Living Like You Mean It by Frederick Ronald J

Author:Frederick, Ronald J.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Published: 2010-05-10T16:00:00+00:00

DAY OF RECKONING

And so I started, in that quiet but pivotal moment, the work of taming my fear and making room to see what was really inside me emotionally. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was about to embark on an experience that would change the course of my life. It was fall 1994, a few months after graduating from my doctoral program, and it seems like a lifetime ago. I was a different person. In fact, as I look back, it’s hard even to recognize myself, hard to remember ever feeling that anxious. But I did.

From a very young age, I had learned to doubt my true feelings and to fear the consequences of trusting my feelings and revealing my true self. Although I had managed to move forward and accomplish a great deal, internally I was struggling. On a deep level, I still expected that something bad would happen if I really opened up and completely embraced the fullness of my emotional experience. The old wiring of my brain kept giving off warning signals, effectively reining me in and keeping my truest self from fully emerging.

Without my knowing it, I had developed a million different ways to avoid my true feelings and the fear that they engendered. For quite a while my defenses—staying busy, distracting myself, questioning and rationalizing away my feelings, dismissing or denying them—had worked to keep my anxiety at bay. But something inside me wouldn’t let up. The voice of my deepest self was aching to be heard and kept searching for a chink in my defensive armor.

It found a way out on graduation day. In the subsequent months, without the business of my academic pursuits to distract me, the surface had continued to crack. The feelings I had been running from were finally breaking through.

I realized that the time had come to stop running, to slow down, quiet the chatter in my head, and make space for what was going on inside me. If I was going to have the life I really wanted, I had to start to try to be aware of my feelings. Fortunately, I found my way to a wonderful therapist, who was able to help me. It wasn’t easy at first, because I had become quite the master of avoidance. In fact, the more I paid attention to what was going on inside me, the more I discovered all the clever little diversionary tactics I had developed over the years. I had had no idea just how skilled I had become at avoiding my feelings.

But I needed to become skilled at something very different. I needed to learn how to loosen the grip that anxiety had over my emotional experience. I needed to learn how to tame my fear.

And now I’m going to teach you what I learned.

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