October 23, 2008

• The Pull Of Fear

  Our fears push and pull us at the same time. We forget that sometimes.
  We think that the things we fear only push us away from them, making us
  avoid them, making us hide from them or do whatever is in our power to
  keep them from coming to pass.  But that isn’t really the entire nature
  of fear. Fear pulls too.

  Sometimes we do things knowing that they will result in the realization
  of our fears. We aren’t necessarily fully cognitive of our decision to
  do these things, and if we are, we don’t realize that it is our fears
  driving us to these actions. But it is the fear. In a sense we are
  challenging the fear. Bating the fear. It’s as if a part of ourselves
  needs to see deep inside the heart of our fear before we can fully
  excise it. The stronger and deeper the fear, the more it pulls us
  toward it.

  Never is this more true than with the classical fears that are
  associated in modern culture with social anxiety. We act in accordance
  with these fears sometimes, running and hiding from them, but other
  times we do the opposite, destructively and recklessly embracing them. 
  We feel both the push and the pull and we are shifted back and forth
  like a rag doll. We keep striving to keep our fears from being realized
  while at the same time acting in a manner that we know is most likely
  to result in that fear coming to pass.

  So one who fears abandonment might purposefully do things to push the
  very people they least want to lose away from them. One who fears
  commitment might make increasingly strong commitments that they may
  well not be able to keep. One who fears failure might explicitly choose
  not to act to achieve things well within their power to achieve,
  purposefully letting themselves fail. One who fears intimacy might
  share intimate details about his or herself, sometimes negative
  details, to those who don’t know them very well. One who fears his or
  her own inadequacy might hesitate to strive or fight for the things he
  or she wants or needs to achieve. And one who fears his or own
  immorality might knowingly choose to be cruel and to hurt others around
  them whom they care about.

  All these things are examples of the pull of fear leading us to act in
  a manner that is counter to ourselves. We bring about the very thing
  that we were terrified might come to pass, the very thing we fear the
  most, through our actions. It’s as if we want it to happen, as if we
  need it to happen.

  Why is this? It seems pretty masochistic when you think about it, but
  we certainly do do this to ourselves, far more often than we would
  like. Why would we want to make choices that are almost assured to lead
  to doing harm to ourselves? It is passing strange, to say the least.

  Perhaps part of us thinks that in order to get past the fear we have to
  face the worst case scenario and see that it wasn’t real or that we
  could get past it and still thrive. To be stronger than the fear. To
  win over the fear. Maybe that is the need that drives us to these acts.
  When stuck within a tyranny of fear, a part of us feels the need to
  rebel, to reclaim our honor, so that we can really be free of it.

  But the fallacy in this kind of reasoning should be clear. If you fear
  abandonment or failure or inadequacy or any other feeling due to
  personal experience with it, when you experience it again, it doesn’t
  hurt less. It hurts more. And certainly the knowledge that you in part
  did it to yourself doesn’t help any. Can you really and truly banish a
  fear that you wanted to bring about in the first place? Worse, the pain
  un-vanquished will just make you fear it all the more.

  Still, perhaps you think that it is possible to suffer the same sorrow
  enough times that it will become impossible for it to hurt you any
  more. You can become used to it. You can become numb to it. Maybe that
  is possible. But the only way I can see that happening is if you give
  up much of your emotional attachment to your experiences. In that case
  wouldn’t you have lost so much of yourself that the ‘cure’ you enacted
  will prove far worse than the disease?

  So if the experience of our deepest fears is just a way in which we
  succumb to the manipulations of those same said fears, what does it
  mean really to ‘face’ our fears? Surely facing our fears is good and
  essential for our future growth. We can’t just let ourselves be pushed
  away from them, for that way lies cowardice. But letting ourselves get
  pulled into them can be just as bad if not worse.

  There is only one other option of course. To stand our ground. We need
  not rush toward our fears or away from them. We can simply face them as
  they come to pass or not and accept them and learn from them. We can
  feel the push of the fear demanding we flee and just say “No. I won’t
  run away.” and stand our ground.  We can suffer that insidious need
  pulling us into our fear so that we may wallow in it and say “No. That
  pain isn’t worth it” and choose instead to stay where we are.

  We just instead make choices based on our reason and our wants and
  our needs and… what? just ignore the fear I guess. Don’t let it pull
  you. Don’t let it push you. Just choose anyway. The fear will come
  anyway. We can’t avoid it, but this way, we can calmly await the fear and when it comes we can accept it and
  just maybe we’ll learn a little bit from it too. Maybe that’s how to face fear.

  • 9:54 am
  • 3 Comments