Anatomy of Fear

Fear ------Trust

Protect ------Venture

When we experience fear in a healthy way, we are able to take our selves and our bodies to someone. There is a receptiveness to our fear, both from from another and then from ourselves - and not simply a resistance or reaction to the fear.

We are able to work with our fears, we are willing and able to take in a supportive other. We can hold onto them with our eyes, our hands, our arms. We experience the other as being there with us in our fear. As we take hold of the support, we can let go of the holding of fear.

With a healthy sense of fear, there is a feeling that there is something I cannot do by myself, but there is someone there to do it for me, or with me.

Fear is often the hardest emotion to access in one’s personal process.

Fear is often the hardest emotion to tolerate in one’s body.

When we become afraid…

there is poor contact with the environment; no experience of the other being there for the self.

we perceive the environment as actively hostile or collapsing.

our body loses it’s capacity to respond, to act, to move. All the energy of the defense system goes into ‘protect’ mode, and goes into ‘holding together’ the body, which becomes a frozen-ness.

When holding the self together doesn’t work, one leaves the body via dissociation.

When fear is the central issue in one’s personal work, there is the chronically

repetitive experience that the other does not notice that I am in trouble, that I am in terror.

When we repeatedly experience that the other doesn’t notice us in our fear, all of our energy goes in to holding ourselves together, and we lose our capacity to rely on the other.

“Coming Towards vs. Coming At”

The process work is to gradually experience the environment as responsive, competent, reliable, active and alive!

When working with fear, there has to be a change in the environment, as well as the internal structure of the client.

Fear surfaces at the edge of any developmental transition, as the new experience or the new environment is always not yet known.

It evokes the experience of disorganization, and unfamiliarity, which must be tolerated, and lingered with, in order to have re-organization take place.

Our deepest or best-known fear arrives at the threshold of new consciousness or experience.

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Crucial elements for a successful “developmental transition”:

Time and patience – ideally, taking as much as is needed.
Having the familiar ground still be there, while one moves towards the unfamiliar.
Taking time to rest, allowing for the ‘plateau’, for integration of what is now known, or new, that wasn’t before.
Ask for guidance and support from others, to create a “we-ness”.
Permission to make mistakes – talk about the inevitability of them.
Having someone available who affirms, appreciates, enjoys witnessing one’s growing sense of mastery.

Fear defenses in our culture are the most “ego-dystonic”, and thus the most rejected – fragmentation just looks ‘weird’ – dissociative, crazy, psychotic, etc. – we place perjurative ‘insanity’ labels on what we don’t readily understand. (Severe schizoid defenses.)

We also need permission to hold on to the familiarity of our defenses while we are working on something new! We can let them go gradually, a little bit at a time.

We need to appreciate and understand the depth and pervasiveness of someone’s defensive fear, and then embrace them with it. For example, the strong schizoid defense can look like they don’t really care; they can get perceived as anti-social. We must see their terror and their paralysis. They truly don’t know how to interact, so they need encouraged and coached.

Working through the recognition of life-threatening fear:

To know and feel that I am scared to death (self acknowledgement)
To have the other know that I am scared! (acknowledgement by the other)
To be able to feel the feeling of fear as tolerable!
To cultivate a willingness to revisit this feeling with do-able

repetitions.

The key element is for the one who is frightened to experience the environment as acting with them, not just for them.

We may need to act on behalf of our client at first, but only until they can act on behalf of themselves; otherwise, we are caretaking them to manage our own fears.