familiarity can lessen the amount of fear that I feel, in some instances it never seems to go away altogether. I have spoken publicly on many occasions since I began my recovery. Even though I can give a speech today without much discomfort, the first several I gave were nerve-wracking. Although I am much more comfortable speaking in public these days, I still get nervous before I speak. No matter how well I know the topic or how prepared I am, I still get butterflies in my stomach. I have found this to be a natural, normal part of the process of public speaking.
Another factor that plays a part in the level of fear I feel seems to depend upon how badly I want or need whatever it is that I am going after—or, should I say, how much I have convinced myself that I want or need it. Even though it is easier for me to ask a woman out on a date these days, the greater my desire to spend time with her, the more difficult it is for me to ask.
I remember when I really wanted a job—my second full-time job. It would pay very well, and even though I was a nervous wreck when I started the job, I eventually made it a career. The amazing thing is that today I can see that I kept that job because I was afraid I couldn’t replace the income it provided with my level of education at that time. I let fear convince me that I couldn’t do any better. That may have been true because all I had at the time was a high school education; I understand now that I could have gone back to school. Fear made me lazy by convincing me that I couldn’t get through college. Real or imagined, fear is fear. It works on me by eroding my life—
if I let it.
While some people say that there are irrational fears—like my fear of not being able to find a better job—I never try to tell anyone that the fear they feel is not rational. After all, it is rational to them, at least for the time being. Until they expose themselves to the fear and move through it repeatedly, until they come to see the truth, their fear will remain rational and very real to them.
I just call it working my way through the fear. I wrote this book to show others how I learned to work my way through the fears I find in my life today. It is my desire to share what I have learned that makes me want to do this, because what works for me can also work for you. I’m not a clinician, but I am speaking from my own experience. My experience tells me that I need to keep it as simple as I can when it comes to something as complicated and pervasive as fear.
Today I see two major characteristics of my fear. The first characteristic is that it wears many faces and changes them as often as it needs to in order to keep me off balance. The second is that it follows me around all the time, waiting for the opportunity to pounce on me like a lion on a mouse.
Since I have found a way to deal with my fear today, and since I don’t see it packing its bags and leaving anytime soon, I have decided to look at fear as just a part of the process, of any process, including the process of life.
While I don’t mean to try to diminish the impact of fear by saying it is just part of the process, what I do intend to do is cut it down to size in my head and in my life. My hope is that you too will come to see fear as just part of the process of everyday life.
Like many things in life, we know fear isn’t going away; we know it keeps us from doing things we want to do; we know it makes us nervous, sweaty, and uncomfortable.
Now let’s take a look at how we can learn to take this monster and make friends with it, or at least shake hands with it and become more comfortable with each other.
Let’s take a look at “the man behind the curtain,” see him for what he is, and deal with him as just another part of the process of living a happy, productive life, a life where we turn fear from a debilitating monster into a tool we can use to our advantage.
When it comes to fear, I think the best thing to do is to feel it, face it, and grow.
I used for many years because of fear. It ran my life like a drill sergeant at boot camp. I did what it told me to do, and I did it for so long that it became my nature. Generally, it told me to run. “Run away from what scares you” is what fear whispered into my ear. Since running was what I did most, I became really good at it. They say that fight or flight are the two main responses to fear. I chose flight so often that I’m surprised I didn’t turn into an airplane. Flight became my only mode of dealing with fear. The more I ran, the stronger my fear grew, and often because of the simplest of things. Soon I became afraid of more and more things. Eventually I was living in a state of near-constant paranoia; I was running from everything in my life, and I didn’t deal with much of anything.
For years I had so many fears running my life that I didn’t know which way to turn, so I turned to alcohol and drugs to help me not to feel the fear. It worked for a while. In fact, it worked right up until it quit working; but by that time, it was too late. My friends (alcohol and drugs) had not only abandoned me, but had turned on me. When I reached this point, I was not only full of fear, but I couldn’t stop drinking and drugging, either. While I choose not to blame fear for my drinking and drugging, I have discovered that the fear was there long before I began abusing alcohol and drugs.
One of my biggest fears during my younger years was women. The more attractive they were, the more I wanted them, and the more fear I felt. It began so long ago, I could actually say it was a fear of girls. Two instances come to mind of my ability to deal or to not deal with my fear of girls while I was in high school.
When I was fourteen, I fell madly in love with my best friend’s sister. She was about three years older than I was, and she graduated during my freshman year. I never saw her at school because we were on split shifts—the juniors and seniors went to school in the morning and the freshmen and sophomores went in the afternoon—but I hung out with her younger brother, so none of that mattered. I still saw her often, and as I now look back, I think it was clear to anyone watching, that I was crazy about her. And she knew it too! Halfway through my freshman year I told her that when I got my driver’s license, I would take her out for dinner and a movie. Her reply was simple. She said, “That sounds like fun.” Little did I know that I would never muster the courage to follow through with my promise. Even though I knew she would go out with me, when I got my license I simply couldn’t gather the nerve to actually ask her out. Fear dictated that I mustn’t follow through on this promise. It was only the beginning of the many opportunities I would miss in my life thanks to having this selfish, manipulative, controlling entity running the show.
While in high school there was another girl, a girl I graduated with, who grabbed my attention. She was homecoming queen, prom queen, and, of course, one of the most popular girls in school. I idolized her from afar; to approach her would have been too much.
To this day, I occasionally wonder what life might have been like if I had acted on either one of these desires. For many years—all through my drinking days, as I remember them—I relived these dreams with regret and remorse. Today I find a fondness has replaced the regret in these daydreams. I no longer wish I had done things differently. I simply enjoy the feeling of love I had for those two women as I let the daydream of what life might have been like play across my mind. While I reminisce, I wish them all the best. Of course, I have come a long way from those fear-filled days of yesteryear, but those were the days when my drinking and drugging began.
For the longest time, drinking gave me a sense of courage. It was never enough to do the things I really wanted to do—like ask one of those girls out on a date—but it was usually enough to get me to do other things or ask out other girls, ones who didn’t intimidate me quite as much. Alcohol and drugs are like that: they provide courage while at the same time tilting the brain into thinking things through in a far-from-rational manner. This often leads to doing silly, crazy, or just plain stupid things.
