Adults often tell me, “I don’t have any fears.” I think, “really?!” Much of what is going on today both politically and personally is rooted in fear. In this blog, I’m going to talk in depth about fear and encourage you to think about and respond to fear.
Expressing fear (or vulnerability) requires trusting that a person will respond with care, understanding and support rather than triggering deeper threats through invalidation, punishment or control. When our fears cannot safely emerge in our relationship, it can negatively impact our sense of well-being and intimacy in several profound ways:
– Repression/suppression of fear breeds disconnection. This erodes the secure base that relationships aim to provide.
– Without opportunities to soothe each other’s worries, relationships remain shallow rather than deeply empowering us to bravely engage our challenges together.
– Over time, harboring fears alone takes an emotional toll, increasing daily stresses that relationships are meant to help alleviate. Unmet needs strain bonds further.
As a seasoned therapist, I have observed clients that will not or cannot see how fear and unmet needs strain their relational bonds.
Let me explain:
I often tell my clients that the purpose of relationships is to fulfill core human needs for safety, trust, belonging and esteem, needs that cultivate well-being. Repressing genuine needs can buffer the intensity of these hidden needs, making them virtually impossible to address directly.
Over time, unacknowledged longings, needs, desires, and wishes can fester inwardly and leak out subtly through increased restlessness, irritability, discontent or detachment instead of open communication and discussion.
When authentic aspects of one’s experience go undisclosed due to fear of vulnerability (expressing one’s needs), a disconnect can gradually emerge. Similarly, repressed needs also pose covert threats. What I mean by this is that repressed needs operate as invisible burdens that we unconsciously carry. Without resolution, unmet needs fester underneath the surface, subtly poisoning relationships and intimacy.
Repressed needs also pose coverts threats such as resentment and damage trust through problematic behaviors that we don’t associate with the real underlying issues. Repressed needs create distance because we experience daily life, but fail to genuinely know and support each other’s authentic self and basic human requirements for safety and belonging, etc. Hence, denying the very existence of our own needs deprives our bonds of fuel for closeness, quality, character and growth.
Fear prevents us from identifying and expressing our expressing our core needs.
How?
– Fear of vulnerability/rejection can lead us to bury our needs deep within ourselves rather than risk the potential discomfort of sharing them.
– Fear of conflict may motivate us to pretend all is well aka “I’m good (think: fake positivity),” rather than address issues and requests for our needs to be acknowledged/prioritized.
– Fear of loss/abandonment could stem from early experiences, making us too afraid to express needs clearly and enlist help meeting them.
– Fear of judgment may inhibit us from introspectively exploring our own needs, motivations and limitations for clarity to communicate authentically.
– Fear of being a “burden” may stop us from advocating respectfully for even basic needs, compromising our well-being and bond’s health over time.
– Fear of retribution/punishment unconsciously silences us from addressing needs directly if prior attempts led to invalidation, control or relationship harm.
– Fear of change prevents examining relationship dynamics or advocating for evolution that could better support individual and mutual growth.
I’ll be honest, for many years I’ve had an intimate relationship with fear. Fear was my most trusted guide-it drove my actions. As a budding professional, I used fear as one of my primary sources of fuel. I also used fear of failure to dig deeper and embrace the pain cave of ambition and drive.
Here’s the thing though, fear isn’t intoxicating like love, or adventurous like curiosity, or even grounded like intuition.
Fear is bold, it’s intrusive, and it disrupts. So disruptive is this feeling that we are often “taught” or modeled or imprinted that we must numb it, suppress it, repress it, deny it, or avoid it. At all costs, we silence that feeling of fear.
So let’s define fear.
**Fear is a feeling. Nothing more. Nothing less.
It’s a state of awareness that alerts our brain and body to danger. From a neurological perspective, it is thought to originate in the Amygdala and cascading networks of other neurological centers. The feeling of fear communicates with our body (heart pounding, butterflies in stomach, pupils dilating, rapid speech or inability to speak) and our thoughts or cognition (holy shit, it’s dangerous, etc.).
In the years in which I was in the vice grip of silencing my fear(s) I achieved a lot of really great “things”- college, masters, doctorate degrees and –a recognized profession.
But just because something is successful doesn’t mean it’s healthy. Achievement and success don’t insulate us from fear. Eventually it leads to burnout or breakdown (think emotional exhaustion).
I believe fear gets a bad rap these days, with all this movement towards (forced) positivity and gratitude. Fear is often discussed as something we need to overcome, silence, medicate, manage, or ignore. In my office, I see it all day long. It’s easy to cast fear out, use avoidance, or other defense mechanisms that keep us distant from its intensity—booze, sex, drugs, denial, masochism, suppression, repression, and on and on. We know the overt and obvious ways that fear operates, such as phobias, panic attacks, etc.
You see, fear is a master of disguise. It cloaks itself in other more seductive costumes, like bravery, perfectionism, arrogance, anger, people pleasing, FOMO, and adrenaline addiction (to name only a few).
When I traced my fears back to their origin, for me, there was often the fear of not being “perfect,” “fear of not being enough” or the BIG ONE, “fear of abandonment.” Oh fuck, that fear of abandonment had me running toward and running away from situations that were not healthy for me.
I was trapped.
It wasn’t until my early thirties that I began to unpack this contract I had with fear, perfectionism, and bravery.
Let me unpack this in a concrete way.
Because I was someone who learned how to move towards my fears, thus why I didn’t develop a phobic personality style, I was considered, and I suppose at some level I am—brave. Fear is a pre-requisite for bravery.
It isn’t brave unless you feel afraid, right? To continue reading click here
