FEAR — Use Fear as a Tool in Mental Healing

This past week, I’ve been thinking about the word fear. What is fear? What does fear drive me to do? What kind of reaction is fear? And then the last question I had was: Can fear be trusted?

Personally, I believe that fear is what makes you choose between “fight or flight”. Fear is a feeling and a belief. I do believe everyone has at least one fear in life. It may not look the same in everyone or even before the same thing in everyone. Some fears are more serious than others. Some fears are physical, where others might be verbal, emotional, mental.

For me, fear can feel like a shock wave, stopping me physically. I’ve had fearful moments in my life where I felt my life was in danger in situations beyond my control or at the mercy of someone else’s whims. Fear made my senses sharper and my brain think quicker as adrenaline pumped out escape routes. But I believe that this version of fear is only surface level.

I want to dig deeper into what fear is. Put it under the microscope if you will. Fear can also be a mental block from something either you are not prepared to deal with or can’t even imagine having to learn to cope with. There are many situations I’ve heard about and thought, “I literally don’t know what I would do if that was me in that situation.” Simply because it is the unknown for me because I have the complete opposite happening in my life.

However, what is interesting to me is that at times people would say some version of this to me about what I was going through, after I had confided my thoughts and feelings to them. And I’ve always thought of it as kind of an interesting response to come off as caring or comforting in a situation. Especially when offering emotional or mental comfort. It’s almost like expressing fear in this regard shows how the person listening hasn’t developed a coping mechanism (whether healthy or unhealthy) for that particular reason of fear or can’t understand how you are able to cope with the fear they perceive coming from the situation. It’s almost like they aren’t able to quite meet you on “your level”.

Now I’m not saying this is a bad or a good thing or a useless method of comforting. We all have different experiences and fears; along with differences in how we perceive “threats” to our physical or mental being. Some things like depression for example that are “a regular Tuesday for me” can appear as the most frightening thing for someone else because of the lack of experience they have with depression, or they haven’t found a good way of coping with it yet.

Now let’s switch gears a little bit, what does a fearful reaction look like in terms of mental health? Personally, I think it looks like anything that stops you from facing the mental illness head on, learning as much as you can about it so you can learn how to beat it. My understanding is that fear is not knowing what is going to happen to you or how it is going to change you. It is walking on the edge of the cliff and not knowing which gust of wind is going to push you off.

Now there are some emotions that embody fear I believe, as fear can have many different faces. Such emotions would be denial, unacceptance, anger, confusion, sadness, disengaged, running away, isolation, selfishness, jealously, self-limiting beliefs, doubts, etc. All of these different emotions empower fear itself and drive a person away from being where they want to be, who they want to be, their dreams, goals, etc. They all stand in the way of a person rising above, moving on, and living a happier and fuller life.

It can be difficult to identify fear in your life because it is not always the most obvious thing. To be honest, I just think about what negative emotions or better yet negative reactions I have in order to pinpoint it. Actively looking and learning about my fears has helped me a lot in my mental healing. Honestly fear is a tool as it acts as an indicator of something I don’t understand and having developed a coping mechanism that need to be addressed.

My last question that I asked myself was “Can fear be trusted?” Yes and No. Yes, as in letting me know where I need to work on healing. But more importantly no because if I didn’t practice standing up to my fears, they would betray the true me. The only thing standing in the way of happiness and being my authentic self is the fear I feel. I’m too important to let my life stand in the hands of fear. I must learn to doubt my fear instead of my potential of who I see myself becoming. I must tear down my fear instead of letting fear allow me to tear down myself.

Life is too short to let fear hold the reins.