We fear our highest possibilities. We are generally afraid to become that which we can glimpse in our most perfect moments, under conditions of great courage. We enjoy and even thrill to godlike possibilities we see in ourselves in such peak moments. And yet we simultaneously shiver with weakness, awe, and fear before these very same possibilities.
—ABRAHAM MASLOW
“I haven’t slept in days!”
After her beloved mother died suddenly in a car accident, Christina would lie awake all night long. Night after night, Christina dreaded the hour when she would find herself in bed anticipating yet another sleepless night followed by yet another day of exhaustion. She tried to fight off her insomnia with over-the-counter sleep medications, but nothing worked. Two years went by without relief.
Eventually, with a stronger sleep medication prescribed by a sleep specialist, Christina began to sleep fitfully. But the lack of quality sleep was already interfering with all aspects of her life, and she was about to get fired from her job at a fast-paced marketing agency. So, she sought me out for help.
Our conversations soon revealed that the true reason for her lack of sleep was a silent, yet crippling, anxiety. Her mother’s death had stirred something much deeper, an existential fear of death that all of us share.
Freud believed that the fear of death was not about death, per se, but about something missing from our lives.1 He thought fear of death was a mask for other distinct yet related fears, such as uncertainty (“What will happen when I die?”), helplessness (“How can I ever solve this situation?”), regret (“How could I have lived this way?”), loneliness (“Why must I die alone?”), or shame (“How can I bear the exposure of death?”). Existential psychiatrist and author Irvin Yalom believed that the people who have the most “unlived life” fear death the most (“I have so much left to do! How could I have wasted so much of my life?!”).
In my work with Christina, we began by focusing on two questions:
“What is missing from your life?”
“How can you begin to live your life more fully and authentically?”
These questions brought us closer to the core of Christina’s anxiety. It would be impossible for any of us to live our lives fully in a state of constant sleep deprivation. Christina’s insomnia further fueled her anxiety, which only worsened her insomnia. She became inadvertently stuck in a self-perpetuating downward spiral from which she did not know how to escape.
By exploring these existential questions together, Christina and I began to zero in on the essential part of Christina’s life that was not being fully lived. I believe that it was that part of her keeping her awake at night. Her mother’s death had made the inevitability of death more real—and far more personal. Now a part of her soul was saying, “I can’t die yet. I haven’t lived!”
In my initial evaluation with patients, I am always looking for their souls to emerge. Our soul is the blueprint we bring into this world of how we are meant to grow, change, evolve, transform, and meaningfully contribute to humankind over the course of our lives. Some call it our “divine essence,” that which connects us to something greater than ourselves, to each other, and to who we really are. Once we learn to hear the whisper of our soul and follow its secret longings, it will guide us to a life of meaning and fulfillment… and sounder sleep. Opening ourselves to our soul’s deepest longings is a powerful catalyst for growth, healing, and transformation.
For Christina that meant listening to the voice inside that knew what it wanted to do in life but had been blocked by her career choices. She had taken a job in marketing because it was practical, available, and paid the bills. But in her heart Christina had always wanted to become a writer. When she finally began to confront her own death anxiety, she realized that the act of writing also provided her with a metaphorical sense of immortality. When she heard that part of her soul speaking to her through her insomnia, she began to take small but tangible steps toward making her dream come true.
For Christina, following her dream was a risk. So she started with a simple morning writing practice without any promises about where that risk would lead. With each passing day, Christina felt more connected with the part of herself she had lost many years ago—her love of language, her passion for writing, her deeply emotional core essence. She studied literature in college and graduated with honors. Where had that passion gone? Writing became an important part of Christina’s healing journey. Slowly but surely Christina began to sleep a little more soundly through the night. To her surprise, she soon found a job as a staff writer at a health journal. Two years later, she left that job to write her first book.
By taking a risk, confronting her fears, and following her dream, Christina began to live her life more fully. When she did, she had no more need for symptoms of insomnia warning her about what is missing in her life. Her death anxiety gradually abated.
This famous quote by author and spiritual educator Marianne Williamson echoed true for Christina as she gained the courage to undergo these powerful changes in her life:
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves, “Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?” Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us.
It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.2
A Course in Miracles, an inspired text about spiritual transformation written by Columbia University psychologist Helen Schucman, makes it clear that, for every decision we make, we have a choice of whether to align with fear or love. The opposite of love is not hate or indifference—it is fear. Just like turning on a lightbulb eradicates the darkness in a room, feeling love can eradicate the feelings of fear inside us. In contrast, defensiveness and fear block our capacity to feel love fully and completely—for other people, for ourselves, and for life. Fear keeps our hearts small. Feeling love creates a space of vulnerability, which may be uncomfortable if we think of love as a limited commodity. We fear, for example, that if we extend ourselves and really love someone, they may eventually leave us and we may feel abandoned and devastated. Thus we feel more fear than love, which keeps our hearts small and closed. When we “fall in love,” as quickly as we may open our hearts in these instances, we may also feel fear. We may close up and build a wall of self-protection around ourselves to avoid the seemingly inevitable devastation that may ensue. Since true love eradicates fear, personal growth entails learning how to gradually come into alignment with love more often, and as a result, with fear less often.3
However, when we have learned to live in fear because of a difficult childhood or extremely challenging life circumstances, it can be difficult to release fear and align with love. It often requires consistent and deliberate baby steps, each of which may feel like a big risk. Risks are enlivening, exhilarating, and at times, terrifying, but they enable us to expand our sense of who we are. Choosing a challenge like this and meeting it creates a strong sense of empowerment that makes it easier for us to face our fears, whatever they may be.
To put this idea into practice, let us focus on making a small perceptual shift in our lives. As I wrote above, all actions are driven either by fear or by love. Since all human beings at the deepest level ultimately want to be loved, heard, and understood, any action driven by fear can also be seen as an appeal for love. Sometimes these appeals for love come in harsh, angry, and heartless ways. The more ferocious the roar, the greater the fear and desperation for love.
For this stream-of-consciousness writing exercise, look back to an instance when somebody treated you in a way that didn’t feel good. Now set your stopwatch to five minutes and write continuously on the topic Seeing the Innocence.
1. In what way this did person hurt you?
2. How did you understand and explain this person’s behavior at the time?
3. Now see this person as a scared little boy or girl who desperately wants love and simply doesn’t know how to get it. How might this person have been driven by fear and appealing for love?
4. How does revisiting this interaction change your perception of it?
Next time somebody treats you in a way that does not feel good, instead of getting angry at this person, practice making the perceptual shift of seeing the innocence in their action. Being able to reframe a situation in this way can be a powerful tool for forgiveness, letting go and opening your heart. However, being able to reframe a situation and have more compassion for another person does not mean that you should therefore allow this person to mistreat you, violate your boundaries, or compromise your safety in any way.
Ultimately, fear is the reason we are all still alive today. If early human beings had not been afraid when they saw a tiger or a blazing forest fire, we might have disappeared from the face of the earth millennia ago. Fear is one of our most invaluable survival instincts. When you think about it, it’s amazing that our bodies have a built-in warning system to let us know when we are—or even might be—in danger! It is far better to panic and run for the hills than to find ourselves on the menu as the midafternoon snack for a hungry alligator!
Fear, by definition, is our response to danger, real or perceived. When the danger is perceived rather than real, stress and anxiety result. In Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, Stanford biology and neuroscience professor Dr. Robert Sapolsky reminds us that in more dangerous times, human beings needed fear to signal the stress response. The hallmark of the stress response is mobilizing our energy stores away from the body’s “rest and digest” functions (stimulated by the parasympathetic nervous system) and into the body’s “fight or flight” functions (stimulated by the sympathetic nervous system).4 Activating the sympathetic nervous system fuels all the critical muscles of your body so that you can effectively outrun the saber-toothed tiger chasing you. Your heart rate, blood pressure, and breathing rate also speed up. While short-term increases in these parameters are adaptive when outrunning a tiger or dealing with any emergency, the overactivation of this response (like if your blood pressure spikes every time you’re stuck in traffic) is a heart attack waiting to happen. This is why with long-term chronic stress, your immune system’s ability to fight off infections is compromised, gastrointestinal symptoms like diarrhea and constipation abound, females are less likely to ovulate and carry pregnancies to term, and males begin to have trouble with erections and secrete less testosterone. When in constant “stress” mode, your body has little time to worry about digestion, reproduction, and fighting off colds.5
And then there is the effect of chronic stress on your brain! While short-term stress heightens cognitive function (like enhancing your focus to ace your math test), long-term stress can actually overtax your poor aching brain and kill neurons in the part of the brain responsible for learning and memory called the hippocampus.6 We naturally lose some brain cells as we age, and chronic stress basically speeds up the aging process.
Heart disease, irritable bowel syndrome, fibromyalgia, certain autoimmune conditions, some forms of dementia, and other illnesses linked to chronic stress do not befall zebras, baboons, or other animals in the wild. And we as human beings may develop these chronic illnesses partly because our bodies aren’t designed for the constant stresses of a modern-day life. Rather, we seem more built for the kind of short-term stress faced by a zebra—like outrunning a predator. Today, “danger” is not usually physical but emotional and psychological: fear of failing at work or school, fear of being intimate with somebody, fear of a conflict with a friend or loved one, fear of death, or fear of never finding a life partner, to name a few.
Most fears—whether physical, emotional, or psychological—can be divided into five categories.7 The first category is fear of death—as in the case of Christina—which arouses a primary existential anxiety in most human beings. The second category is fear of losing one’s bodily integrity, such as through disability, aging, illness, or injury of any kind, as in a car accident. The third category is fear of losing one’s autonomy, as via imprisonment, immobilization, paralysis, and the like. Interestingly, some fears of commitment in relationships fall into this category. While there is significant overlap between the second and third category, the former focuses specifically on deterioration or damage to the physical body, while the latter focuses on loss of one’s freedom, self-sufficiency, and sense of control in life. The fourth category is fear of separation, such as loneliness, abandonment, or loss of connectedness. This stems from a fear of becoming a non-person—not wanted, respected, or valued by somebody else. The fifth category is fear of ego dissolution, or the shattering of one’s constructed sense of lovability, capability, and worthiness. This includes humiliation, shame, or any other mechanism of profound self-disapproval that threatens the loss of integrity of the self.
Over the centuries, certain fears have been passed down through our genetic memory. Through the hard-won lessons learned by our ancestors, many of us have inborn fears of heights, angry faces, glaring lights, and loud noises. But as individuals we also accumulate more fears as we encounter difficult, painful, or traumatic life experiences. In an effort to protect us, our bodies learn to warn us of new “dangers” based on past trauma. We are unconsciously conditioned to react with fear to things that remind us of those traumatic events, whether the associations are valid or not.
Daryl was a twenty-eight-year-old professional bodybuilder with a Herculean six-foot-four-inch, three-hundred-pound body. For as long as he could remember, Daryl thrived on “living on the edge.” He loved nothing more than racing cars, riding motorcycles, skydiving, base jumping—anything to keep his adrenaline pumping. On the surface, Daryl was absolutely fearless. He told me time and again that he did not fear death.
But I was suspicious, because if he truly did not fear death, he would not have had to repeatedly remind me of it. More likely, he was as terrified of death as Christina but dealt with his fear in the exact opposite way: by confronting it head-on with countless death-defying activities. This defense against one’s fear is unconscious and called “counterphobia.” What is feared—in Daryl’s case, death—is denied and disavowed, just like Carl Jung’s “shadow.” As far as Daryl was concerned, fear of death was the farthest thing from his conscious mind. His unconscious was a different story.
Daryl was conflicted. On a conscious level, getting as close to death as possible filled his life with excitement and passion. The closer he came to death, the more alive he felt. But on an unconscious level, he was terrified, using death-defying stunts to deny the terror he felt deep inside. When a conflict exists between the conscious and unconscious mind, we may develop a symptom.
In time, Daryl’s body couldn’t keep up. While doing dead lifts, Daryl threw out his back. It was a disappointment, but Daryl recovered quickly and went back to his old habits, only to pull his back out again, this time much more seriously. He was told by his doctors to stop his workouts and allow his body to heal. Some therapists might interpret Daryl’s back injury as a symptom he unconsciously created to resolve the conflict between his conscious mind (I don’t fear death!) and his unconscious mind (I’m terrified of death!). The result of the symptom: Daryl was paralyzed from engaging in any more death-defying acts!
Daryl was devastated. Not only was his self-image closely linked to his ability to perform incredible feats, but he had devoted himself to high-energy activities so completely that he didn’t know what to do with his time now that he had to stop. His unconscious solution to this problem came as a surprise, even to him.
For reasons beyond his awareness, Daryl started going to bars late at night and picking fights. This was a completely foreign behavior to Daryl—he had many friends, was well liked by his peers, and was not a violent or angry person by nature. So what in the world was driving this unusual aggressive behavior? As Daryl and I explored this, we discovered that what he was ultimately craving in these bar fights was the adrenaline rush. He felt this rush when he pushed himself beyond his limits with dead lifts or jumped out of planes. Not being able to get his adrenaline rush through workouts anymore, he succumbed to provoking bar fights without even knowing why! He was exhibiting the unmistakable signs of an adrenaline junkie.
The pattern had developed in the most innocent way. When Daryl was only ten years old, his mother died from a heart attack. His father was so heartbroken that he repeatedly attempted suicide. Even as a boy, it was Daryl who “saved him.” It was understood that Daryl’s job from then on was to keep his father alive. If there is any activity that will rev up your adrenaline, it’s pulling your father back from the brink of death again and again and again. Daryl lived in a constant state of stress, fearing that one day his efforts would not be enough to save his dad. With so many people grateful for his efforts and the love of his father to show for it, Daryl was rightly proud of his ability to defy death. It had started so young that it felt like his birthright.
With a strong physique and a determination to live that role to the fullest, Daryl naturally gravitated toward extreme sports. What better way to thrive at the place he felt he belonged—at the brink of death? It’s no surprise that it felt right.
While his back was healing, the risks of bar fights gave him a modest but sufficient rush of adrenaline to get him by. It all came crashing down when he got arrested.
Handcuffed to a metal chair at the police station, Daryl was forced to take a look at what he’d been doing. He felt guilty and ashamed of himself. This adrenaline addiction had driven him down a road he had never meant to take. He had become a violent offender! The very idea made him wince. That’s not who he was! Not only did Daryl have to face his own embarrassment about being arrested, but his arrest meant he had to call his wife, Marla, to bail him out.
From the very beginning, Daryl had always been the rock in their relationship. His wife had married a strong, confident, death-defying man. He was terrified of her reaction. Would she leave him? Could she ever look him in the eyes again?
To his surprise, Marla was immediately loving and empathetic despite her shock. In fact, months later she confided in Daryl that she “loved him even more.” She had always loved and admired the strong man he presented to the world, but now his vulnerability had allowed her to feel closer to him. Letting down his guard to reveal himself in all his human vulnerability to the woman he loved was not humiliating after all. Instead it strengthened his marriage.
In this situation, Daryl’s soul correction involved kicking his adrenaline addiction. Lack of a high-adrenaline activity led Daryl to feel empty, a feeling so painful and dark that he looked for any possible way to fill this inner void. At first going into this space was so uncomfortable that Daryl needed to retreat immediately—he could not even talk about it. Throughout his therapy work, Daryl slowly and gently allowed his void to emerge while developing tools to tolerate his emotions, like a loving-kindness meditation Daryl began to do daily. Over time Daryl felt less need to escape his void because he was able to transform his fear into something constructive through the use of loving-kindness.
A devoted athlete, Daryl still engages in competitive activities that push his body to the limit—boot camps, triathlon training, rowing, hiking, hot yoga, and extreme sports. The difference is that now, if he puts them on hold for any reason, he is able to tolerate his inner void rather than turning to bar fights or any other destructive activity for this adrenaline rush. As he gradually became more in touch with his true self, he was also able to build a more intimate bond with his wife.
This twenty-five-hundred-year-old Buddhist practice is a powerful tool for filling one’s inner emptiness and transforming one’s fears and worries by cultivating an attitude of unconditional loving-kindness.8
1. Find a relaxed position, whether sitting or lying down.
2. Focus your attention on the area around your heart.
3. Now imagine that you are breathing in and out through your heart. With each inhale, your heart expands as it fills with fresh air. With each exhale, your heart contracts.
4. Now close your eyes and take several slow deep breaths through your heart:
• Inhale through your nose for the count of two.
• Hold your breath for the count of four.
• Exhale through your nose for the count of eight.
• Repeat for five breaths.
5. For the next three to five minutes, repeat inwardly to yourself the following four phrases:
May I be free of worry and fear.
May I be happy.
May I be free from suffering.
May I be at peace.
6. After each repetition, bring your attention back to your heart center and take a breath through your heart as above.
Throughout this week, repeat these phrases to yourself every time you feel empty, sad, fearful, or alone. As you do, connect to your heart center and imagine these words opening your heart more and more as you read each line.
In contrast to Daryl and Christina, who came to me with the underlying existential anxiety of fear of death, Lahari, a beautiful twenty-three-year-old medical student from Ghana, was plagued by fears of separation, alienation, and aloneness. When she came to my office, she, like many women I treat and like myself in years past, was afraid she would never meet her soulmate. Unlike most young people in New York City these days, Lahari felt ready to settle down, get married, and have a baby at a relatively young age. In Ghana, women are often married with children by their early twenties. Lahari said she felt a loneliness in her heart and soul that only her soulmate could fill.
Together we worked to allay her fears of never meeting the right man. She worried that she might one day find herself living alone after it was too late for her to have a family. If that were to happen, she wondered if life would have any meaning for her. In her worst moments, this downward spiral of “catastrophizing” and self-defeating thoughts led Lahari to feel like life was no longer worth living.
When women come to me in search of their soulmates, I tell them about the two distinct yet not mutually exclusive approaches to meeting the right person. The first approach is purely rational, best summarized as “it’s a numbers game.” You meet as many people as possible and go on as many dates as you can, and eventually, chances are you’ll meet your soulmate. The more people you meet, the greater the odds of finding “the One.” Obviously, this is highly oversimplified, as most people with whom I would be having this conversation come to therapy not because they haven’t met enough people, but because, for one reason or another, relationships have not worked out with the people they have met. Nevertheless, many people employ the first approach for years before deciding to explore the second approach.
The second approach is more psychological and spiritual. This approach is artfully delineated in Katherine Woodward Thomas’s book, Calling in “The One.” To draw in your soulmate, you work on yourself to clear out the emotional, psychological, spiritual, and sometimes physical blockages that exist within you that keep your soulmate from coming into your life. As you work through your resistances, blockages, fears, and conflicts about being in a committed relationship, the chances of a relationship working out become much higher. Obviously, the two approaches are not mutually exclusive but actually quite complementary.
People who adopt the second approach and begin to work on clearing out their so-called blockages often begin to notice different kinds of partners appearing in their lives. Every person you draw into your life is a mirror of yourself in some way. This is true not only of romantic relationships, but also of friendships and business relationships. If you keep drawing the same exact kind of person into your life over and over, it means that you have not yet learned the lesson that precisely this kind of person is supposed to teach you.
As I wrote about earlier, I kept drawing in one emotionally unavailable man after another before I finally realized that the problem was not with the men. On some level, I too was emotionally unavailable. These men were mirrors for this important truth I had not yet faced about myself.
My patient Lahari soon started dating a man who looked very promising. He always said the right things. More than any other man she had ever met, Danilo was romantic and attentive. She loved the sense of being wooed. Beyond that, Danilo felt like family from the start. She could not quite place it, but something in his manner made her very comfortable thinking of him as her partner for life. She began to wonder if Danilo was the soulmate she had been dreaming of. Maybe he was the one to end her fear of being alone all her life.
As the months went by, however, Lahari and I began to notice that, for all his attentiveness and charm, Danilo cared most about Danilo. When Lahari’s needs conflicted with his, he always put his own needs first, without apology. The connection Lahari thought she had felt with him was shaken.
Finally, we saw that when it really came down to it, Danilo was quite narcissistic. If he felt like family, it might have been less because of a soul connection and more because Lahari’s father had also been narcissistic. As a child, she had grown accustomed to her father putting his own needs first while charming her into thinking her small needs didn’t matter as much as his. But Lahari knew better now. Eventually, Lahari ended her relationship with Danilo. She had no intention of spending the rest of her life bound to a narcissist.
In the aftermath, I worked with her to keep her soul’s intention clear. Lahari’s relationship with Danilo helped her to become clearer about what she was looking for in a soulmate: somebody who was romantic, charming, charismatic, handsome, fun (all qualities Danilo had) but who was also generous, loving, empathic, vulnerable, and capable of putting Lahari’s needs on par with his own.
About a year later, Lahari went with her medical school friends to a birthday party for a man named Gerald. Lahari had once met Gerald several years prior and thought he was very nice. But since he was a little older and not in the medical field himself, Lahari did not think there was relationship potential. Now, with more clarity in what she was looking for in a partner, Lahari let herself be drawn in by Gerald’s warm and endearing smile. A kindhearted archeologist who came to love her very deeply, Gerald was far more capable of seeing Lahari for who she was and aligning with the truest needs of her heart. Despite her fears, she had found a man to be her soulmate after all. Although Gerald had come into Lahari’s life before, she had not been in the place to recognize him as her soulmate until she had done the necessary work on herself and gotten clear about exactly what she was looking for in a soulmate. At the time of this writing, she remains happily married to him three years later.
As with Lahari, fear is often our guide to the soul correction we need to make. Lahari’s fear of being alone enabled her to access her soul’s deep desire for a life partner and use that desire to grow as a person and transform herself. In this way, Lahari’s fear served as an impetus for her spiritual and psychological transformation. Aligning with your soul and cultivating authenticity are often key components to overcoming fear. Having the courage to overcome your fear, in turn, emboldens your soul. The truth is that together, your mind and soul are truer, bigger, and stronger than even your darkest fear.
As you go through the exercise that follows, you may want to journal about your experience and what comes up for you. Some questions for reflection are provided throughout the exercise.
It sometimes helps to start with easy ones (“I am afraid I’ll be late for my early meeting tomorrow” or “I’m afraid this dress makes me look fat”).
After you’ve had some success releasing the smaller fears, you can move to larger ones (“I’m a failure,” “I’ll never meet my soulmate,” “I won’t make enough money this year to support my family,” etc.).
Too often we figuratively shut our eyes and turn away from our fears, hoping to avoid them. It doesn’t help. We still feel them anyway. But turning away like that does keep us from questioning whether they’re legitimate or not.
You can find a hint in the triggers. What happens to provoke your fear? If you can identify the triggers, you can anticipate the fear, so you won’t be thrown off as much by it.
Maybe one of your current goals is to meet a life partner. Two triggers that could set off your fear of failure might be “When I go online, I come up empty, never connecting with anyone” and “My self-consciousness about my own flaws or vulnerabilities makes me fear that no one will want me.” If instead you have a fear of commitment, your trigger might be “When someone starts wanting to get serious, I suddenly start daydreaming about leaving.”
Notice where your resistance lies. How can you use your fear to grow as a person and expand your current limitations? How can you work it through with the man or woman who comes into your life?
Ask yourself how your response to this fear can benefit your soul. Will it push you to develop more courage or confidence? Will it make you go outside your comfort zone and give up habits that have been blocking your happiness? How can you transform this fear instead of casting yourself as its victim?
To deactivate fear, breathe deeply, close your eyes, and repeat: “I am not my fear. I am so much more.” To center yourself further, repeat the Loving-Kindness Meditation exercise here.
Connect to the love inside you. Feel your soul expand.
This connection to your deepest self will make you strong in the face of even the darkest fears. This inner connection is your true self and your most reliable friend. Trust it. Rely on it. Breathe it in.