Fear is a Bugger
Fear is a bugger. It buggers your brain. It
buggers your thinking and your feeling and your choosing. In the long run, fear
buggers your life. When fear happens your brain gets hijacked by the ancient
survival driver. The survival driver asks only one question. "What can I do
right now that will make me feel safe." When the survival driver gets an answer
to that question, he acts and you are buggered. So the question becomes, "how do
you debugger your brain?'
You may remember Abraham Maslow from your psychology 101 class a million
years ago. Maslow thought that the needs of humans are organized in hierarchical
fashion. We rise through this hierarchy like climbing a ladder. We move up the
ladder one rung at a time. You can't skip rungs. Maslow thought the most basic
needs were those that linked directly to physiological processes. Those needs
include air, water, food, and sleep. If you don't get those things you will die
(or at least be very cranky in the case of sleep). For most of us, most of the
time, basic, physiological needs are met. This is not a problem and so it does
not bugger your brain.
The next rung on the ladder is safety. We need to feel safe. People will work
really hard to feel safe. Like physiological needs, most of us don't live lives
where our actual safety is very often threatened. But many of us spend a lot of
time feeling unsafe - afraid - even when we are safe. This is the part where we
get buggered.
Children are born able to feel safe. But certain things have to happen to
bring that ability to flower. The child must learn that bad things don't happen
very often and when they do that their parents will know how to make things
right and keep them safe. That learning is about trust. The child especially
must learn that their parents don't make bad things happen. Things like pain,
fear, shame, hurt, hunger, cold, and so forth. If the child learns those things
then the fear part of the brain remains normal sized and the brain does not get
buggered. But if a child doesn't learn that they are safe, then the fear part of
the brain gets super-sized. Incidentally, if bad things happen anytime in life,
the fear part of the brain may get super-sized and the brain may thereby get
buggered.
If the fear part of the brain gets super-sized, it generates persistent fear
warnings. That fear gets to feel normal. Many of the people I work with tell me
that they have never felt safe. That is how it feels if your brain is buggered.
You are always afraid. I wish you could just turn off the part of your brain
that keeps telling you that you are in danger. You can't. Nor can proving to
yourself that you are safe by having enough money, enough friends, enough sex,
enough anything turn off the fear buggered part of your brain.
The fear part of the brain keeps asking the same question and acting the same
way. It keeps protecting you against the threat that is not really there.
Protection is exactly the right thing to do where there is real danger. You were
built to do that and most of us do that just fine. But when we protect ourselves
because the buggered brain alarm is going on constantly, we make lots of
mistakes. We stay safe but we never learn to trust because we never feel safe.
Protecting yourself from the outside will never let you feel safe on the inside.
Protection does not work to allow the feeling of safety to emerge because
protection is predicated on fear. Protection requires fear. Only by experiencing
fear and the reality that we are safe despite the fear, can we come to trust
ourselves finally.
The guy who is driving the fear brain is very efficient, but he is not very
smart. He does not think beyond the moment. Remember that he was there when you
were born and he is no older than that now. He will use whatever is available to
gain a feeling of safety. That is why our buggered brains are confused. He will
use sex, or booze, or hiding, or pretending something isn't happening, or lying
to appease or escape, or running away, or beating up, or crying, or yelling, or
pouting, and a whole bunch of other stuff to create the feeling of safety. He
will try to get you to "fall in love" or join a bunch of people or make a lot of
money or become a religious fanatic or a thousand other things to get to that
sense of safety. But, it never works. It never works because it is protection
and protection requires fear and fear buggers your brain.
Only the truth will heal the fear buggered brain. There are two truths
really. The truth about what is really going on outside you in the world and the
truth about who you are inside. The truth about what is going on outside is that
you are safe. Sure there are real threats in the world, but they are few and far
between. When your fear buggered brain heals enough to dial down the fear alarm
you will still be able to detect real threats and act protectively. You will be
better prepared actually because you will no longer be responding to the
persistent false alarms. The truth about who you are inside is that you are
enough. You can think and act and love and create and connect and live. Even if
really bad things did happen you would be just fine. It takes time and work to
get those two truths straight. It takes time to unbugger your brain enough to
allow you to live in reality. Sometimes I think this is why Jesus and the Buddha
and other transcendent folks discouraged materialism. It is hard to know and
feel the truth when you are protected by stuff.
One of the problems in unbuggering your fear brain is that it likes to get
dressed up in costumes. Sometimes fear gets dressed up like anger. Sometimes it
dresses up like arrogance. Sometimes it likes to look self-righteous. Sometimes
it gets dressed up in hyperactive obsessive rationality. Sometimes it gets
dressed up in dependent depression. Sometimes it dresses up like a very nice and
compliant boy or girl. "Yes of course mummy, I would love to scrub the toilets
with my bear hands." "Yes of course Daddy, I will hug you and tell you I love
you just after you have walloped my bear five year old bottom with a razor
strap." Fear has trouble feeling proud of itself and so it wears disguises. Fear
is afraid that if it shows up without a costume, bad things will happen. Fear
has learned to protect itself by looking like something else.
So how can you unbugger your brain? The steps are simple but not easy and
they take time. First, you have to get the intellectual idea that your brain has
been buggered and so you are probably not dealing with reality. Next you need to
learn to recognize your own fear. That is easy when the fear is naked. It is
more difficult when you have to undress the fear first. That is why people
usually get into recovery after hitting bottom. Hitting bottom undresses your
fear automatically and you can see pretty clearly how buggered your mind is.
Later, as you grow in recovery, your fear will probably be disguised again. A
good rule is to recognize that most strong feelings like anger, sadness, guilt,
and shame, have fear at their root. When you notice you are feeling those
things, ask yourself what you are afraid of. When you affirm the reality that
there is little real danger and the reality that you have what it takes to deal
with your difficulties, you have taken a step. You have to take this step many
thousands of times before you begin to notice the progress. But in time you will
notice that you can feel your naked fear, use your intelligence to unbugger your
brain, solve your problems in healthy and productive ways, and move forward in
your life. That is how you unbugger your fear brain. It is an important thread
in the fabric of recovery.
