Dealing with Our Own Difficult Emotions

The end of June wrapped Annapolis with a blanket of deep sadness as we could feel so close to us, what the seed of hatred, resentment and violence could be capable of. This was right in our neighborhood. It happened to people whose names were familiar to the Capital Gazette readers. We feel deep compassion for them and their families, and even for the perpetrator who is obviously seriously sick to commit such a horrendous act. An act that reminds us of the uncertainty and the fragility of life.

Many of us are wondering what we can do to bring peace and harmony into our world. It is helpful to become aware of the fact that the forces behind good and bad lie within our own minds, so if we want to understand what is happening in the world today, we need to understand what is happening with ourselves first.

Clearly, during and after the Capital Gazette incident, we experienced a myriad of emotions, the most outstanding of which was fear. However, fear is not our enemy. Fear is our nature’s protector. It alerts us of a threat and pushes us away from it. It is our survival mechanism which engages unconscious physiological reactions to keep ourselves safe. So, the question is, how do we typically react when we are triggered, and how can we shift from the automatic fight, flight and freeze response to a more conscious state of “attend and befriend” which can bring emotional balance and alleviate our suffering.

What’s the Core Emotion?

 When we face challenges in life, our suffering expresses itself as depression, anxiety, shame, stress, obsessive thinking, worry, or we might resort to an addictive behavior. Lying beneath every one of those feelings and behaviors, we will find fear. Fear is the core emotion.  However, when fear is raw and strong, it is so unpleasant that it becomes a shadow; in other words, we push it away, we hide it or ignore it and we are not totally aware of it.

Under the influence of fear, our thinking mind goes override. It is very easy to cling to our most catastrophic thoughts, and as we do, our thoughts start taking momentum, until we might become overwhelmed by speculations that may never, ever happen. While those thoughts may never become a reality, our emotional life colors the way we perceive life. It is helpful to remember that our daily reality is in fact a reflection of our inner state.

There are times when we really feel the intensity of fear, that is when we experience anxiety. At other times fear is like a “background hum,” like Pema Chodron says, constantly with us, and it manifests itself as edginess, restlessness, uneasiness, agitation and worry. Unless we recognize, accept the feeling and befriend that background distress of fear, we will never contact the wholeness of who we are.

Under the influence of fear, our thinking mind goes override. It is very easy to attach to our most catastrophic thoughts, and as we do, our thoughts start taking momentum, until we might become overwhelmed by speculations that may never, ever happen. While those thoughts may never become a reality, our emotional life colors the way we perceive life. It is helpful to remember that our daily reality is actually a reflection of our inner state.

What is Fear?

Fear is how we experience biologically and emotionally the anticipation of loss. The loss of our safety in any area of our lives. It could be our perception of physical danger, the loss of someone we love, the loss of love and affection, the loss of our reputation, financial loss…., and ultimately our mortality. Fear consumes us, we get caught in reactivity, in judgments of others and ourselves, and we tend to resort to survival mechanism against a possible threat. Maybe our biggest loss in the presence of fear is the loss of the life that is right here and now.

Nowadays, however, most of our fears are not only associated with physical survival, but around the emotions we experience in a social context.  It is about the stories we tell ourselves regarding whether we will measure up, whether we will be accepted or rejected, whether we will fit in, whether we are good enough. These feelings get exacerbated if we were raised in a family where we experienced physical or emotional abuse, or any type of humiliation or neglect. In such cases we might be inclined to think There is something intrinsically wrong with me, and there is nothing I can do about it, which intensifies the persistent background of fear.

How do we react in the face of fear? There are three unconscious strategies: Fight, Flight or Freeze.

Fight:

1. When we are afraid we might tend to become defensive and aggressive. We may demonize the other, we can create divisiveness and conflict, and become self-righteous which could eventually lead to violence.
2. We may also resort to “attacking” ourselves: we may blame and judge ourselves using that strategy as a motivator. However, the brain takes that self-attack as an outside threat and our body releases stress hormones, which intensify our anxiety.

 Flight: One of the ways we escape the fear is by avoiding it. There are 2 different ways of avoiding the raw emotions of contacting our fear.

1. We ignore it or deny it. We make light of it. We simply find a way not to deal with it.
2. We distract ourselves with activities. It is the eternal I’m so busy William James, the father of American Psychology, describes Life as a ceaseless frenzy in which we are always thinking we should be doing something else. Under our constant business there is an undercurrent of fear, and not doing can become unbearable so distracting ourselves from facing our fears becomes our addiction. We might also soothe ourselves with other seemingly innocuous activities like going to social media, watching T.V. or judging others. We also self-soothe with substances like food, marihuana, alcohol, some substance that takes us away from the immediate intensity of our experience.

Another involuntary reaction to fear is Freeze

Sometimes we get paralyzed with fear. When you feel overpowered, overwhelmed or trapped, there is no option to either flee or fight. In those cases, freezing is the only option, and it is not a conscious decision. Our primitive brain takes over and immobilizes us. In many cases, freezing may also protect us from psychological harm by shutting down the attentional centers in our brain. In the case of rape or assault, for example, by passing out you won’t consciously process the whole incident, and there may not be conscious memory of it.

Fear activates the sympathetic nervous system (SNS), the branch of the central nervous system that prepares us for action.  As we attach to fearful thoughts, the SNS initiates a cascade of stress hormones that keeps us stuck into a fight and flight reaction.  At that point, we lose our ability to access our wisdom, our ability to be flexible, open and receptive. We become small, disconnected, rigid and we tend to distance ourselves from others. This process brings a lot of suffering into our lives. When there is fear, there is a contraction, a tension in our bodies that takes us away from the present moment. Eckhart Tolle in his A New Earth calls it the Fear Body, which includes our physical and emotional body. From our Fear Body, the world becomes smaller in our eyes. By bringing awareness to our Fear Body, we will be able to gradually face our fear, and befriend it.

How Can we Decondition our Reactivity, and Find Freedom and Connection?

1. Pause

 In order to decondition our reactivity, we need a tool to calm down the SNS. So the first step is to pause and notice your breath. Slow down and deepen your breath. Noticing your breathing changes your biochemistry and calms down your SNS. There is a quote attributed to Viktor Frankl that says Between the stimulus and the response, there is a pause, and in that pause, lies your power and your freedom. The freedom to focus, find your wisdom and stop your reactivity. Now you have more options. You can begin to notice where in your body you are experiencing your intense emotion, and by bringing awareness to your body, to your feet on the floor, you begin to ground yourself. In that way you do not get stuck in your fear. You allow your fear to move on.

2. Bring Awareness to your Thinking

Most of the unpleasant emotions we experience in life are driven by the thoughts we entertain. By raising mindful awareness to the thought patterns that lead you to sorrow, distress, anguish and suffering, you can bring more clarity to your experience.  Mindful awareness will actually guide you to realize when you are hooked, and to choose habits of mind that will lead to self-compassion, compassion for others, wisdom and ultimately to peace. Mindful awareness can be practiced by everybody, regardless of their religion, culture, or ethnicity. Everything starts with becoming the witness of your thoughts.

3. Attend and Befriend

A. To attend is to notice your breathing and to contact what is right here in the body. The idea is to lean into the physical sensation, even the unpleasant fear sensation of the body, which is exactly the opposite of our conditioning, and instead of avoiding it, we are learning to stay with it. It is to look right at your fear. This takes courage because instinctively, all we will want to do is to get away from that unpleasant sensation, but as we stay with the discomfort, it will eventually dissolve. In the meantime, this process is changing the architecture of our brains to become more resilient and know that the more we stay with the fear, the faster it starts to soften.

This practice is not recommended to people who have experienced trauma, unless they do it with the assistance of a therapist.

It is also helpful to start naming the sensations you are feeling in your body: tension, heat, pounding, beating hard, squeezing, cold. Also notice when your mind has drifted into fearful thoughts, and come back to your body. As soon as you start reconnecting with your fear, your mind will start generating more scaring thoughts. It takes awareness to recognize your fearful thoughts. Tell yourself I do not have to believe these thoughts and go back to your breathing.

B. To befriend your fear is to meet your feeling with kindness. Accepting the fear will open up space for you. Many times, just by accepting our fear, there is a shift towards a more peaceful emotion. Often the fear just wants us to accept that it is there. That is precisely what befriending your fear is.  It is to give space and acceptance to what you are feeling. It is a very powerful practice.

In social situations, acknowledging the fear to ourselves and in even labeling it in the presence of others, will completely dissipate it. Naming it becomes less personal. When the fear is not acknowledged it creates a separation and robs us of our spontaneity and our aliveness.

When we face our fears, we discover that fear does not define who we are, That we are so much larger than fear. We all experience fear. That is why it is so crucial to be there for each other. Did you know a 20-second hug helps your system release oxytocin? A tender look, a soft tone of voice, a loving expression, and caring listening has the power to calm down our SNS.

4. Resource

In order to transform fear, we need to call on something more powerful than ourselves. We call on a Resource, somebody who we sense loves us unconditionally. It could be a family member, a friend we feel very safe with, a deity, a teacher or mentor, even a pet or a tree you feel close to, or the Universe. At the moment we are contacting our fear, we feel held by the unconditional love of this being, just keeping us company, holding us with love and understanding in warmth and safety. In their company, you will feel the strength and confidence to look at fear in the face and listen to its message.

We tend to move through our day in a busy state, unaware of the beauty and the mystery of everyday life. We are caught up in reactivity, many times oblivious of the power we have to change the world by starting with ourselves. If you are still wondering how to contribute to a more peaceful planet so what happened at the Capital Gazette Office eventually becomes a thing of the past, consider contemplating on the words of Esther Etty Hillesum  in one of her journals:

Ultimately, we have just one moral duty: to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves, more and more peace, and to reflect it toward others. And the more peace there is in us, the more peace there will also be in our troubled world.