Facing Your Fear
I’ve been facing my fear for about a few years now. Prior to that I had 50 years on the planet not even knowing I head this fear. How can that be possible?
Well my coaching supervisor said I had ‘complex defensive structures’. When she said it I was rather pleased because it sounded cool. But then after going through some seriously painful learning it turns out it is not so cool after all.
If I think of myself as a house (for the purpose of a helpful metaphor – bear with me!) then the things I, and everyone else can see, are the house itself with all its features. What is hidden are the foundations, which are the things that were built first but are no longer visible to me or anyone else. These foundations could include the fears I was not facing. To be fair to me it is no easy to see the foundations of a house, in fact mostly it is not possible without some serious excavation. However why bother to go to all the effort when there is a nice solid concrete floor in place (a.k.a. my complex defensive structures)?
In my case the fear I’ve been facing is the fear of abandonment. The ways in which I have avoided facing it are many and varied. So much so that I didn’t realise I had this fear until, well, I suddenly realised it. I suppose I am lucky that at least this happened before my house fell down.
My complex defensive structures have included:
Wearing armour (not literally!) to protect myself from the risk of vulnerability
Steering clear of people (again not literally - just emotionally) of people I thought would abandon me
Latching on to people who thought the sun shone out of my arse
Telling a story that I was afraid of nothing, not even death, and telling it so well and so often that I believed it to be true
Using the extensive self personal and professional development I’ve done on myself as ‘evidence’ of an establishment that had been fully and comprehensively witnessed
Developing a mindfulness practice as demonstration of some sort of enlightenment
All the time my fear remained steadfastly unknown to me. It was like I wasn’t looking for it. It was like I was seeing the house while paying no attention to what might be in the foundations down below; perhaps even forgetting about any existence of the foundations.
In case you are wondering I only got to make sense of this metaphor after I started to face my fear.
So what are in your foundations? What aren’t you seeing that is there? Also, why do we need to find out about the foundations? On one level, as long as the house is still standing I guess we don’t, particularly if we have a thick concrete floor to help us feel safe and solid. But what if there is a risk of subsidence, or perhaps of it falling down? What if we want to add more storeys or just extend a bit? Or even just make it resilient enough to survive and thrive in flooded autumns and harsh winters?