The many faces of fear

Once she admitted that she was not the self-sufficient, independent woman she pretended to be, she was able to get the help she needed to overcome her deepest fears and find a joy for living beyond her wildest dreams!

I grew up believing I was independent, self-sufficient, and not afraid of anything. I did lots of things alone; traveled abroad, lived alone—I was "Miss Independent." I prided myself on not needing other people and on not needing to be with a man or in a relationship all the time. I took care of myself. Or so I thought. If someone had asked me if I was afraid of anything, I would have replied, “who me? Afraid? I’m not afraid of anything.” I couldn’t relate to people with phobias and disorders that inhibited their lives. As my life went on, however, I became less and less effective and productive. I grew further and further away from the dreams I had once held for myself, and the vision of a successful and prosperous future I once had. I actually stopped believing that I could have a happy, successful, productive life, and felt doomed to plod along the way I was going, just getting by with the bare minimum.

The thing that baffled me the most was that I did not understand what was causing me to move in the exact opposite direction of the way I consciously believed I wanted to go. I desperately wanted to be thin, yet I couldn’t stop overeating. I wanted to have a successful career and be financially stable, but I found myself in a succession of low-paying jobs that I felt embarrassed to talk about with my friends. I wanted to be social and popular, but I spent the majority of my free time alone. I wanted to have a loving intimate relationship with a man, but I always seemed to attract losers, if I attracted anyone at all. I wanted to be confident and happy, but I was increasingly insecure and depressed. I went to Twelve-step programs, self-help seminars, prayer groups, church, the gym, and years of therapy to try to address these different problems, and I was still extremely unhappy because none of them worked permanently to make me feel better. In fact, year after year I felt worse and worse.

What I didn’t understand was that I was afraid of everything. And what I also didn’t understand was how powerful and destructive fear can be. I was so riddled with fear that it infected and affected every single area of my life. My whole orientation towards life was fearful, but because I was so accustomed to it, I lived in constant anxiety and terror and didn’t even know it. The reason I could believe that I wasn’t afraid was because anger and self-righteous resentment covered over the fear most of the time. As the years went by, I perceived myself to be more and more of a victim of circumstance, and always saw myself as getting the unfair end of the deal from life. I blamed everyone and everything else for my misfortunes. I blamed society for creating an unrealistic ideal for women’s bodies while constantly pushing food commercials and ads, I resented my bosses for not paying me enough, I hated the men who wanted to date me because I couldn’t get anyone better, and I blamed my parents for oppressing me when I was a child. Underlying all this anger and resentment was pure fear; fear of what people thought of me, fear to be fully responsible for my life, fear of intimacy with other people, fear of my sexuality, fear of failure, and fear of being myself.

Fear dictated all my actions, and also all of my inaction. Despite all of my intellectual psychological training as a therapist myself, I discovered that I was motivated to do things because I was trying to avoid dealing with someone or something I was afraid of. Or, I was just so afraid that I avoided taking action all together. I ended up developing terrible habits of procrastination and neglect in order to accommodate the fear. By the time I was 30 years old, fear had me backed into a corner. I found myself unable to do things I once enjoyed doing, and being afraid to go out of my house. And my compulsive overeating and depression were only getting worse. It was a vicious cycle that I felt hopeless about breaking because I thought I had tried every possible solution and none of them had worked.

It was while I was in the depths of this darkness that I learned about Be Totally Free!, and a process for healing and recovering one’s life, and my life took a radical turn for the good. With the support and encouragement of Roy Nelson, I have learned how to apply the Metasteps principles of healing, and address and face the underlying fears and other emotions that were causing me to sabotage myself and keep myself from having the kind of life I wanted. Thanks to the Roy’s guidance, I have been able to take responsibility for my thoughts, my feelings, and my actions, and am now benefiting from a freedom from the conditions that once held me paralyzed in bondage. But even better, I now have a joy for living beyond my wildest dreams!