When I was a small child, I used to be really scared of the dark.
I wasn’t scared of the darkness itself. I was scared of my inability to perceive the danger that could be lurking in it.
I don’t know when you personally stopped being afraid of the dark, but it took me longer than most kids. And I still experience darkness with a bit of unease from time to time. When I’m feeling good, darkness is fun. There’s a little thrill involved. I don’t know what experience I’m going to find in the cave, the woods, or the attic, and the novelty is exciting.
When I lack confidence in my capacity to handle the unknowns I might discover, the dark becomes disinteresting. I’m not scared. It’s just stupid to go in there. Or it's boring. Why would I explore without my sense of sight, or when I could accidentally hurt myself?
That right there, though? Disinterest? That’s fear in disguise. Rationalization of maintaining my ignorance is one of the faces that fear can wear.
I’m not shaming any version of myself for fear. Quite the opposite. I’m celebrating my capacity to recognize fear in so many forms now.
Adult fear does not always cause us to cower somewhere safe in a way that we recognize. The complex socialization we experience into adulthood makes fear an undesirable experience. If we don’t practice the discipline that makes fear, curiosity, then courage a part of the internal sequence that might lead to discovery, we can find ourselves “bored” and “disinterested,” as well as a host of other things as a defense mechanism. Socially, there’s no real shame in being bored, but there is shame in being fearful-... like a child. Ironically, the virtue of courage requires that we overcome fear. Courage is how we grow, and it gives us agency.
That’s the thing about fear. It forces an evaluation of our agency. Adult fears that typically get consciously addressed are the kind that we can come to blows with. However, choosing conflict is not synonymous with choosing courage. We can confront our spouse about how “shitty” their behavior is, instead of admitting that their attractiveness makes us feel insecure. The very magnetism that might’ve drawn us to them is now a problem. If, instead of confronting our fear of their irresistible charm and our inability to control who's drawn to them or their faithfulness, we resort to shaming them for others' reactions to their presence, we've allowed our fear to dictate our actions.
Shame is important here because shame and guilt are tools that people employ to impact the behavior of the people we engage with. The shame, guilt, pride circuitry of our brain is heavily involved in social correction. We shame children for their fear. We shame girls when their emotions are inconvenient, and we shame boys for their vulnerability. This conditioning teaches us, but men almost as an imperative, to replace vulnerable emotions with aggressive ones or submissive ones, because fighting is a field of agency. Control things with the threat of violence. Submit or risk getting your ass beaten. This conditioning teaches us, but women almost as an imperative, to hide inconvenient emotions until we can express them honestly, and to, in the meantime, appease others whose opinions hold consequences. Hold your tongue. Be passive-aggressive and wily, or be punished for your arrogance. Be so polite no one can blame you for their violence if you survive the assault. If you’re going to be a victim, do your best to be blameless because they will try to blame you. But, remember, no matter how seductive a premise, you can’t out-careful danger.
There are many ways fear can create patterns of limiting thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors that we may not even be able to consciously process until someone or something forces them into our awareness.
Pride in our ignorance? Fear. If you don’t know, you don’t know; it’s not your fault, right? We don’t have to face the dangers of failing to grow and change if we never learn that we are the problem or that there is a solution. Even exceptionally bright people fall prey to this. Maybe we were gifted as children and fear failure. If we stay ignorant about best practice, we don’t have to learn or commit to working hard until we succeed. If we deny that something we don’t comprehend could be valid, then we have nothing to learn and can keep demanding people trust our authority in the field in which we are confident.
Disinterest or dismissal? Fear. Boredom is a great subconscious disguise for fear. You don’t have to do the hard work of learning to manage your finances if you just get comfortable with victimhood and fiscal anxiety. Do you fantasize about someone skilled or savvy saving you from your money woes? Are you literally waiting for your hero to come save you? If your initial fear is transformed into a defeatist attitude so quickly you don’t realize you’re afraid, you can even pretend your uninformed pessimism is actually realism.
Envy? When you don’t take responsibility for what you can control and end up bitter about the success of others, your complaints, criticisms, and dismissals can all represent fear. Feigning disinterest when you’re actually envious? Now you’re three layers deep, baby.
That’s a fear of fear.
Anger at people suggesting you’re afraid? Aggression is masking fear of fear.
What if I try to sit with my feelings and I don’t feel afraid or I don’t know what fear feels like?
Check it out, Batman...
Excessive caution or over-planning? Also fear. If you won’t take the action you need to take unless you have everything planned with contingencies? That’s fear. Extra points if you’re procrastinating by planning, hoping that the solution arises so that you don’t have to take action.
Stopped propositioning your partner for sex or starting the conversations that need to be had? “What if I misspeak and instead of getting my needs met I’m made into a monster?” You’re anxious about the consequences. You can’t act. You’ve canceled yourself in your mind before you’ve even begun. And now we’ve stepped into codependency. “If they might be inconvenienced, then my needs don’t matter.”
Resisting authentic expression for fear of consequences is not just fear, but likely complex trauma from past rejections.
Check yourself. If your strategies are anxiety management strategies because anxiety is fear out of step with the presence of danger, then you already know you’re afraid, even if you’re not thinking of it that way. You’re braced for the inevitable, whether or not it actually comes.
There is nothing wrong with being afraid. It’s natural. There is nothing wrong with acting out of fear. That instinct is meant to keep you alive and to help you survive. When you’re fighting your loved ones and running from important conversations when you chose each other to connect and collaborate to build something beautiful, something is wrong. When safety first goes too far and all you can think about is how to survive when you have the space to live and thrive, then you’re robbing yourself of the life that mechanism is meant to protect.
And that’s the real shame.
That and the fact that it’s slowly killing you, but toxic stress and anxiety disorders are getting handled some other time.
Thanks for making it this far. I hope this helped you. If you think it could help you start a conversation, feel free to slyly send it to someone, pretending you didn’t read this part. But in all seriousness, the best things you can do to help me if this helped you are share this with someone you think it could help and leave a comment letting me know how it affected you if it did.
