Did you know that your soul has a built-in alert system? Fear is a key part of that system. While fear often feels like an unwelcome visitor, learning to understand its cues and lead yourself with care can help you calm fear so that your soul can function as God designed it to.
God designed you with a sophisticated, state-of-the-art system to alert you to danger in your environment. It’s your nervous system, which affects your emotions, perceptions, and nearly every decision you make. This inner alert system helps you keep yourself safe emotionally and physically.
The problem is that unhealed wounds from your past affect this system, influencing how you react to situations in your present. These reactions are embedded in your body and operate outside your conscious control. Without realizing it, your brain automatically jumps to conclusions about a present situation based on past conditioning.
THE FOUR FEAR RESPONSES:
1. Fight—attack, confront
2. Flight—flee, avoid
3. Freeze—numb, isolate
4. Fawn—please, win over
In the face of real threats, these responses are constructive. But trauma can cause your body to misread a threat. For example, it can cause you to react to minor threats—or even instances of healthy vulnerability—as if they were a major attack on your safety. Trauma can also cause you to under-react to actual threats. Your body can grow accustomed to a heightened state of arousal and stress. As a result, you might be drawn to the familiarity of stressful relationships.
When you sense danger, your inner alert system kicks into high gear.
You might already be familiar with the idea of a “fight, flight, or freeze” response. Your heart rate quickens, your palms grow sweaty, and your body grows tense as it prepares to protect itself. If you tend toward “fight,” you might get louder, physically act out, or run headfirst into a conflict. If you tend toward “flight,” you might run away, hide, or simply avoid any semblance of confrontation. If you “freeze,” you might find yourself shutting down altogether. You might disconnect from emotional cues as a way to tolerate the pain. This is what psychologists call disassociation.
Think about your own relationships: Do you run headlong into conflict (fight)? Or do you move away from it as fast as you can (flight)? Do you sometimes find yourself shutting down mentally or emotionally altogether (freeze)? Now, think back to when you were young. Do you remember when, where, or why you started to adopt that tendency?
The important thing to know is that these impulses are conditioned responses. Something happened outside of you that stirred up stress or fear inside of you. So your body figured out how to respond to protect itself. Over time, that response became reflexive. That means your body learned to respond to certain cues in the environment—without you even having a chance to think about it.
Here’s an example. As a young girl, maybe your mother criticized you constantly. At the time you didn’t know that what she was doing was cruel. After all, she was your mom, the only one you ever knew. But that criticism stirred up something negative inside you. It didn’t feel good. Your nervous system got activated and became poised to protect you. Maybe you chose to avoid your mom or hide from her jabs. Or maybe you fought back, learning how to land your own punches.
At some point, you received a reward or positive outcome for whichever path you chose. If you fought, you found that you could gain power. Sure, it wasn’t pleasant to argue with your mom, but at least you felt a rush of adrenaline as a result of standing up for yourself. If you fled, you found that you could avoid most of the pain. Sure, you sacrificed closeness with your mom, but at least you weren’t getting criticized.
All the while, your body was being conditioned by that behavior. As an adult, however, that conditioned response may no longer be appropriate for certain problems that surface. Maybe your partner, who is genuinely trying to be helpful says, “Hey, your shirt is on inside out.”
He’s kind, not critical, just looking out for you. But his words activate the same feelings your mom’s did in the past. Your body goes into fight mode, and suddenly you’re on the attack: “Stop criticizing me!” Your spouse, who wasn’t in fact criticizing you, is confused and dumbfounded. Your body took over and misread the cues.
Maybe you even know that you overreacted, prompting shame and embarrassment. But you can’t figure out how to stop this reaction to anyone who seems remotely critical.
Here’s the good news: you can learn to recognize the warning signs when your body is shifting into an fear response.
By noticing the fear within you before it takes over, you can create space between the automatic instinct and your reaction. This gives you the power to choose how you respond. With practice, you can harness fear to work for you instead of against you.
This blog post is adapted from Chapter 2 of The Best of You. Click here to get the first 3 chapters + a free Devotional toady!
