Often the emotional responses that get ingrained in us aren’t even our own—they’re ones we’ve learned from watching others. So you can ask yourself, “Is this my fear? Or someone else’s?” If the fear really belongs to your mother or father or grandparent or spouse, you don’t have to carry it anymore. Just put it down. Release your hold. Leave it behind.
Then make a list of the fears that remain.
This is how you begin to face your fears, rather than fighting them, or running from them, or medicating them.
I did this fear exercise with my patient Alison, the professional singer. She was struggling in the wake of a divorce, and dealing with some physical ailments—a vocal tremor, back pain—that hindered her ability to perform. Her list of fears included:
Being alone.
Losing my income.
Being poor, possibly homeless.
Being sick and not having anyone there to help me.
Not being accepted by others.
I asked her to go over her list and decide how realistic each fear was. If it was realistic—a valid concern given the facts of her life—she circled it and put an R next to it. If the fear was unrealistic, she crossed it off her list. She discovered that two of her fears weren’t realistic. With income from royalties and retirement savings, she had a safety net. Even if she lost income, which was likely given the tours she’d had to cancel, it wasn’t likely that she’d lose her house and end up on the streets. She crossed off being poor, possibly homeless. She also crossed off not being accepted by others. Events in her life showed a different truth—that she was an admired performer, a cherished friend. More important, she realized that whether or not she was accepted by someone else wasn’t up to her. She was learning to love herself. What others thought about her was up to them.
The three remaining fears got Rs: being alone, losing my income, and being sick and not having anyone there to help me.
I asked her to generate a list of things she could do today on her own behalf to protect herself and build the life she wanted. If she was afraid of being alone and wanted to be in a relationship again, she could sign up on a dating app, spend a day making eye contact with strangers (you never know who you’ll meet!), go to a Codependents Anonymous meeting so she could enter a new relationship in a healthier place than she’d been when she married her ex. To face her fear of being sick with no one to take care of her, she could research resources available should she be in need of care. What home health organizations were in the area? What did they cost? Were they covered by insurance? And so on. It’s not that we make our fears go away. We don’t let them dominate. We invite the other voices in the room to do some talking. And then we do something. We take charge. We ask for help.
Often when we’re stuck it’s not that we don’t know what to do. It’s that we’re afraid we won’t do it well enough. We’re self-critical. We hold high standards. We want others’ approval—most of all, our own—and think we can earn it by being Superman or Superwoman. But if you’re perfectionistic, you’re going to procrastinate, because perfect means never.
Here’s another way to think about it. If you’re perfectionistic, you’re competing with God. And you’re human. You’re going to make mistakes. Don’t try to beat God, because God will always win.
It doesn’t take courage to strive for perfection. It takes courage to be average. To say, “I’m okay with me.” To say, “Good enough is good enough.”
Sometimes our fears are painfully realistic, our resources for meeting them limited.
This was the case for Lauren, the mother of two young children who, in her early forties, was diagnosed with cancer. Her disease was its own prison. Her fears about the future—about dying, about her children growing up without her—became a second set of bars. One day she told me what scared her most of all—that she would die without having really lived. She was trapped in an emotionally and physically abusive marriage. She longed to protect her children and live free from her husband’s control and violence. But it seemed impossible to leave. Cancer had rendered her physically and financially vulnerable, compounding an already dangerous situation. To leave seemed too big a risk.
We explored the fact that there’s a difference between stress and distress. Distress is constant threat and uncertainty, like we had in Auschwitz—when we took a shower, we never knew what was going to come out of the spigot, water or gas. Distress is toxic. It can mean never knowing when a bomb will drop on your house, never knowing where you will sleep each night. Stress, on the other hand, is actually a good thing. It requires us to face a challenge, to find creative solutions, to trust ourselves.
It is so challenging and dangerous to leave the cycle of abuse that most women return multiple times to their abuser before breaking free—if they ever do. It would no doubt be challenging for Lauren, too. She would likely struggle—to feed her children on a limited income, to manage a household and her treatment regimen as a single parent. But she would no longer be living every day under the threat of violence. She would no longer be in distress.
Yet leaving would require her to exchange a known reality for an unknown one. This is usually what stops us from taking risks. We’d rather stick with what we know, painful or untenable as it
