The Best Way to Handle Fear is to Face It

The uncomfortable truth.Photo by Zachary Kadolph on Unsplash

When people are scared, what they fear can become so overwhelming to the senses and emotions that they release all reason. Fear overrides logic, overcomes sensibility, and the next thing you know, you’ve allowed someone to manipulate you.

All you need to do is look at the current American political situation to see the truth of this. The fear of suffering has been weaponized horrifically. Many people have been convinced that they will suffer horribly when the liberals, the woke, LGBTQA+ people, immigrants, and other scapegoats take what they are entitled to. The sad irony is that the people telling them this are the ones who will cause them to suffer.

Weaponized fear and suffering are distractions. However, you can’t ignore them completely because of their prevalence. If you are even a little empathic, you can feel it in the air. The fear, the uncertainty, the hopelessness. It’s incredibly disconcerting.

I’ve spent most of my adult life fighting 1 fear that manifested itself in 2 places. Those two places have been fear of failure and fear of success. But the underlying fear, ultimately, has been fear of abandonment.

Hence, I’m afraid that if I fail or if I succeed, the people I care about will throw me off the island, leave me on my own, and abandon me.

Not a pleasant fear to have. Yet, over the years, I’ve seen that there is only 1 effective method to deal with it. I need to face it.

The elephant in the room can’t be ignored

Elephants are huge. Everything about them is big, from their legs to their ears to their shit. When it comes to your home, your place of work, places that you spend time with people you care about, an elephant in a room would be difficult to ignore.

You and I live in a fear-based society. Fear is used and abused to sway, influence, and control people. It’s even been given a cutesy notion to normalize it in FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out). We accept it like we accept that we all need air to breathe, up is the opposite of down, and water is wet.

Because of the prevalence of fear and the way it’s presented, we’re given to ignore it. The problem, however, is that ignoring it doesn’t make it go away. The elephant is in the damned room.

Here’s the thing. Big, overarching, nameless, faceless fear is more like the sky. How do you face it down when it’s right there, overarching all, literally?

Start with your fear.

Photo by JM Lova on UnsplashThe best way to handle fear is to face it

For a long time, I saw my fear of failure and my fear of success as clear as day. I did and didn’t do things, consciously and subconsciously, out of fear that success or failure would equally upset the people I care about. I spent most of my 20s moving between jobs, relationships, homes, and avoiding anything stabilizing because of my fear.

When I realized that my true, underlying fear was abandonment, I started to better understand. My various acts of self-sabotage were my ego keeping me in my “comfort zone” so that I’d avoid getting abandoned.

This was not how I wanted to live my life. So, I sought therapy, got a prescription for antidepressants, and took better care of my mental, emotional, and spiritual health overall.

However, only I can take action to do something about my fears. Even though your fear might be different from mine, these steps still apply.

Recognize the fear. What is it? You can go deeper and analyze the why and how, but that’s a personal choice. Identifying what it is will be highly informative.Acknowledge the fear. The elephant in the room doesn’t walk out when you ignore it. Recognition is the start, but acknowledgement is how you face it.Examine the fear. Is the fear that you recognize and acknowledge what the true issue is, or is it a mask for something deeper? How does your fear impact your life?Face the fear. What can you do to overcome this? Are there things that help center and balance you and banish the fear?

These steps are how you can interact with and work with fear. However, there is one small matter to consider that makes a difference in how you face your fear.

How much suffering will you experience?

More often than not, in my experience, it’s not the fear itself, it’s the perceived suffering that the fear will cause that’s most damaging. The pain – be it mental, emotional, spiritual, or physical – the discomfort, the uncertainty, and all the “what if?” scenarios for how you’ll suffer tend to be the real issue at hand.

The truth is that usually the suffering you fear is far worse than how you will actually suffer. As Paulo Coelho summed up so brilliantly in The Alchemist,

“Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself.”

Nobody wants to suffer. The main reason that people accept less for themselves, allow others to manipulate them, and accept bullshit is because of the suffering they fear they’ll experience. What if they step out of their comfort zone, do something different, or the like, and it goes horribly wrong?

Our fear-based society abuses us by playing up fear and potential suffering. I’m not discounting that people do suffer injustice, neglect, and worse. But if you don’t face your fear, you are disempowering yourself and ceding control.

This might require you to get help, to seek counsel, and to get uncomfortable. But I’ve seen for myself that when you face fear, you become empowered. Being empowered opens you to choices and decisions. That’s how you can control your life experience. Facing fear lets you do something about it. When more of us find reason, logic, and balance over fear, we can start to shift the narrative.

So, that written, are you willing and able to face your fear?

This is the seventh-hundred-sixth (706) exploration of my Pathwalking philosophy. These weekly essays are my ideas for – and experiences with – applying mindfulness and positivity to walk along a chosen path of life to consciously create reality.

I share this journey as part of my desire to make a difference in this world and empower as many people as I can with conscious reality creation.

Thank you for joining me. Feel free to repost and share this.

The first year of Pathwalking, including expanded ideas, is available here. Check out my author website for the rest of my published fiction and nonfiction works.

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