I’m Afraid

I’m afraid of losing what I’ve worked so hard to build. I’m afraid there won’t be enough…enough readers, enough listeners, enough participants, enough interest, enough connection, enough resonation, enough money.

My ability to sleep through the night, and the degree to which I am pleasant to be around during the day, both depend on how I am managing my fears. Just like addiction isn’t a yes or no question, but rather addiction exists on a continuum, my fear is on a spectrum as well. Sometimes my fear is in check, and I feel peaceful and content. Sometimes my fear is temporarily nonexistent, and I am joyful and exuberant. Other times, my fear is woven through my thoughts leading my mind to race with fixation and rumination. Occasionally, my fear is completely out-of-control and I am debilitated and consumed.

In early sobriety, I learned that I was emotionally immature – that my emotional maturation had stopped at the age when I started drinking. I learned that the work of recovery was largely about tolerating emotions rather than drinking them away. I learned to sit with unpleasant emotions, and that they would wash over me on a time schedule I could not control. I learned to rest assured that emotions that brought discomfort would pass and would be replaced by more desirable emotions in due time. The work of recovery – the work of gaining emotional maturity – was learning to suffer without reaching for a maladaptive coping mechanism, whether alcohol or some thing or behavior to which I had transferred my addiction.

It all made sense, and I have given the same advice I received thousands of times. But now I wonder. I don’t think it is as complex as all of that. I don’t think I experience a wide variety of emotions, and that I need to brace myself for the next unpredictable wave.

I think there is one emotion: fear.

Sometimes I am scared shitless, and sometimes I am fearless, and usually I am somewhere in the middle. My emotional health and sanity is all about managing my fears.

I have enthusiastically espoused for years now that the cure for addiction is self-esteem. I have seen tangible examples of this in my own life. When I feel good about myself, I am independent, productive, hopeful, creative, cheerful and motivated. When I feel bad about myself, I am worried, doubtful, hopeless, paranoid, and often locked into a cycle of destructive thinking. Do you see all the emotions and emotionally adjacent words in those two lists? Obviously, I would rather feel good about myself than bad about myself. As my drinking progressed, I connected alcohol with feeling good, so I used booze to cope. I call alcohol a “maladaptive” coping mechanism because it carries with it sneaky, but deadly, side effects that make it the wrong tool for the job. So when I talk about self-esteem as the cure for alcoholism, I am talking about finding natural ways to feel good about myself without the toxic side effects of alcohol or addiction.

What is self-esteem in relation to my fear? For me, self-esteem and fear are antonyms on the same continuum. The better I feel about myself, the less my fears impact me. The lower my self-esteem, the more territory I relinquish to my fear.

Self-esteem and emotional maturity are both accurate ways to describe my growth in recovery. I just believe I can now think of the quest I am on for discovery in even simpler terms. How afraid am I at this particular moment?

Spirituality plays a huge role in fear management for me. In Christianity, we are taught not to waste time worrying – that God has a plan that we aren’t privy to until it unfolds slowly in front of us. One of the most popular mantras in Alcoholics Anonymous teaches followers to, “Let go and let God.” All of the major religions, and most of the well-known philosophers going back to the start of recorded history, preach that we must live in the present and not ruminate on the past or fixate on the future. Religion and philosophy is all about finding peace in the chaos and suffering of the human experience, and all of these vaunted, poetic, divine and enlightened teachings all point in the same direction: Do not be afraid. There are literally billions of words from thousands of respected and worshiped teachings. Talk about complexity. What they all boil down to for me is owning my relationship with my fear.

Mental health gurus talk about gratitude practices, making lists of our daily accomplishments, and talking about our goals in the past tense as a way of tricking ourselves into believing we have already achieved the desired success. I have first-hand experience that suggests to me that mind games like this work. When I think about how lucky I am to be an American with a healthy family that loves me and with all the middle-class material comforts I have accumulated over the past half-century, it does bring me peace and contentment. Now that I’m in my 50s, I have a new weapon to use against my many fears and paranoias. I can now say with some confidence that I have lived at least half of my life, and I’ve survived so far, so whatever pesky worry creeps into my mind is statistically unlikely to bring me down. I have weathered enough storms to have data pointing to the likelihood of my continued survival. I might be a little unenthusiastic to be closer to the end of my life than the beginning, but at least I know I’ve got the grit to keep going. I can convince myself that I have nothing to fear.

But just like with the many emotions I try to navigate, and just like with the voluminous teachings of religion and philosophy, the gratitude journals and accomplishment lists and past-tense goals and half-century of survival are too complex for me. I have been accused of oversimplification more times than I can count. At the risk of receiving that criticism again, I contend that for me, it all boils down to that same one thing: How afraid am I?

Can I quench my fear?

I have found myself often jealously watching children flow through the world. There is one little girl in particular at our church who brings so much joy and creativity to everything she does. My wife is the children’s minister at our church, and the little girl often asks Sheri with great anticipation about the craft they will do in Sunday School. She participates in every activity, dances with careless abandon and raises her hand to answer every question during the children’s sermon. But my favorite thing to witness is when she squeeze-hugs her baby brother like expressing love for him is her only purpose in life.

She is fearless.

Her home environment is safe, both physically and emotionally. She has clearly never been abused physically or sexually. All of her needs are being met. She is not wealthy or spoiled or undisciplined or greedy. She is protected and cared for, and that allows her to live a life that is almost completely devoid of fear. All of her joy and laughter – those ear to ear grins for which she is well known in our congregation – whatever emotions you assign to her pleasant demeanor, it all just means to me that on her own personal fear continuum, she has the needle pinned on the good side.

I’ve not yet lost anyone really close to me. When I think about how I will feel when my parents eventually die, the grief is really just fear that I will no longer have their love, support and connection. When we humans talk about processing the grief of a tragic loss, isn’t that processing just reconciling the fear of living without that person?

I have written extensively about the feeling of euphoria I experienced about two IPAs into a drinking session. I now believe that the unmatchable euphoria wasn’t really a unique positive emotion. It was a particular state of fearlessness. There was a sweet spot with which all alcoholics are familiar where booze quenched my fear just before it started to hamper my reflexes and cognitive function. The euphoria wasn’t its own thing. It was a lack of the thing that caused me the most distress. The euphoria was the adult version of the best end of the fear continuum.

When I am angry, what I really am is afraid that some mean person or some unfortunate situation is going to cause me or the people I care about pain or challenges. When I am sad, I am afraid of an unpleasant change in the status quo. When I am happy, I am so locked into whatever I am experiencing that there is no room for fear. Over Independence Weekend, I attended a Guerilla Fanfare concert. Guerilla Fanfare is a brass band of 30 somethings who also have real jobs and mostly play creative arrangements of popular songs. I was dancing and singing along and hooting for the constant trombone or tenor sax solos and just having as much fun as I can with my clothes on. It was a euphoric feeling. When I think back on why I enjoyed that 90 minutes of brass-band music so much, it was because it wasn’t crowded or expensive or too long or happening when I should have been doing something productive. My fear-o-meter was low going in, and the musicians created an environment to which I could lock in for a fearless hour-and-a-half. I wasn’t really happy. I was really free from fear.

Sheri and I talk a lot about the importance of both physical and emotional safety in relationships on our Untoxicated Podcast. When the partner of an alcoholic never knows what she is going to get from her drinker, she lives in fear. Fear activates her nervous system into fight, flight, fawn or freeze mode. Nervous system activation is designed to protect us when we encounter a bear. It is not a healthy way to live our daily lives. My drinking wasn’t just damaging to me. My drinking was a chronic danger to Sheri’s health and survival even though our relationship was physically safe. The fear that enveloped Sheri because of my drinking was killing her.

Now that I’ve simplified all of my emotions down to one, fear or a lack thereof, the real trick is figuring out how to control my fear. I feel like Luke in episode four wearing that blinder shield wielding my lightsaber while Obi-Wan repeats that I need to let go of my fear and use the force to defend myself against the floating orb shooting stinging little laser blasts. I can hear Buddhist mantras telling me to be present, and I can think about that little girl at church who bounces gleefully down the center aisle even though she doesn’t even know the plan for lunch, let alone the plan for the rest of her life. The future will come to pass whether I fear it or not. Sure, it’s good to strategize and have a plan, but as I’ve learned in my first half-century, I have made so many different significant course changes that I can’t possibly know what my future holds. I am better off proudly using my accumulated knowledge to help me make decent decisions in real time than to try to use my stubborn will to manipulate the uncontrollable and unpredictable future.

So what’s my key to peace, joy, contentment and even euphoria?

Be fearless.

I’m afraid that’s easier said than done, but at least I have simplified my goals and aspirations. Wish me luck.

If you are ready to refine your goals and aspirations and leave the maladaptive coping mechanism that is alcohol behind, please consider joining us in SHOUT Sobriety.

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