how to be afraid as a grownup

where are all the snakes and spiders?

When I was a kid I thought fear was a really simple concept. I was afraid of snakes and spiders and heights I think. So as long as I didn’t interact with snakes or spiders or heights, I could avoid being afraid. The concept of being scared and avoiding things that scared you seemed really black and white. I could avoid fear forever!

I am not a kid any more although I have learned about things like working on my inner child. And if you have worked in therapy enough or watched enough TikToks to know what inner child work is, you probably know that being scared is way more intense than being afraid of snakes. Although they are still very, very overwhelming if you ask me.

Fear is hard and it shows up anywhere. And it is absolutely not always a reaction to something as concrete as what we think about as children. It can, and often does, show up in relationships, at work, in parenting, you name it. Fear doesn’t have a face more often than not I am realizing and that was not something I was prepared to deal with. It was not something I ever realized was going to be the case. My Care Bear stories I read at night talked about facing fears around speaking in public maybe, but not the level of existential dread that adulthood can carry.

Fears in the diagnosed sense are things that have -phobia at the end of the word and then some descriptor you have to take a guess at in the front. These feel meaningless to me and like a way to dull the actual fear because it is nearly impossible to understand what these words mean. I know there must be words for what my fears are, but it is easier and more realistic to speak what they are than what any medical term for them might be.

It's scary to find something out about yourself in your 40s and to constantly fear if making changes for yourself are truly going to make you happy or if you just found out too late.

It's scary worrying you won't teach your kids the things they'll want to know when their older.

It's scary hearing silence in a kid's room after you've had a disagreement with them and you know silence from you can sometimes bring really intrusive and dangerous thoughts.

It's scary to live with really intrusive and dangerous thoughts.

It's scary to push back against conventional ideas knowing there are few support networks out there when things feel really hard, which is often.

It's scary choosing what's best for you, knowing that might not be best for others.

It's scary to live with borderline personality disorder and to talk about self harm and self sabotage and to worry about whether you'll ever feel good.

It is scary to have a brain that doesn’t have a yellow light, only green and red.

You can be afraid that you won’t ever get better, that therapy isn’t working, that even with all the help around you things still feel too hard.

This list could be endless and exhausting and that's scary too.

I guess the idea is that you have to manage through fear way more frequently than I ever expected. And that snakes and spiders and heights and bridges play into my own day-to-day interactions less than expected even though I am afraid all the time.

We don't talk about the really scary things a lot. We can talk about them in therapy if we're privileged enough to access that, but we don't really air out fears publicly and let other people know that this shit is frightening.

It's very adult to be able to say “holy crap, I'm terrified of a lot of stuff.” You don't have to not be scared.

Do I have tips that work for me? Kind of. I have tips that I've been given in my many, many trips through therapy. They don't always work, or I should say, they don't move me from bad to good.

But, they might help stall your fears momentarily or get you through a dangerous thinking trap. My therapists (and partner) have told me to remember that the goal in fearful situations when your brain is being mean to you is to stop the worsening, not necessarily to make everything better all at once.

STOP

Stop what you’re doing. This is apparently what there is to this. Just don’t do things any more. Get off your phone. Stop what’s making you silly scared.

Take a step back. Is this much different than stop? Maybe not but maybe yes. Either way, keep not doing things and just do something you enjoy doing. Doing this can be hard because it is a lot easier to focus on crappy things, but try for me ok please.

Observe. Are things exactly as you had perceived them? Are there other answers possible? Don’t discount what you have been thinking but give your brain space to accept that maybe the world isn’t crumbling (I know, maybe it is).

Proceed mindfully. You've stopped and thought things through, now see if you can get back to communicating. You still don't need to be back to 100 per cent, and odds are if you have these many fears, you don't know 100 per cent anyway, but you feel a bit better now, and you can talk about that and what scared you in the first place.

Opposite actioning

Basically don't do what you think you should do. Or, trick yourself slowly. I've learned lots about neuropathways and such and how much I need to actively change my reactions to things by changing how I react to things. So I begrudgingly try to do things I normally wouldn't—-communicate when I want to shut down, get up and go for a walk when I want to stay in bed etc.

I don't know the logistics of this one per se, I do know that it takes a lot of practice and work for us to change our immediate reaction to fear.

We're all afraid and that's ok. It's good. It's good to talk about it beyond what we worried about when we were five. I have such a hard time talking about fear and thank you for being part of my exposure therapy.