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I want to follow up today on two recent blog topics–one about bullying, the other about fear–by reporting one of the most interesting and useful spiritual journeys I have taken in perhaps the past five years. The very simple exercise that I engaged was, “what happens if I consciously allow myself to feel afraid?”

That exercise arose from the realization that I do not usually allow myself to feel afraid. I have gone through life under the misconception that I’m a very brave, courageous guy, because I almost never feel afraid, and that’s true. I almost never do.

However, the reason I almost never feel afraid is not because there’s no fear there. It’s because I do not allow myself to feel that feeling. It’s there, but like numbing a nerve with an anesthetic, I learned, quite young, to turn off my ability to feel fear, or my awareness of that feeling.

In the course of exploring a practice of mindfulness, I have been looking in the corners for those pieces of myself that have been pushed out of awareness, those pieces that are ready now to come back into full conscious appreciation. Feeling fear was something that was pushed out of consciousness long ago, and not for entirely bad reasons.

First, many American boys of my generation were raised with encouragement not to feel fear. “Be brave” or “big boys don’t cry” were phrases we heard often. Boys were taught that men had the ability to shove fear down inside so that it didn’t show, and if we were really successful at learning to bury it deeply, we didn’t even feel it. So part of why I developed this ability has to do with the way in which I was socialized, and the modeling of the behavior of men around me as I was growing up.

However, this ability to sequester fear, to put a container around the feeling so that I can’t feel it, is not without advantages, and it’s useful under certain circumstances. It seems to be an important part of our evolution. Let me link to a portion of a Wikipedia entry about this:

Although fear is one of the crucial evolutionary mechanisms for individual survival, in certain situations psychologically normal humans can behave without feeling fear, with a total neglect of potentially lethal risk. A classical situation is when a child is attacked by a predatory animal (or an armed human), and a parent starts an all-out fight against the much stronger attacker, totally neglecting his or her personal safety. This mechanism is present among many species, most notably when a mother behaves fearlessly towards much stronger opposition in order to save her offspring. Ethnomusicologist Joseph Jordania uses the term aphobia for the temporary loss of fear, induced by the release of neurochemicals in the brain which leads to a specific altered state of consciousness. Jordania calls this state the battle trance. According to him, aphobia supersedes the individual’s instinctive fear for selfish survival and well-being, when more evolutionarily important subjects than that individual’s own life are in danger. These can be the life of a child, family members, or members of a soldier’s unit. Sometimes saving unknown humans or animals can also trigger the temporary loss of fear. Jordania suggested that battle trance and associated loss of fear and pain (known as analgesia) were designed in the course of evolution by forces of natural selection as a survival mechanism, as individual hominids were too weak to stand against the formidable African ground predators after they descended from the relatively safe trees to the ground. The state of battle trance, which can be induced by rhythmic drumming, singing, dancing, body painting, and the use of certain substances, allowed them to lose their individuality, obtain collective identity, and to fight together as a unit without feeling fear and pain, neglecting their personal safety for the evolutionarily more important reason. 

The pilot who recently landed a plane with two failed engines safely in the Hudson River probably was not overwrought with fear during that event, and it’s is likely that the astronauts working to recover Apollo 13 were able to set aside fear as well. As I said in an earlier blog, the war might have taken a different turn for America had FDR gone on the radio and said, “oh my God, we’re all going to die.” One of the things we rely on in our leaders is the ability to suppress fear in order to take care of those in their care.

The ability to suppress fear doesn’t always have happy outcomes; the terrorists who flew planes into buildings on 9/11 very likely had learned the ability to suppress fear in order to be able to do that. No one can perform complicated mechanical or technical feats if they are quivering uncontrollably and hyperventilating.

What happens afterwards, of course, is another story. The pilot who landed that plane in the Hudson, not surprisingly, retired from flying shortly thereafter. Many successful combat veterans learn to suppress fear but later have serious bouts with PTSD. One of the things I end up engaging when I work with soldiers in Touch Practice is making a place where they can feel afraid and feel safe, which, for some of them, requires a great deal of practice and considerable effort.

Holding down fear is useful in some cases and can have positive benefits, but it can also come with costs, some of them great costs. Suppressing fear, or any emotion, can impact physical health, raising blood pressure, for example, and increasing the risk of stroke or heart attack.

In my own case, I learned that there was a direct correlation between bullying behavior and my unwillingness to feel my own fear. I’ve never been a physical bully, but I am a chief executive of a large company with authority over hundreds of people, so I carry a certain amount of power. I do have the ability to throw my weight around verbally, and when I’m not at my best I can be pushy and bossy. Even I know this is not my very best, so it got my attention, and I turned to investigate.

Without fail, whenever I find myself bossing someone else around or speaking aggressively to them, if I look closely, it’s because I myself am feeling afraid and am somehow refusing to acknowledge or feel that. When I allow myself to feel afraid, I am still able to lead quite effectively, but I am gentler with others. I’m more likely to acknowledge that they feel afraid too. I’m able to lead full-hearted human beings rather than moving cattle heartlessly with a sharp stick.

With fear, as with many other emotions, what we refuse to feel ourselves we tend to project onto or into other people. When we bully people, it’s as though we say, “hell, I am not going to deal with fear; here, YOU deal with it.” Before we know it, we’ve got someone cowering in a corner, carrying and dealing with the feelings that we ourselves decided we weren’t going to have.

It works with attraction; a person who has fears about their own attractiveness becomes hypercritical of others, developing a list of 30 characteristics which potential dates must “pass” like a pre-flight checklist. The person has, in effect, said: “I’m not going to deal with my fear of being unattractive, or having a flaw. I’m going to push that out on you. Here, YOU deal with this.”

Homophobia works the same way. “I’m not going to deal with the fact that I might feel uncomfortable having attraction to men; YOU deal with this, and I’ll be uncomfortable with you instead.” The list of examples is endless.

So, check this out, if you’re curious. Ask yourself, “what happens if I let myself feel afraid, and if I notice when I’m afraid, what I’m afraid of, and allow it to be? What happens if I embrace that?” You don’t have to do a single thing about it. There’s nothing to fix, nothing to change; just notice and allow.

If you’re about to run into a burning building to save someone’s life, then go ahead and suppress fear, if that’s your inclination. If you’ve got to land a plane, also a great idea to put fear off to the side.

But if you’re cultivating an intimate relationship, raising a child, nurturing a marriage, counseling a co-worker, speaking with your boss, working out a conflict with your neighbors, or even doing yoga by yourself, you might want to take a different approach. Try keeping your own fears front and center, make a safe space for them, and just allow them to be along for the ride. They really won’t hurt you, and in fact, they’ll help you get the most accurate picture possible of what needs to happen next.

Have thoughts you’d like to share?

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