Fear Is a Liar

Let me tell you what fear does. It sits in the back of your mind and it whispers. It doesn't scream. Screaming would be too obvious, and you would know to fight back. Fear whispers. It sounds reasonable. It sounds like logic. It sounds like caution and self-preservation and common sense.

It says: You can't handle this. You're not strong enough. If you try, you'll fail. If you fail, everyone will see. Stay where you are. It's safer here.

Because it sounds so reasonable, you listen. You stay on the couch. You don't make the call. You don't leave the relationship, the job, the habit. You don't reach out for help because fear says: what if they judge you? What if they can't help? What if it gets worse?

Here is the truth that fear doesn't want you to know: you've already survived everything fear said would destroy you.

Every single thing fear told you would be the end - the diagnosis, the divorce, the loss, the failure, the rejection, the bottom - you're on the other side of it. You're reading these words right now. That means fear was wrong. Again.

I spent years being controlled by fear. Fear of being seen. Fear of being abandoned. Fear of being sober, because being sober meant feeling, and feeling meant facing everything I had been running from since I was a child. Fear ran my life so efficiently that I thought it was me. I thought the anxiety, the panic, the constant bracing for the next catastrophe was just how life worked.

It isn't. That's fear working. Fear is a liar.

What I've learned, and what I teach every person who sits across from me, is that fear is a root thought. It isn't who you are. It isn't permanent. It isn't truth. It is a pattern that took hold in you, often very early, and it has been running the show ever since. Patterns can be understood. What's understood can be transformed.

Transforming fear doesn't mean you never feel afraid again. That would be foolish. Fear has survival purposes. It means you learn to recognize when fear is protecting you and when it's controlling you. It means you develop the ability to hear the whisper and say: I hear you, but I'm moving forward anyway.

That isn't recklessness. That's courage. Courage isn't the absence of fear. Courage is taking the next step with fear still talking. You have more courage in you than fear wants you to believe. You always have.