The Fear Paradox by Frank Faranda

Author:Frank Faranda [Frank Faranda, PhD]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781642500585
Publisher: Mango Media
Published: 2020-04-03T07:12:07+00:00

For much of her life, Robin considered herself a people-pleaser, someone who liked to be liked and worked hard to be a good friend and eventually, a good partner in marriage. Her husband had been in therapy before, but Robin had never done any work on herself. Her husband suggested she go into therapy to work on her explosive anger that came out when they argued. The way Robin described it was that everything would be fine, and then all of a sudden, “it would all come out.” And unfortunately, the words she used weren’t just angry, they were mean.

Our initial work centered on helping Robin to become more in touch with her feelings, to notice the tiny moments of emotion, sensation, and feeling. This work proved valuable to her, and she felt hopeful. But as we began to look beneath the surface, Robin realized that she had no idea who she was. She didn’t know what her favorite movies were, what music she liked, or even why she had come to live in New York City.

With this emerging reality, we wondered together about where those feeling states of individuality were, why they were not known to her, and whether they even existed at all. Small moments of unacknowledged disappointment and emotional hurt led us to realize that she was missing important aspects of who she was. She wasn’t sure if she was dismissing them, rationalizing them away, or just not noticing them. But regardless, they were not available to her.

With time, as Robin began to check in more with her inner experience, she described the feeling of walking on eggshells with her husband. It was subtle, she told me, not so obvious—to her or to anyone else. She described a sensitivity she had to the needs of her husband, and to others more generally. She prided herself on being able to meet those needs. This could take the form of thoughtful actions, such as remembering to pick up her husband’s favorite cereal or sending a thank-you card to his mother. But in many ways, we discovered this “eggshell” experience was primarily an attempt to attune to her husband’s emotional state. She said that he wasn’t always so easy to read and that she considered herself pretty good at reading emotions, but not always his.

What began to unfold, in the work between us, was a growing awareness that somehow the “good childhood” she remembered was also a childhood in which she experienced a significant degree of restrictive fear. In her early childhood, she remembered that she had trouble sleeping alone and would often wake her mother for comfort. Her mother was reassuring and would sit with her daughter in her bed till she fell asleep. Robin also remembered having fears of burglars breaking into the house and kidnapping her. She worried about getting lost when they traveled and wanted to hold hands with her mom in public spaces up until she was at least twelve years old.

As we explored the nature of these memories one day, Robin had an image of her mother’s face come to mind.

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