Why Fear Grows In The Dark But Shrinks In The Light
I remember as a kid being scared that Jason Voorhees, of Friday the 13th fame, was outside my window. At six or seven years old, I was convinced that the noises coming out of my bedroom window were because he was trying to get in. It definitely was not the wind, like my mom was telling me.
I’d leave my room in the middle of the night to go wake up my mom (I knew better than to wake my dad) but couldn’t quite make it down the hall because once I got to a certain point, I saw Freddy Krueger’s bladed hands as a shadow below the stairs. My jaw dropped, my eyes bugged out, and I immediately did a 180 with smoke trails behind me as I ran back to my room.
Yup, I grew up on horror and action films.
Anyway, like most kids, my fears came out at night. And, like most kids with an active imagination (or too many movies), my mind conjured up horrible images and stories that perpetuated irrational fears simply because nothing else could convince me they weren’t there. After all, to a young kid, seeing is believing—even if it’s seeing with the mind and not the eyes.
Fear Lingers In The Dark
The other night our four-year-old daughter couldn’t sleep because she was scared. When I asked her what she was scared of, she pointed to the window. I knew that telling her, “There’s nothing to be scared of” wouldn’t reduce her fears nor would it validate how she was feeling. Many parents make the mistake of telling their kids how they should or shouldn’t feel based on their (the parents’) practical understanding of the world. But failing to validate a child’s feelings is the exact opposite of what a parent wants to do if they want to raise a secure child. When parents contradict their child’s feelings by telling them, “Stop being upset!” “This isn’t worth crying over!” or “This is not scary!”, what they’re really doing is telling their child that how they feel is wrong. The child learns they can’t trust themselves and so they grow up avoiding feelings. More on this another time.
For children (and adults, for that matter), seeing is believing. So, I opened the curtain to my daughter’s window and had her come over and look. She placed her head up to the window and saw the trees, the lights on the deck, and…nothing else. No monsters. No boogie man. No Jason Voorhees (thank God!). Just the world outside. Then she climbed back in bed and tried to sleep.
Fear Thrives on Obscurity
My daughter was scared because her fear was vague. She couldn’t touch her fear. There were no words to describe her fear in detail—and not just because she’s four and pronounces tomatoes as potatoes. She was overcome by fear because she was scared that something was outside, and the rest she created with her imagination. This is exactly where fear lives—in the obscure pits of the mind where there are no details, no specificity, no exactness of what is. Fear lives and grows in the “dark.”
Fear is the result of trying to know the unknowable. It resides within the corners of the imagination where likelihood and practicality turn into possibility and falsity; where everything and anything are possible, and where rationality goes out the (bedroom) window.
Fearing that something may occur, somehow, in some way, enslaves you to uncertainty and leaves you completely powerless. Living in uncertainty is akin to living in the realm of imagination, where it’s just as likely to get bit by a household spider and die as it is to ferry to work on your rainbow unicorn.
Things become less scary when those fears emerge out of the dark, when there’s light shed upon them that reveals those big scary things in the hallway aren’t Freddy Krueger hands, they’re just shadows. This is one reason why cognitive behavioral therapy is used to address fears. When you get down to the nitty gritty about what your fear is, what it looks like, what it feels like, and what the experience of sitting with fear feels like, you begin to realize the irrationality of them. The more “life” you give your fear, by way of detail and awareness, the closer you move that fear to “death.”
Here are three strategies to shed “light” on a vague fear:
Strategy 1: A 4-Step Method
Locate it. First, locate the feeling in your body. Do you feel fear in the chest? Stomach? Arms? Sacral? What does if feel like? Is it acute? Gross? Pulsating? Do not forego this step! This is an important step in the process because the whole reason people avoid their fear isn’t because of the thing (or person/situation/animal), but how the thing makes them feel.
Label it. Once you’ve located the fear, label what the fear is in detail. For example, writing “I’m afraid of spiders” is vague, there are too many gaps for the mind to fill in with regard to why spiders are scary. Remember, we want to get the fear out of the dark and into the light. So instead, write down the kind of spiders you’re afraid of, the color, the size, where they live, where you often see them, what their normal reaction is when they see you, etc…Write in as much detail as possible because you want to bring your fear into the light.
What then? Once you labeled your fear, ask yourself “what then?” at least five times. Let’s say you get bit by a spider. What happens next? Do you really die right there? Not likely. Keep asking yourself what then to get to the root of your fear.
Humanize. Accept that fear is a normal, human emotion and don’t judge or label yourself for it. Everyone fears something. It’s when a fear interferes with optimal functioning that it becomes problematic.
Strategy 2: A 3-Step Method
Create three columns on a piece of paper and label them Fears, Fixes, Likely Outcome.
Under fears, write down your fears/anxieties/worries.
Under fixes, write down the possible solution(s) to them.
Under likely outcome, write out what is most likely to occur irrespective of how intense the fear might be. This is thinking realistically about the most likely outcome.
So, an example might look like this:
Strategy 3: A 1-Step Method
Accept the unknown. Embrace it. Stop trying to control it. Fearlessness comes from an acceptance of not only what is, but also what could be. By letting yourself become vulnerable, you render yourself completely safe, because no longer does your fear control you.
Conclusion
Fear will never disappear, nor do you want it to. What else will keep you from stepping into traffic? However, that doesn’t mean it has to run your life. Shed some light on it and get granular. Only then can you see clearly that the fear, is just fear—an emotion that comes and goes.
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