“F” is for *@uck Fear!
by Alfonsina Betancourt
He was mad at something, I don’t even remembered what. But my five-year-old son was having a major tantrum. And by major I mean lots of kicking, hitting and throwing stuff. I was helpless. My usual “let’s-talk-about-our-feelings-approach” was not working. I had seen tantrums before but none like this. It started happening more frequently on the following days. Of course I started reading, researching, trying different methods without significant success. Then one day I was driving back home after an appointment and I had the need to scream. Not to anyone in particular, but to the air, to the world. But I didn’t. I am a relatively put-together woman who meditates regularly and who has an obsession with processing my feelings. I don’t always have my act together, but if there has been a year that has put me to the test it has been the wonderful, unpredictable and always beating-its-previous-record 2020.
Picture credit @dre0316
Lost in my thoughts before the light turned green I realized what was happening to me. I wanted to allow myself to do what my son had been doing for the last few weeks. I wanted to have a major Tantrum, with capital T. I wanted to throw myself on the floor and scream and cry and say I didn’t want to cooperate, that I wanted to be left alone, untouched. I wanted to ask “why” knowing that I did not care about the answers. I just wanted to be heard. I imagined myself doing exactly that. Acting like an out-of-control 5 year-old.
Picture credit @timtrad
The beautiful mirror of my son made me see that the cause of both of our tantrums was the same: we were in FEAR. We were both like two frightened tiger cubs trying to defend ourselves and all we needed was someone to hold us tight and tell us everything was going to be fine.
Me being the adult should have known what to do. Did I? I could see my son been afraid, not understanding what was going on around him, when is he allowed to touch and be near some people but not others, why school looks a little bit different, why his sisters talk about the presidential elections like it is a big deal, why he wants to find a four-leaf clover to wish upon that his Nonna never passes away. From his size, the world seems quite scary! From my shoes, the world has been turned recklessly upside down and I am very disoriented. I am afraid, I admit it, of so many things.
Picture credit @joshboot
Faith, that besides also starting with an “F” has nothing in common with Fear, has always been my safety net and my best antidote against fear itself. When we believe there is something bigger protecting us and working out plans on our behalf, we can let the reins out and accept whatever it comes because even when things look terribly bad, there is a reason for the suffering or the lesson. Did you lose your job? A better one will probably come. A relationship ended? Congratulations on been released from its toxicity. Your car got totaled? Good thing it protected you from leaving an accident unscratched. Thanks to faith we can always find a spin to the most difficult circumstances.
Sometimes, we get hit in so many fronts simultaneously that not even faith can keep us afloat. That is when fear gets fed and grows like a gigantic monster. It does not matter how much we want to focus on the silver lining, there are occasions in which the world (our world at the moment, really) sucks. How do we embrace fear then? How do we see it eye-to-eye without being swallowed by it?
Fear is a primal response and primordial to our survival. Psychologists have defined the acute stress response as the way we act when we are under extreme frightening circumstances. We might feel comfortable with one of them, until we face a different kind of fear and then our chemical reactions surprise us. The way we embrace the FOUR ‘Fs” teach us who we really are and how we can literally survive our biggest challenges.
Picture credit @crazyvan_ita
FIGHT: Have you ever being in a closed room with a cockroach? Yes, disgusting! If it is a flying one, your skin will feel creeped out for hours, maybe years. We take whatever we can, a towel, a shoe and throw it at it because not knowing where that thing is going to hide is unbearable. You don’t suddenly say “it’s OK, I am sure it will not suddenly reappear while I am sleeping.” No, you use every ounce of adrenaline to fight it as if you were Batman because you can’t afford being defeated.
Picture credit @opeleye
2. FLIGHT: You are hiking alone on the woods, enjoying the solitude and nice scent of pine trees when suddenly a black bear appears in front of you. You have nothing to defend yourself against that over 300-pound animal. If it comes at you, you could embrace your Leonardo Di Caprio and fight it with all your might. But you know your chances of succeeding are quite low. So you flight, run with all your strength as if you were Usain Bolt. You are not a coward; you are a sensible human being who knows when the opponent has all the odds in its favor.
Picture credit @joshuaearle
3. FREEZE: When we are faced with a situation that seems familiarly devastating, specially when there is trauma involved, our natural reaction is to freeze on our tracks. Our bodies don’t know how to react, so we get paralyzed. When people are involved in a car crash, it is commonly reported that people block most of the memories from it. They don’t know what happened, how did they get to the ravine, how many turns did they take. Their brains shut down ahead of the trauma to protect themselves from pain. Even when they know they should probably quickly escape a smoking car, their legs can’t move, they have been frozen, not in an Elsa-using-her-icy-power kind of way, but rather I-just-saw-Medusa-and-I-am-not-going-anywhere.”
Picture credit @yp8135
4. FAINT: I only discovered this one recently, and although it was not the first time that it happened to me I never thought of it as a natural reaction to fear. We get bad news: a diagnosis, a loved one passed away, the girl form the soap opera found out her parents were not her “real parents”, the teenage girl found out she was pregnant. It is the movie-like faint when we receive shocking news. It is another way for our brains to protect themselves as if they were saying “this can’t be true so I am going to fall and when I open my eyes, I am going to be like Dorothy and be back in Kansas.” If it has happened to you let me break the news: you are not melodramatic!
“Everything you want is on the other side of fear.”
— Jack Canfield
Unfortunately, we can’t choose any of these reactions on demand. We can rehearse some responses so that hopefully we don’t get eaten by the bear or be inside an exploding vehicle, but I have found the most tired we are, as when we are dealing with chronic stressors where we are constantly hit with bad news (hello 2020!), the less likely we are to fight or flight, and rather go towards freeze or faint.
How is this information relevant when we are going through something that reminds us of hell? When we are dealing with life going upside down and when our fears are legitimate and rational, we are not only the ones that freeze; the world seems to freeze as well. We are in this slow-motion bubble where we know we can’t allow to be paralyzed but we have no strength to move forward either. I am there and tons of meditations and journaling later I have realized that sometimes all we can do is to float and let the river take us. Being fearless does not always implies fighting like courageous soldiers. We need to be compassionate with ourselves when we have been depleted. But on occasions, we can’t literally afford being paralyzed either. It is a matter of survival. We are required to do the things we are afraid to do, even when we fear what would happen; there is no other option. We don’t get rid of fear and then act; we act besides the fear. Sometimes our micro action is just showing up. Sometimes all we can do is having the tantrum while seating on our bathroom floor. Sometimes all we can do is to share our fear with someone who is willing to hear and not judge. Sometimes, braveness looks like showing up when we know there are little chances for us to be untouched by the process. And sometimes, all we can do is to look at the dragon called Fear, knowing that we can be burnt to ashes in a second, and just hope for the best. Take whatever “F” you want. Rewrite the whole dictionary if you need to. Do the bad gestures, say aloud “*@uck Fear”. Hold on to your Faith and trust that even when we don’t know where we are going, we are going somewhere…hopefully to a place without cockroaches or scary bears where we can call victories and get our “Being Brave” batches from the hand of courageous little five-years olds who are trying to figure out why sometimes the world looks a little scarier than usual. They are the ones who deserve we show up to the battle, even when are afraid and crawling, because nothing is scarier than abandoning a fight that hasn’t even started.
Picture credit @beccatapert
To all my FAMILY and FRIENDS, the Fearless, Fantastic, Funny, Faithful, Full-of-love ones who have hold me in the middle of my tantrums and whose hands I want to hold in their own battles. Fear really sucks, but having you makes me embrace the dragons as if I was a true, Fantastic superhero.
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