Get­ting Past Your Fear

This idea is as close to human nature as breath­ing, and some­how as we become adults, we resist it.

When you think about human devel­op­ment, it’s all about learn­ing new things, and for most peo­ple, that equates to some level of fear.

Psy­chol­o­gists phrase it, ‘fear of the unknown.’ We all rec­og­nize the felt-sense of it—heart rac­ing, short­ness of breath, not know­ing whether to run or to stand and fight. And yet, when you think about it, con­fronting the unknown is the nat­ural state of the new­born, and this state con­tin­ues for some years. Because we can­not remem­ber those early days, we also for­get to think about what it must have been like.

Even par­ents for­get to remem­ber what the infant / child is going through. For exam­ple, I’ve seem par­ents get quite indig­nant that their six-month-old won’t stop cry­ing, despite the par­ent hav­ing told the child how dis­pleas­ing and annoy­ing the cry­ing is. It’s as if the par­ent thinks the child should ‘know better.’

The par­ent forgets—the infant knows noth­ing.

What is actu­ally hap­pen­ing here is that the par­ent assumes the infant is sim­ply a lit­tle adult. Because they can’t remem­ber their own con­fu­sion at this young age, they have no frame of ref­er­ence for know­ing noth­ing. The par­ent assumes the child is just being stub­born or evil, when in truth the child is clueless.

Hav­ing stated that, I want to look at the sit­u­a­tion as I imag­ine it looks from a child’s per­spec­tive. So, for exam­ple, the first time a par­ent yells at a child, gets all red-faced, or even gives off a con­trolled ‘angry’ vibe, the child is observ­ing this totally new thing. The child has no con­cept of anger, no con­cept of who the per­son is (other than ‘that which is an exten­sion of me that meets my needs’—see last arti­cle.) All the child knows is that the ‘parent-object’ has shifted, and the energy of the trans­ac­tion ‘feels’ yucky.

Now, by some fluke, the child might stop doing what­ever set the par­ent off, and the parent’s energy shifts. A mem­ory is set, but it is incom­plete. It goes, “Red face, I feel yucky, so I stop cry­ing, no red face, I feel bet­ter.” What is miss­ing here is any under­stand­ing, on the part of the child, of the mean­ing of the parent’s anger.

This is the case for every­thing the child learns. Each action is a new one. With depth per­cep­tion comes crawl­ing and a fear of falling. With stand­ing comes a first sense of bal­ance. You might even see this expe­ri­ence if you hap­pen to be with a child who stands for the first time, wob­bling, but standing—the look is fear com­bined with wide-eyed-wonder.

So, we could say that every sin­gle thing you do had a cre­ation point at some prior time. But here is the kicker. Ini­tial learn­ings had no antecedent. In other words, there was no expe­ri­ence before the first one. So, try­ing to roll over for the first time does not have some­thing before it.

As soon as the child starts rock­ing side to side, a mem­ory (bod­ily) is cre­ated. It is only when the child rolls over that the rock­ing is con­nected to the rolling over. Then, the child knows what to do.

How we func­tion in the world is a series of learned behav­iours, and we get much of it by age 6. This is also the age when many of us begin to have mem­o­ries that linger. (Most of us have few, if any mem­o­ries before age 6 or so. What we do have are mem­o­ries of sto­ries peo­ple told us of those yearly years.)

Some­thing else trig­gers around that time—our abil­ity to imag­ine out­comes. Indeed, par­ents begin to push this idea around this age. Prior to that, kids just don’t ‘get’ that action ‘a’ led to result ‘b.’

The infant mind does not have enough data to inter­po­late out­comes.

And then, they do.

This becomes a double-edged sword, and in a sense causes the child to slow down the absorp­tion of clean data. Social pres­sure to behave in trib­ally accept­able ways begins to be more aggres­sively asserted.

My nephew has a 4-year-old. At the least Thanks­giv­ing Din­ner, mom and dad filled the kid’s plate. The kid wanted some­thing from every bowl. Turnip was last. My nephew said, “I’ll give you some, but you don’t like turnip, and you won’t eat it.” ‘Coin­ci­den­tally,’ my nephew does not eat turnip.

Thus, a seed was planted. Now, maybe the kid never had eaten turnip before. But she was just given a tribal rule, which is even more pow­er­ful than the taste of turnip. That com­ment was com­pletely unnec­es­sary, and actu­ally harm­ful, as the kid ignored the turnip on her plate.

Here comes my point! This sort of life-conditioning is com­mon. By the time most peo­ple get to adult­hood, it is dif­fi­cult for them to try stuff. Every expe­ri­ence pro­posed is vet­ted through years-old tribal fil­ters.

You hear these con­di­tion­ings in the absolutes spo­ken. I could never… Women always… chil­dren should be… I’m a (Chris­t­ian, Mus­lim, Jew, Bud­dhist) and we never…

Clients come to learn com­mu­ni­ca­tion. They learn how, and refuse to actu­ally do it with their part­ner. I ask why. “She’s not coop­er­at­ing.” “I know he’ll do it for a month, and then stop.” The resis­tance to doing is two-fold.

First, it is about the fear of try­ing the new thing. Sec­ond, it is the fear of failing.

Yet, if either of those two fears had been in place for us at age one, we would never have learned to walk. Or talk. Or relate.

You might say that who we are is lim­ited by what we refuse to con­sider and do. We are no larger or greater than our fears.

If I think, “She will reject me / leave me…” I will fear risk­ing get­ting to know the per­son and see­ing what hap­pens. If I think, “If I do that, bad things will hap­pen…” I will never know that expe­ri­ence. (Imag­ine if Edi­son had thought that about pass­ing elec­tric­ity through tung­sten, some­thing never done before…)

At the end of my life, I will be noth­ing more than what I did. It will not mat­ter an iota what I thought, wished for, longed for, resisted, or did not try.
I am only what I enact.

I urge my clients to exper­i­ment with every­thing life has to offer. Once you have tried a thing, you can choose, from expe­ri­ence, not to repeat it, or to do it dif­fer­ently, or to incor­po­rate this thing into your self-definition.

Liv­ing life from fear-based lim­i­ta­tion is fool­ish. The world needs fear­less self-explorers, who, in real­ity, are not fear­less, but rather fear-facers. If you think an act will be uncom­fort­able, do it any­way. If some­thing needs say­ing or doing, say or do it. If you want to explore new ter­ri­tory, buy a map, and get going.

Because liv­ing a tiny, shel­tered, care­ful life, in the end,
is a use­less and unprof­itable way to be.