“That’s the fear talking.”

I could feel myself sinking deeper into the couch, whether physically or metaphorically, I could not tell. My therapist had been on a mission, it seemed. No more coddling. She was still talking, but I could barely hear her. 

“You’re going to have to push through the fear to get to what’s underneath. You’re not going to die. You may feel that way, but just keep telling yourself, ‘I am not going to die.’ It is the only way to get out of your stuckness.

Who said I was stuck? And of course, I know I’m not going to die. Did I say anything of the sort? I could feel my hackles rising. 

She continued, but I wasn’t listening anymore. I was too busy wondering if I had outgrown my therapist. She did not seem to get me anymore. How could she just dismiss my situation and my feelings, whatever they were, and say it was fear that was keeping me spinning in circles both emotionally and with decision paralysis. I was not afraid, I was thoughtful, I was calculating, not controlling. I was…interrupted. 

“What are you thinking over there?”

Nothing really.

“I know you better than that. Those wheels are turning.”

I was trying to not say something I would regret, I thought. In actuality, I was trying to control the situation. Fear and control are best friends. If I can control everything, maybe I won’t have to face my fear. If I have a contingency plan for everything, there is always a way out, always an escape plan. If I have a response planned for every possible thing you might say when I bring to you my carefully crafted concern you have no idea is coming, well, controlling and manipulative are kinfolks, but that’s a story for another day. On this day, I was controlling by withdrawing, and she was having none of it. The thing is…no one can escape from themselves. There is no real escape plan for that. Of course, we have all of the distraction games that we play, but those aren’t really escaping, they are just delaying…the inevitable…that quiet, unexpected moment when we have to face ourselves…and then fear smacks us in the face…and there’s no more control and no more escape. 

It’s just that, I don’t feel afraid. I mean, I know fear, I’ve lived with anxiety longer than I can remember, but I don’t think that’s what is going on here. 

“You don’t know what you feel, because you haven’t sat long enough with it, but I promise you, if you’re honest with yourself, fear is going to come up, and then you’re going to have to get past that to get to the real stuff underneath.”

“Why was she not listening to me? Was it an off day? Had I really outgrown this relationship that we just weren’t able to communicate anymore? (Ironically, that WAS the fear talking.) 

As Josh discussed in the introduction to this series, fear and shame put us in a double bind. I was completely out of touch with my feelings and I was feeling shame about it. I was ashamed that after three years of therapy we were still talking about connecting to feelings. I thought I should have been through that by then. I had expectations of myself that were unrealistic, but I was also unwilling to admit the problem. I was stuck. In response to my shame, in an effort to do anything I could not to feel it, I turned it outward and shot it back like a weapon. I blamed my therapist for my shame. I decided she was incompetent and uncaring, and I went into victim mode feeling unseen and unheard. For someone so out of touch with their feelings, I had a lot of them and that terrified me.

Somewhere (or somewhere plural) along the way I learned that feelings could not be trusted. They were bad, simply put. One of those somewheres was the Church. Granted, feelings cannot be the sole place we make decisions from, but it is confusing as a young person growing up in an environment that is teaching you quite directly not to trust your feelings but often using emotionally manipulative tactics to gain compliance. A great example is the True Love Waits movement which propagated shame and peddled more fear than one could bear to illicit a decision for abstinence from tweens and teens that barely understood the implications of their proclamation. Another would be the use of just the right music set at summer church camp to set just the right mood so that when the preacher was ready to invite the students to follow Jesus they would be overcome by either the Holy Spirit or the fog machines. Outside of when it benefited the agenda of church leadership using this anti-Gospel of shame and fear, feelings were to be ignored as misleading at best and the gateway to the slippery slope of sin at their worst. Blame the Puritans or the Gnostics before them, but Evangelicals both loved and hated emotions in their own institutionalized shame. You didn’t need to be of the Church to be caught in the wake of this damaging system of belief. Where there has been controlling church dogma there too there has been great fear. Yet this is an anti-gospel. There is no good news here.

When I learned to ignore my emotional realm because it might as well be sinful in and of itself, as best as I could interpret the message, my relationship with fear and shame was wed. I was ashamed that my feelings were too big and the more I stuffed them down the more ambiguous they became until I was a giant ball of angst and unknowable emotions brimming and begging to be exposed. But fear of the unknown is crippling, and so, there I was, I was a prisoner to my own emotional life. There was no freedom in the aftermath of my anti-Gospel. Annie Dillard confirms my suspicion that diving deeper is risky. She writes, that if you ride the monsters deeper down… you’ll find both that which gives goodness its power for good and evil its power for evil.” In other words, to dive deeper under the fear is to find out what you are made of, to face your demons, and that means confronting your gatekeeper, Ego-Self. 

It’s much easier to move toward blame and a posture of martyrdom than to admit a bruised Ego is really at play. My therapist was on to something, but I couldn’t see it yet. I wouldn’t. Fear was still my protector, and I was not ready to go without a shield.

I hate to admit, I picked up a sword on more than one occasion in the weeks that followed that day in my therapist’s office. I went to battle with the one person in my life that was trying to tell me the truth, trying to show me the way to freedom. The fear and shame made her words sound like a resounding gong, but in her love and care she persisted. 

Sound familiar? 

In every major religious tradition, our religious leaders are rejected because of the call for a new way of thinking, a new way of life. A life that transcends the Gospel of Fear and Shame and instead takes on courage and humility, to things the Ego-Self cannot abide, in order to live a life of freedom that includes our neighbors. Christians may consider the courage of Jesus as he faced the temptations in the desert or his prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane before his execution, but we can also look to contemporaries such as Dorthy Day and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I think of one of my heroes of the faith, Rev. Traci Blackmon in the streets of Ferguson. Fear and courage must meet if the true Gospel is to be revealed. Jacob may have wrestled with God, but what if he had danced? What if his fear had not been absent, but met with honest courage?

“That’s the fear talking again”

Again? Really? *Sigh*. Ok. Yeah, I’m sure you’re right.

These days,  I am not less fearful, but I do find it more recognizable. I can own my shame more often too. It’s taken a lot of practice and a lot of patience from an incredible, and yes, competent therapist. The same therapist. I’m learning to dance with fear instead of always wrestling. I’m learning to look for good news.