THE PRICES I PAY FOR LETTING FEAR RUN MY LIFE

What happens when we live our lives making decisions that are run by our fears?

What happens when we “survive” life instead of living it, and experiencing it to the maximum?

I started asking myself these questions one day recently in connection with an examination of my own life.

My coach had me reflecting on ways that I “protect myself,” as well as the prices and payoffs that I pay and receive for living a relatively solitary life, which is how I had been living.  These tasks were among the things I had declared I would accomplish during the week between our coaching calls. And of course the two sets of questions were completely intertwined.  Because for me, the solitary, disconnected life I chose much of the time, was a way to protect myself.  Protect myself from the judgments of others.  Protect myself from the feelings of rejection that I might experience if I was authentic with them, or the feelings of “differentness” I would feel if I was NOT authentic, but just listened and absorbed.

So my work that Sunday went like this.  I wrote first, and quite briefly, about the prices and payoffs I got for the solitary life.  Loneliness being the biggest price, and the payoffs being principally safety and comfort.

I decided to move on to the ways I protect myself, and as I began writing those down.  My sources of protection, in the order I wrote them, but not necessarily the order in which I might use them were:

Silence

Aloofness

Solitude

Focusing on the “defects” in others, instead of looking at myself

TV

Video games

“Busy” work

Smallness (Flying under people’s radar)

Serious demeanor

Invalidate others

Self justify, to me and others

Make others wrong

Computer work.

Now please understand I am not saying that all of these things are bad or wrong.  Solitude can be a very beneficial thing when that is what the mind or body needs.  And I am writing this piece on a computer.  It is not the task or way of being itself that is the issue.  It is when I use them as ways to protect myself from something, whether real or imagined.

Then I asked myself, what is it that I am protecting myself from?  For me, it turned out to be the following:

Pain of being laughed at by others

Pain of rejection

Pain of self discovery.

Being laughed at when I wasn’t trying to be funny was something that was leftover from my childhood, when that happened to me a lot, at least in my eyes.  And the feeling of being on the outside looking in that came from those childhood experiences was still very real for me.

For me, this fear of being laughed at is really a subset of the fear of rejection generally.  I suspect that most all of us have had this feeling from time to time in our lives, and I suspect that this is a very common source of pain or fear for humans.

The pain of self discovery was sort of a surprise for me.  I had always viewed myself as introspective, and in a constant state of questioning of myself.  But as I did this work I came to realize that most of the self examination I had done had been done for the purpose of justifying my beliefs, ways of being, and actions.  It had not been undertaken for the purpose of true self-discovery, but rather for the purpose of making me feel good about myself.

Now it was time to get in touch with the prices I was paying for these protective measures.

Here they are, again in the order in which they occurred to me;

Disconnection from others

Maintenance of the status quo, instead of growth

Loneliness

Not listening to others deeply, and so not learning

Invalidation of others, causing them pain, and withdrawal from me!           

Wow.  My fear of being rejected, and hence being lonely, caused me to be alone, and feel lonely!!  How insane is THAT behavior??  And I did not even realize this was all going on until I did this work one Sunday morning.

And truth be told, even if some people might “reject” me, or not “get” me if I was interacting in a connected way with others, living the way I HAD been living guaranteed that NOBODY would get me, because I was not allowing myself to be known.

So I resolved to transform this behavior.  No more solitude, except for healthy reflection, meditation, or general “battery recharge.”  I decided to be in relationship with people, knowing that I might sometimes get hurt if I choose to take things personally, but knowing also that the payoffs for connected relationships greatly outweighed the prices.

How about you?  How does Fear get in the way of what you really want?

 

Try this exercise for yourself: 

My fears are:

 

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The ways I protect myself are:

 

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The Prices I pay for using these protections are:

 

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What have you discovered about your own insanity?  J

 

What are you going to do differently from now on?