Resisting, Insisting and Fear

Fear grabs you and demands that you pay attention and prepare to handle what may be a threat. A simple version of fear: “Is that a stick or a snake?” When fear arises, we meet the unknown, what we don’t understand: in the moment, in our familiar experience, or existentially. Without understanding, the physical feeling intensifies. Fear insists that you pay attention. The need to know and understand in life is hardwired to be compelling. Many people love to watch thriller and adventure movies because the intensely alive feeling of fear is triggered and the resolution is slowly or explosively or compellingly revealed. We end up with blazing triumph, chilling relief, or a haunting curiosity, depending on how the understanding is delivered. It’s easy to see how these versions of pleasure can be addicting; if you can just stay put in your seat, heart pounding, you earn a gift of understanding and relief.

Working with clients in therapy involves carefully identifying the binding between “a rock and a hard place.” For example: A college student says: “I’m about to graduate college with a degree in a field that doesn’t interest me. I’m expected to get a good job that I don’t want to do.” Or a woman in her forties says: “I want to leave my marriage but my spouse has just been diagnosed with cancer.”

The college student who lets himself off the hook of doing a job he’s not interested in, must ask himself what else he’d like to do. What does turn him on? In his session, not knowing the answer to this question is scary. He’s been hiding from fear by pretending he doesn’t care, by acting as if he’s got it all together. Feeling the fear now, he’s willing to listen. At first, he reports that he hears nothing inside: “Crickets.” He’s sweating and rubbing his hands together, swallowing repeatedly, now looking at me with some panic in his eyes. We agree that he’s making a commitment to just be curious and find out what really attracts and interests him, what has meaning to him for his own thriving. His knee begins to jump rhythmically as he gazes out the window. When he looks back at me, he has the ghost of a smile. I ask, “Got an idea of what that might be, have you?” He grins and ducks his head, getting up to pull on his jacket and head out the door.

Interest and curiosity move us toward the pleasure of understanding if we orient to the present moment. Here and now is when and where we are alive. Right now look up and take in, through all of your senses, the whole field of this moment. Take your time.

I do this too, lifting my hands from the keyboard, and begin to smile. We’re hanging out in this moment without insisting or resisting, somewhere between knowing and not knowing.

What are you noticing? What in you moves freely, with some excitement, right now? Can you sense the rest of us present with you, swirling on your periphery, like the iridescence on a soap bubble? Or like a pod of skydivers grinning at each other while the planes that dropped us lift away?

…Okay, where were we? Sitting with the bind of insisting and resisting.

The woman in her forties who says “I want to leave my marriage but my spouse has been diagnosed with cancer” is distraught. We have been sitting for months with her caged feeling brought on by dutiful promises made decades ago which remain frustrated, unfulfilled. She cycles through frustrating empathy for her suffering spouse, her dread and grief, her fear and longing for her own space, her own journey into something fresh and enlivening. Today, each time the bars of her cage are rattled and kicked, the feeling of compression intensifies: cold panic, hot guilt.

Pausing, she settles into stillness. There are sounds of construction next door, power tools roaring in short bursts. She smiles wryly and asks when they’re going to burst through the wall. I nod and murmur, “Mmmmm, burst through the wall?” Her smile fades.

After a time, she looks up again, taking a deep breath, letting it go, looking around again. She says,”If I stand outside this cage of a marriage and look back at it, it’s empty. He’s gone from it too.”

She gasps, sobbing, her face in her hands. As the wave subsides, I offer her words again with the slightest bit of a question: “He’s gone from it too?”

Her eyes widen and she says it again: “He’s gone from it too…he’s also free.” Another deep breath. She looks around the room again, as if arriving just now. “We’re both free.”

She adds,”Whatever happens with the cancer, we could both be free.” She looks at me, and we nod together. I affirm: “You could both be free.”

As I watch her absorb this new understanding of her bind, I wonder again whether her husband’s cancer expresses his wish to also be free of their marriage. It seems that she’s confirming this for herself right now. This changes the equation that needs solving: she senses that they could have a good result in common.

What’s present in the moment when resisting and insisting resolve into understanding?

You can proceed toward light and air, toward what you love and value, toward freedom and growth. Your interest, curiosity and desire naturally increase the pressure of the bind so as to propel you through the release of fear into relief. Just like inhale and exhale, every shift is prompted by contacting a limit, and the release from that limit feels good. As with breathing, survival may be served by release, but what about thriving? What about staying present with curiosity until a deeper understanding dawns, reaching a threshold of satisfaction and relaxing into fulfillment?

Any minute now, a thought, an impulse will arise. There’s a gentle lift of the waving, humming, flowing energy in your body that’s there all the time. Suddenly a bit more buoyant, like a wave organizing and swelling as it gets closer to shore…

What if you’re free to navigate without a plan and without conviction: imprisonment in a cage you’ve built for yourself? With ease and presence in the big field of this moment, can you trust that interest and curiosity will guide you, and if fear arises, can you stay present long enough to accept the gift of understanding? These moments can crest into a fresh, simple pleasure, reaching a threshold of satisfaction and relaxing into fulfillment.

Take all the time you want with that feeling; these waves roll through all the time. Just notice.