by Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness
Your Relationship with Yourself & Life is in the Hands of Your Relationship with Fear
It probably goes without saying that fear is one of the most powerful forces moving through the human mind-body system – partly because it’s so ancient and primal:
But what if fear isn’t a problem, though? What if the only real problem is our relationship with it?
Depending on our relationship to fear, it can either make us run from (actual) danger, pay attention to what genuinely matters, and recognise when something isn’t ‘right’ or it can keep us trapped in lives that have become small and unreal by convincing us that the familiar is safer than the unknown.
The difference comes down to where our fear takes us is whether we own our fear or whether our fear owns us.
This is the second article in a series exploring the active and passive Shadow sides of different emotions:
The first article looked at anger but in this one we’re turning our attention to fear because learning to relate to fear in a REAL way is one of the most important skills we can cultivate if we want to keep growing real, overcome the Void, and become more whole.
Let’s dig a little deeper:
Emotions Are Energy, Not Truth
Before we get into fear specifically, it’s worth quickly revisiting three principles that help us understand emotions as a whole and how we can have a healthy relationship with them:
Emotional Principle #1: Emotions are not the TRUTH.
Emotions are important and definitely need to be faced but it’s really essential not to fall into the trap of treating emotions as being the final authority on reality itself.
The main reason for this is that emotions can contradict one another but nothing can contradict the truth:
This is why we can feel love and anger towards the same person, why we can feel excited and terrified about the same opportunity, and why we might be confident one day and doubtful the next.
Emotions also change and are temporary whereas the truth (not our interpretations of the truth) is absolute which means that – when all is said and done – the truth doesn’t suddenly become different because your nervous system and inner emotional landscape led to you having a ‘bad’ afternoon.
None of this means that we should ignore emotions – actually, quite the opposite:
We need to allow them to move through us so that we can become present enough to recognise what’s actually true instead of blocking them and becoming stagnated and fragmented because we get lost to distortions of perception.
Emotional Principle #2: Emotions are “e-motion: energy in motion”.
The next thing to really understand and embody is that emotions aren’t designed to sit permanently inside us and that allowing this to happen just causes inner tension, friction, frustration, and eventual misery.
Unfortunately, this kind of stagnation and ‘stuckness’ is exactly what happens when the ego concludes that a particular emotion threatens it and some way and so blocks the natural flow behind unreal beliefs and blocks:
This is because the ego follows a set of ‘rules’ about what’s acceptable or not in order to keep itself in place.
These ‘rules’ ultimately affect how we relate to our own emotions and the capacity we have to let them flow through us – here are some examples:
- “Men don’t get scared“.
- “I need to be confident“.
- “I can’t look weak“.
- “I need to look like I know what I’m doing“.
- “If I fail then people will judge me“.
- “I ‘should‘ be able to handle this“.
- Etc. etc. etc.
When an emotion contradicts these rules, the ego experiences it as a threat because facing these actual emotions will involve facing the shadow self and moving beyond the ego in its current form.
Emotional Principle #3: You have to feel it to heal it.
Carl Jung famously said that “What we resist, persists” which is a reminder that whatever we resist tends to get worse because resistance prevents the energy from completing its natural movement through the system.
This is why feeling fear is different from being controlled by fear:
Feeling it gives you information that you can make a CHOICE about but resisting it gives it power over you.
How Fear Enters the Shadow Self
Things end up being sent into exile in the Shadow Territory whenever they contradict the ego’s rules and the self-image we’ve constructed around them.
Fear is particularly good at exposing our inner contradictions (which are usually caused by the conflict between the ego and the shadow self which are always engaged in a kind of dance).
For example:
Imagine that you want to start a business but you can never quite get started in the way that you’d like to be able to – one ‘part’ of you knows that you’re ready but another ‘part’ is terrified and so nothing ever happens.
Despite your best intentions, your fear keeps whispering to you from beneath the surface of what you’re telling yourself about what you actually want:
- “What if nobody buys anything?“
- “What if I fail?“
- “What if people laugh at me?“
- “What if I lose money?“
- “What if I’m not actually good enough?“
- Etc. etc. etc.
At this point, the only thing that’s going to get you out of this type of inner conflict is a CHOICE and – in this case – it looks like this:
You can feel the fear and then spend some time investigating what’s actually true or you can resist and it stay ‘stuck’.
Resistance generally takes two forms – either suppression or unreal expression:
Suppression says something along the lines of “I’m not scared” (when you actually are) and so then you go distract yourself by doom-scrolling, working on something else that’s in your comfort zone, or telling yourself that you’ll do it tomorrow (though, of course, tomorrow never comes).
When you repeatedly suppress your fear in this way then your fear as a whole develops a Passive Shadow which means that your ownership of it is diminished and you lose all control and power over it.
Alternatively, you can express the fear in an unreal way which means that you DO something with it to get the energy out of your system but – because you’re not actually feeling what you’re feeling – you simply cast it outside of you in an unreal way:
Maybe you ‘research’ endlessly (when you already know enough), spend time drawing out elaborate plans (that you never act on), buy another course, build another spreadsheet, or do a plethora of other things that will help you eventually feel ‘ready’ – all of this ‘stuff’ feels like action but it’s unreal action because the ego is using activity to avoid the uncertainty that frightens it.
This kind of unreal expression done repeatedly creates the Active Shadow which means that the fear causes you to act in an unreal way instead of you using it to figure out how to act in a real way.
In both cases, fear has become your master because you have RESISTED what’s actually going on inside of you.
Let’s look at the Passive and Active Shadows of Fear in a bit more detail before diving into something that’s a bit more REAL:
The Passive Shadow of Fear
The Passive Shadow is what happens when fear gets pushed down and suppressed so it starts to influence your life indirectly:
It can look fairly respectable in some cases – almost like you’re consciously biding your time – and so you you may even end up calling your passive shadow “sensible” or “patience” whilst you’re doing your ‘research’ and waiting for the ‘right’ time.
What’s actually going on, though, is that you’re SCARED but you don’t want to own the fear by feeling it and moving through it.
The Passive Shadow of Fear most commonly shows up like this:
- Ignoring genuine risks because acknowledging them feels uncomfortable.
- Constantly seeking more information so that you’re finally ‘ready’ to act.
- Hesitating over important life decisions (usually until they pass you by).
- Holding yourself back from meaningful goals.
- Avoiding uncertainty and the unknown and trying to control or force everything (even though uncertainty and the unknown are always going to be part of life).
- Being passive about your purpose and being disconnected from your real values.
- Refusing to stand up for yourself when you need to.
- Staying in situations you’ve outgrown because they’re familiar (even if you don’t ‘like’ them).
- Continually choosing comfort over growth.
The particularly sneaky thing about fear’s passive shadow is that it doesn’t necessarily feel like fear – in fact, it can feel like nothing because you’ve put your inner barriers up and you’re blocking the flow of “e-motion, energy in motion“.
This is why:
- You don’t take the flight.
- You don’t have the conversation.
- You don’t submit the application.
- You don’t ask the question.
- You don’t leave.
- You don’t begin.
- Etc. etc. etc.
Life simply becomes smaller and smaller the more you suppress your fear and – because nothing dramatic or even that ‘bad’ happens – you can convince yourself that everything is ‘fine’ (even though the shadow of fear is still running the show the whole time and you’re living in the Void disconnected from your REAL life).
The Active Shadow of Fear
Like we already said, the Active Shadow is fear expressed through unreal action – this can look a little more like something real is happening and brings more energy into your world.
This is because the Active Shadow will literally DO ANYTHING besides actually feel the fear and so it turns into action that has an undercurrent of:
- Anxiety.
- Constant worry.
- Hyper-vigilance.
- Doubt.
- Overthinking.
- Trying to control everything (including the uncontrollable).
- Trying to predict every possible outcome.
- Creating endless contingency plans.
- Keeping yourself ‘busy‘ so you don’t have to feel what is happening underneath.
- Etc. etc. etc.
The Active Shadow of Fear often also masquerades as ambition and drive and so you become obsessed with achievement because it makes you feel temporarily safe (as though you found a way out of the Void – which is always the deeper problem).
You chase money, status, productivity, knowledge, and/or external validation because the next achievement promises that you’ll finally be ‘safe’ and ‘enough’.
The major problem with succumbing to the Active Shadow like this is that the finish line keeps moving because, really you’re only running because you’re afraid and no amount of running creates genuine safety.
Both shadows have the same underlying problem which is that they’re forms of resistance (and, ultimately, the only thing we can really resist is REALITY).
Real Fear and Unreal Fear
This is where things get interesting because not all fear is the same – in fact, we can broadly distinguish between Real Fear and Unreal Fear:
Real Fear is instinctual and is designed to keep you alive for as long as possible – if a car is hurtling towards you as you stroll down the pavement, for example, then you don’t need to sit down and journal about your relationship with fear…you jump out of the way.
If you encounter a poisonous snake in the woods, as another example, then your nervous system is going to do exactly what it evolved to do and will give you what you need to MOVE.
This type of ‘real’ fear is useful because it serves to protect you and keep you alive so you can keep growing real,
On the other hand, Unreal Fear is different because it’s often just emotional discomfort that a dysregulated nervous system interprets as physical danger when there’s no actual physical threat.
This is why sometimes your body might react as though something terrible and destructive is happening when – in reality – you’re really just about to do something uncomfortable:
Giving a presentation isn’t a tiger chasing you, neither is asking somebody on a date, publishing your work, setting a boundary, or starting on something you’ve never done before but your body might not know the difference.
This is where the famous acronym F.E.A.R. (“False Evidence Appearing Real“) becomes useful because it reminds us that our minds can create convincing stories about threats that don’t actually exist (and when we’re caught in the Passive or Active Shadow, those stories can become incredibly persuasive).
When Real is ‘Wrong’: The Spider That Wasn’t There
Imagine walking into a dark room and seeing something ‘move’ on the wall against the shadows – your brain registers “SPIDER!?” and then, before you’ve consciously processed what’s happening, you’ve recoiled in fear and jumped at least a few feet back.
Your heart is racing, your muscles are tense, and your focus has narrowed but, then…you turn the light on only to learn the actual truth:
There was no spider. It’s a shadow. The threat was unreal.
Even though your fear turned out to be factually ‘wrong’ the intention behind it was still real because your system was trying to protect you.
This distinction actually matters because fear isn’t stupid – it’s just trying to keep you safe and so even if gets things wrong sometimes this kind of Real Fear is still worth having (in case that shadow on the wall ever is a poisonous spider and you need to move fast).
The goal of integrating the shadow of fear isn’t, therefore, to destroy fear but to develop a real relationship with it where you can feel its message without automatically obeying it (you can’t stop yourself from recoiling, of course, that’s instinctual and beyond conscious control).
The REALNESS of Integrated Fear
This is what integrated fear looks like in comparison to the Passive or Active shadow expressions (when you’re dealing with Unreal Fear – if you’re being chased by a tiger then let it do it’s thing!):
- You feel the fear but you don’t immediately suppress it or act on it just to get the energy out of your system.
- Instead, you allow it to exist as “e-motion, energy in motion” and pay attention to what’s happening in your body (as physiological sensations without any ‘stories‘ attached).
- Maybe your heart beats faster, your stomach tightens, your breathing changes (short and shallow, usually), or you muscles tense up as you get ready for fight-or-flight.
- Basically, instead of making the feeling ‘disappear’ by resisting it in some way, you choose to just be present with it.
- The aim now is to investigate from this grounded place within yourself (which is always there because what’s real is always real) so you ask yourself some simple questions:
- “What is actually REAL here?“
- Is something or somebody actually threatening your safety? Or are you really just standing at the edge of something unfamiliar?
- Then you choose something REAL (instead of suppressing or expressing in an unreal way)
This is the difference between being ruled by fear because of resistance and owning it through integration.
Fear as Fuel
When fear is integrated, it becomes fuel for transforming your life and growing more real – not because the fear disappears but because you stop wasting energy fighting it.
This gives you access to the energy required to stretch beyond your current comfort zone so you can find your edge (which where you can feel the fear and still remain present enough to choose your response to life instead of acting automatically according to old and outdated patterns).
This is where you step into your courage which is really just the ability to feel fear without surrendering your agency to it.
You don’t need to become ‘fearless’ (you’re not a robot) but you do need to become capable of moving with and through fear so you can find your realness on the other side of all that “energy in motion”).
If you’re a man who wants to go deeper into shadow work and finding more balance then the Shadow Work Toolkit for Men can get you results.
Five Ways to Integrate Your Fear
1. Stop arguing with the feeling
When unreal fear appears, don’t immediately jump into telling yourself that you “shouldn’t” be afraid and, instead, just name what’s happening:
“I’m feeling fear” (not I AM fearful, etc.)
Notice where it lives in your body and then just let it be there – you don’t have to make it disappear but you’ll see that it’ll dissolve if you allow it.
2. Separate sensation from story
Fear produces physical sensations and then the mind then often creates a story about those sensations so learn to distinguish between the two.
“My chest is tight” is totally different to “I’m going to fail“, for example – the first is an experience but second is just an interpretation (and interpretations are never reality itself).
3. Investigate what’s actually ‘dangerous’ (if anything even is)
When fear appears then get used to asking something like:
“What’s the real threat here?”
If there is one, then respond appropriately but if there isn’t then you just uncovered an opportunity to move through discomfort rather than running from it (which almost always makes you more real).
4. Take one real step forward
Don’t try to conquer your entire fear in one heroic gesture but commit to taking the next real step if you can:
- Make the phone call.
- Have the conversation.
- Publish the article.
- Go to the class.
- Set the boundary.
- Start the project.
- Etc. etc. etc.
In short: do something that stretches you without requiring you to abandon yourself or end up in a panic.
5. Review what happened after it happened
After you’ve had to deal with fear for whatever reason then ask yourself what you LEARNED from the experience.
This teaches your nervous system something incredibly important which is that.
“I can experience fear and remain safe“,
Over time, the your Window of Tolerance becomes wider, your capacity for presence in yourself and life expands, and your life becomes more real.
The Final Word: Fear Doesn’t Need to Disappear
A real and integrated relationship with fear isn’t “I don’t feel afraid anymore” – that’s resistance – but knowing that “I can feel fear and still make a CHOICE“.
When fear is suppressed then it becomes passive and quietly shrinks your life but when it’s expressed in unreal ways through the ego then it becomes active and sends you running around like a headless chicken trying to control the uncontrollable.
On the other hand, when fear is felt, understood and integrated, then you become more capable of standing at the edge:
- You can feel the fear.
- You can let the energy move.
- You can check in on what’ s actually true.
- Then you can CHOOSE the real over the unreal.
When you own your fear rather than allowing it to own you, it stops being an obstacle to realness and becomes fuel for it.
Stay real out there,
P.S. If you’re caught up in the shadows and it’s holding you back then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you start taking real and integrated action.
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