired as a reaction to my inner commentator, ie. “Fearful of making mistakes and sucking” which only caused more mistakes, leading to more inner commentary on the mistakes.
- Done enough times, Voila! You now have fear of committing mistakes!
You could say that this trait is honed uniquely by the environment YOU & your mind are surrounded by during the earlier phases of life. Where else would it know how to talk, where to talk, which themes it chooses to focus on? It had to have been heavily influenced, like a child, by the forces of the environment, which is mainly our parents, our friends, our teachers, our experiences and generally, the fabric of our society.
I know for myself, I was always scared to make a mistake. My parents didn’t have a very favorable attitude towards mistakes and I don’t blame them, since they themselves would’ve been conditioned by their own childhood. Making mistakes was showing weakness, equivalent of you not being naturally good enough to tackle things. So I internalized this, as a result, my inner commentator was born with a short fuse towards mistakes. This is a case of fear that originated from the conditioning of my inner voice.
In my case, I vividly remember how this process worked on my psyche.
Since I was a kid, I’ve loved public speaking. I would debate endlessly, with no fear of judgement from others, which stemmed from the fact that I didn’t fear judgement from myself. This changed when I grew older, in my 16s/17s and more concerned about people’s perception of me. When I went for a debate at the age of 17, all I remember is my inner commentator going,
“What if you make a mistake? What if you forget your plot? What if you don’t know what to say?”
Guess what……………. That’s exactly what unfolded.
The self fulfilling prophecy of fear.
This event then created a fear that got lodged within me — the fear of making mistakes and making a fool of myself. Every time I had an opportunity to speak up, I went back to this feeling. However, most times, people couldn’t really tell since I still had it together. It was mostly in my head that I felt the same fear as I did when I stood in front of all those people during my debate. Before that incident, my mind and my actions were aligned. After that point, they delineated in a way that my mind was pushing for something and my actions required yet something else.
Then, there’s fear that was birthed from strong emotional events that leave a scar, a scar so pronounced that you’re forced to relive it every time a similar event occurs.
I had the chance to experiment and re-engineer fear in two facets of my life, through which I learned a lot about the workings of fear. One was the fear of claustrophobia in small spaces.
I began to go floating which requires you to lock yourself up in a tank in complete dark. My first session, I remember stepping into the tank and taking a few deep breaths before getting my body ready to float. For a few minutes, the light inside the tank is left on with a voice that guides you to relax until it all shuts off. When the light went off, I panicked, reaching out for the light switch immediately. I forced myself to focus on my breathing, until I relaxed. However, I had my hand on the switch for the entire session. I knew this work was unfinished and that I had to come back. So I kept coming back, once a month for almost 1.5 years. One fine day, I stepped inside the tank, took two deep breaths, and switched off the light myself before it had a chance to automatically turn off. I knew my work was now done. I still go back time & again. The place holds history for me — it’s where I began to unlearn fear.
Similar to this was (slowly becoming was) my fear of water. It came from a solid place of near-death accidents. The brain stores and contextualizes fear-related memories so if a strong emotional event occurs, the brain encodes it as a high-priority memory, making future responses faster and more automatic. No matter how many times I tried to learn to swim, the fear always got the better of me. It never really let me go beyond the feeling of fear itself. I was subconsciously conditioning myself to feel fear every time my body felt the cue of water. I had bookmarked this chapter of my life, until I was ready to open it last year in December. I finally began my swimming lessons. Stepping into the water, it all came back to me, the panic that stems from my long-stored memory of fear. The only way was to recondition it with continued exposure. So I began going to the pool 3x a week. Some days felt like I was not making any progress, since I would come back to the same place, having survived yesterday yet feeling the fear of drowning today. I just knew I had to keep coming back.
Fast forward 3 months, I would say my fear has gone down to 30% from a solid 100% when I began. What worked and continues to work is going back there again and again, until every part of me is convinced that there is NO threat. I would combine it with visualization exercise where I visualize a state of calm while I’m swimming. Also, a mantra as I enter the waters “Water will hold you, if you only learn the ways of the water.” I do feel the tug of rushing the process, the impatience of it all yet I need to gently remind myself that this work needs patience & repetition.
The skills acquired through working on one type of fear are also somewhat transferable to other fears you might tackle — at least that’s what I realized in my two projects I describe above.
The funny thing about fear is that it starts off with good intentions, trying to warn you and urging you to be vigilant but if you let it overstay its welcome, it becomes a part of you until you can no longer distinguish between fear and yourself. It molds into your personality and before you know it, you’re now telling yourself & the world a story of you that goes like,
“I don’t like water.”
“I don’t like trying new things.”
“I don’t like closed spaces.”
“I don’t like to speak in front of people.”
The fear becomes meshed with your identity, the “I” you think is you is simply fear, one of the many primal emotional responses that every human being comes preinstalled with. It’s not you, it’s a part of you, which if left unattended, can do serious damage, worst of all, unconsciously. Without you even knowing it. It begins to run your life and only gets stronger with time.
To prove to yourself that there exists space between YOU and fear, you must face exactly what it is you say you don’t like or fear. You must face it enough times to prove to yourself that you contained the fear all along, and fear doesn’t contain you. Your rational mind doesn’t work here (trust me, I’ve tried). Only repeated action, repeated conditioning to overcome the old conditioning, does. You never know when you will strike treasure, but you will. When you do, you will lie on your back in a lake somewhere, like I did yesterday, and magically float, while asking yourself,
“This is what I feared? Ha!”
And the work goes on….
Some effective methods I found (and continue to practice) for working on fear include:
- Breathing exercises (Inhale, Hold, Exhale, Hold — All 4 seconds) when you feel fear in your body
- Regular meditation
- Regular visualization (which focuses on a CALM state of mind while performing the action you fear)
- Recognizing fear and observing it by simply saying “I am experiencing fear but I am not this fear”
- Repeated exposure to what you fear with reconditioning through mantras/affirmations
“Where your fear is, there is your task” — Carl Jung
