Week Ninety-Nine: Exploring Your Relationship with Fear

As the country moves through various stages of terrorist alert status, we all meet our fears in one way or another. There may be times you feel helpless or times you feel angry. There may be times you want to fight, and there may be times you want to hide under the covers and never come out, or to flee and find some place where you can feel safe. Without question, these are times in which we are confronted with our relationship to fear again and again, and it helps to discover new skills for dealing with our feelings and responses.
Recently, in an article by a therapist named Miriam Greenspan, presented in the Psychotherapy Networker magazine, I discovered some useful ideas about how to deal with fear in constructive ways. Ms. Greenspan offers five questions she uses with clients to help them deal with their fears. Drawing from her article, here are some questions you can ask yourself.

The first is, “What do I fear most?” The reason to ask this question is to help you focus on the most fundamental thing that gets activated for you with all the news reports about potential terrorist attacks. Writing about it in your journal might help you put words to how you feel. Sometimes, when we are able to see our feelings in writing, we understand them more clearly.

The second question you can ask yourself is, “What if anything, helps me feel less afraid?” This question can help you identify activities and skills that have helped you cope with fears in the past. For example, you might talk with a friend on the phone, go to a movie, meditate, read an inspiring book, listen to calming or beautiful music. It’s useful to create a laundry list of your coping skills so that you can bring them to mind if you’re having a particularly fear-filled day.

The third question is two-fold, and quite interesting. “What is my fear asking of me right now?” and “What does my fear have to teach me?” By paying attention to your fear, you allow it to move through, rather than becoming stuck as it does whenever you clench down around it (which is what most of us do instinctively). In the paradoxical way I’ve written about before, softening into what you’re feeling, allowing it to come fully into awareness, actually loosens it up and lets it move into and then through awareness. By listening to your fear, you offer yourself an opportunity to discover solutions, activities, and skills that can help you cope more effectively. For many of us, one of the answers to this third question is that we are learning to constantly come back into the present moment. Our fear reminds us that, in this exact moment, right here and right now, we are okay, and that’s where we need to focus. Allow yourself to discover what your fear has to teach you.

The fourth question from Ms. Greenspan’s article asks, “Do I have a spiritual practice or tradition that helps me?” This question orients you to that “something” that is bigger than you are, to your connection to meaning and to a larger context. As you explore this question, you might rediscover religious practices or spiritual resources you had forgotten that would be useful to bring to the foreground of your experience during times of fear. It’s been my experience that having an alive and active spiritual life during times of ease and calm makes this resource more immediately available when fear or difficulty arise.

The fifth question asks, “Can I imagine living more calmly with my fear?” This question actually includes the answers to all of the above, bringing to your relationship to fear whatever skills you have developed along the way. The most important part of dealing with fear – as is true when dealing with any challenging or painful experience – is to make room for it to be what it is, to allow it to arise and move through your experience and awareness without struggle. Being able to soften into our pain and fear is a powerful skill that can make even the most arduous experience more tolerable.

And so, as you work with this week’s experiment, allow yourself to explore your relationship with fear with open curiosity, and with a willingness to learn more about the fear that moves through you. By learning more about it, there will be less need to fend it off, as you will discover that it arises, moves through, and moves on in the same way all awareness does. By practicing coming into the present moment and making room for your fear to teach you, you offer yourself a powerful skill for living in these times.

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