When Fear Takes Over
Other than anger, fear is the feeling I have the most. In the throes of his psychosis, I do not fear my son, but I do fear for him. Early on, I didn’t know what was happening to him, nor could I understand what to do about it. And then when we did get help, it was in the form of medications with terrible side effects, hospitalizations that locked me on the other side of the door from him, and civil commitments that interjected the law into our lives. And the words that are used in the world of mental illness can cause fear - words like manic, suicide, forced medication hearing (read more about that here).
In life, we don’t fear the small things. We only fear those things that threaten what’s dearest to us:
Family relationships
Peace
Health
Opportunities
Livelihood
Friendships
Normalcy
So what do we do when fear threatens to take over? Fear isn’t easily banished. But here are some ideas to help you face your fear, and channel it for good:
Understand the illness. Marie Curie said, “Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood.” The more I understood my son’s illness, the less I feared it. I started to recognize his behaviors for what they were - symptoms of an illness, not choices he was making to make my life difficult. I started to learn the difference between can’t and won’t, and changed my expectations for him based on what I knew.
Celebrate the fear. Acknowledging and accepting the fear as an appropriate response to the threats at hand lessens its intensity.
Make a choice. You have the ability to stop fear from making decisions for you. The fearful thoughts you find yourself falling for are just that - thoughts. And a thought can be changed, or ignored just as easily as it can be acted on. Mindfulness is a good practice for this; I have found that practicing mindfulness helps me see my thoughts as clouds going by without chasing them and increasing my fear. Tiny Buddha is a website I frequent often to help me with this.
Soothe yourself. Stretch. Take a hot shower. Don’t forget to breathe - close your eyes for five minutes and focus on your breath entering and leaving your body. Let those thoughts pass by like a cloud floating by, or a balloon slipping away into the sky. Speak compassionately to yourself - tell yourself you’re enough. You’re doing the best you can. You are amazing.
Fear is normal. Fear can overtake us and make us think things are more wrong and overwhelming than they really are. Recognizing that fear is a normal response to the experiences you’re having, and acknowledging that, keeps us from catastrophizing events. It is completely natural to feel the way you’re feeling.
Rainer Maria Rilke wrote:
So don’t be frightened, dear friend, if a sadness confronts you larger than any you have ever known, casting its shadow over all you do. You must think that something is happening within you, and remember that life has not forgotten you; it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall. Why would you want to exclude from your life any uneasiness, any pain, any depression, since you don’t know what work they are accomplishing within you?
When fear threatens to take over, remember that it is normal to be afraid. You don’t have to allow it to make your choices for you. And it may very well be accomplishing something special and surprising within you.