What If Fear Made You A Powerful Force In the World?
What If Fear Made You A Powerful Force In the World?
How “Your Body. My Choice. Forever.” undid me until I put myself back together
Who would you be if everything that scared you gave you courage? In last week’s newsletter on Women, Power & Fear, I wrote, “I’m challenging every one of us to take responsibility for our fear and find ways to manage it by changing our beliefs so we can stop being afraid of things that truly don’t endanger us and take action to exercise whatever power we do have for things that do legitimately threaten us and those we love.” I had no idea that in the next few days, I’d have a reason to do just that—thanks to a seven-word text.
In this month’s InPower Women’s Mastermind, we take fear head-on, finding ways to turn anxiety in the mind and heart into empowering action in realistic and authentic ways that build our personal power to affect meaningful change in the world. Here is the question I challenged all of us to confront last week:
If you took responsibility for your fear, who might you become?
Listen to an audio recording of this post.
In the last five days, I’ve been sitting with the question above and as I write this, I’m a mess. As evidence, I submit for your consideration my outline for this week’s newsletter, which has been evolving over the last week.
REMINDER: This month’s InPower Mastermind Zoom session and chat are open to all paid and free subscribers. See below for link.
Last Friday, three days after the election, I sat on a train to Philadelphia going to a client meeting. I got up at 4:30 am to catch the train, and I needed two very large cups of coffee to get my brain online. My plan had been to start drafting this post about fear on the train. My brain kicked into gear around 7:30 am, and I jotted down ten words with a black pen on the white piece of paper that now appears in the picture above. My thoughts were a jumble. What could I advise anyone about dealing with fear? I have all my canned coaching responses that work in 1-1 calls when I can apply advice very personally, but I wasn’t sure any of them would be sufficient for what I was personally feeling after the election and what I’d seen in my social media feeds over the last few days.
With an hour left to ride, I noticed that the guy next to me was a Black man. I had thoughts I’d never had before, “How had the two of us voted in the election? I can’t tell who’s on ‘my side’ by demographic anymore. Had we betrayed each other?” My rational brain reminded me I could never have known who was on ‘my side’ by demographic, that these thoughts were demeaning to both of us, and that ‘taking sides’ out of anxiety was a problem I worked to help people move beyond. But my biased brain–the one running with my heart in circles on this new conundrum–just added to the confusion I experienced when it came to finding advice about handling fear and discomfort. I realized I was still, personally, sitting in a lot of discomfort and not a small amount of fear.
The gentleman next to me then took out his laptop and brought up a few news articles that told me he and I had voted the same way. I relaxed into watching the landscape whizz by and decided to simply witness my biased brain running away with itself, put off thinking about this post, and catch up on the news. The first thing to pop up in my social feed was this.
“Your body. M,y choice. Forever.” - Nick Fuentes
It’s hard to explain how I felt as these words and their implications sunk into my body, bypassing my brain. I wasn’t focused on the political irony Fuentes tried to instigate with this quote. I wasn’t focused on the fact that I was probably reacting exactly as he hoped I would. I think the closest actual feeling I had was simple numbness. I didn’t even notice until several days after the fact that numbness is how my body reacts to violations of all kinds, and always has, since my own experience with sexual violence as a child (see last week’s post.)
Sitting on the train–dreading what I would find–I looked for evidence that since the election, women and girls had experienced increased levels of threat. Of course, I found it. I remembered that I wasn’t alone in feeling unsafe and fearful at a visceral level and that maybe I would have to address Fuentes’ toxic words in this article if I ever got around to writing it. Lucky for me, the train pulled into the station about then, I found a polite way to acknowledge to my traveling companion that our interests were aligned and refocused myself on facilitating a strategy session for my clients.
For seven blissful hours, I immersed myself in interpersonal communication challenges and organizational dynamics. Then I got back on the train, having forgotten all about my morning angst over biases, confusion, and threat levels until a young man got on at Baltimore to sit next to me with his fat headphones and laptop. He looked for all the world like a tech-bro, and all the anxieties that had been on the train with me that morning came back. Was he on ‘my side’ or was he a “Your body. My choice.” guy? I put my own headphones on and tuned out.
Over the weekend, I curated my news intake carefully to preserve my peace so I could enjoy some time with house guests, all the while dreading writing this article on Monday morning. I figured I’d do what I always do and come up with some good thoughts, generalizing my 1-1 advice to our larger situation of feeling unsafe. I kept watching some of the news about how women and girls were experiencing hatred from men and boys hurled at them with the “your body, my choice” lens, and I continued to feel numb and uncomfortable, especially about the younger girls hearing it from male classmates.
Then, about an hour before I sat down to write this, just as I was saying goodbye to my house guests, I had a text exchange with a male friend. He made a very small comment–about seven words–which, in retrospect, I realized was meant to make me feel good—and I found myself short of breath, panicked and flooded with anxiety and fear. I was so upset that I couldn’t even respond to his effort at a compliment.
I didn’t understand anything except that his text had triggered me into an emotional state that I couldn’t comprehend. I was shutting down. I managed to compartmentalize my reaction enough to see off my friends warmly and then sat at my computer to write this post.
How fear shuts down our power
I couldn’t do it.
I couldn't even write pablum or crap. I couldn't even make shit up (which I’m normally really good at.) I was numb, and my mind was blank.
In that moment, Fuentes had won. My power to affect change had been nullified. The world had silenced me by using public messages to trigger my personal traumas. The world had put me into a prison of my own fear.
And this, I remembered, is how our inner fear is wielded as a weapon against us. This is how our inner powerlessness keeps us powerless in the external world.
It’s a pattern I see in my clients day in and day out. It’s a pattern I see in the ways that powerful people keep other people powerless, and powerless people talk themselves out of even trying to achieve power in the world.
It’s how the world breaks women’s relationship with their own power.
It’s a pattern I see in even the most powerful women I know. Every person who has power in the world (and those who don’t), women and men, often carries seeds of powerlessness inside them. Personal trauma, the imposter’s voice, or unchallenged insecurities lurk in us all, just waiting to take us down and rob us of our will to make a change in ourselves and in the world. People who want power over us know this instinctively. They prey on it. They prey on us.
Sitting at my computer, wrangling my heart and mind, I put all my unrelated distractions outside the door of my office (they’ll come back, they always do) and managed to focus enough to use my own detriggering tool (which works for me 98% of the time) to try defusing the fritzy emotions keeping me unproductive so I could get my voice back. For the first time in a very long time, I was unable to get out of the fear state so I could process related emotions like anger, guilt, and shame.
I was stuck, paralyzed in terror, and though my mind knew I’d (probably) completely overblown my reaction to the seven words in my friend’s text, I watched like a spectator as my mind ran through scenarios about how this very good friend was trying to hurt and humiliate me with his words. I knew for a fact that this was (probably) incorrect, but what I “knew” was completely irrelevant. I ran down many rabbit holes of narratives I understood from my own life and the lives of other women. My mind knew all this was (probably) bullshit, but my heart didn’t. And the collision of the two kept me in a triggered state of fear.
Using my tools, I was able to isolate my reaction to a personal trigger around humiliation that ran deep through my past. I understood then: He (probably) didn’t mean for it to happen, but I felt humiliated reading his text.
I was still afraid, but I breathed a shaky sigh of relief. Now, I could stop focusing on him. I knew what was in me, and that was something I could work with.
Accepting responsibility for my fears
If you read my article last week and wondered what the hell I was talking about, “taking responsibility for your own fear,” this is what it looks like.
Step One: Acknowledge what you feel and claim it as yours
Keying in on the sense of humiliation, I put the (probably) fictional narratives about my friend in a box so I could focus on my own feelings of humiliation. Whether my friend or Nick Fuentes intended me to feel these feelings had become secondary; they were now mine, and only I could deal with them.
I stopped to focus on all the pieces of my fear, all the ways the outside world made me afraid of being shamed and humiliated. Resisting against every instinct, I didn’t push the scary emotions away. I let myself feel them. I let myself sit with the ugly feelings inside me, yelling silently at my friend that he should have known better, bringing back memories of shame and terror from things that happened to me when I was three, four, seven, twelve, seventeen, twenty-four, forty-seven, fifty-eight, and now sixty-two years old. I focused on this current sense of humiliation, stewed in it, and let it be real in my heart. I broke down the fear and humiliation into its most important piece parts. Nausea built.
I felt afraid because I was raped by a young man when I was seven.
I felt afraid because I had experienced objectification by men and boys in my life.
I felt afraid because other women had objectified themselves, making me believe at a subconscious level that my woman’s body was a source of shame.
I felt afraid because a misogynist who appears determined to use the power of the United States government against bodies like mine will have four years (and smarter-than-him accomplices) to try to make this happen.
I felt afraid because too many other US citizens support this agenda and are now even more emboldened to turn women’s fear against us as threats, and I could end up in this mix because I work to make women powerful.
I felt afraid because a man I trusted said something that felt insensitive to the moment I was in, at a moment when I was vulnerable, and he (probably) didn’t mean to humiliate me, but I felt humiliated anyway.
All these things that had been done to me left me with nothing to say.
And I sat in the fear of it all, aware that my mind and body were still experiencing some numbness. I accepted that this was part of the fear, a protective reaction to a deeper sense of helplessness and powerlessness.
I let it be real and hated every second of it.
Step Two: Take action and make choices about what you control
After I accepted that the fear left in me from others’ actions was mine to deal with, I began to process it. Anger came next. I would be justified for being angry at every single person who’d done me wrong, and even my friend who (probably) didn’t mean to. And none of that would change the fact that my own fear held me captive. None of that fear and anger would change a damned thing. I let the anger exist in my heart. I didn’t absolve anyone of blame, but I accepted responsibility for dealing with what had been left behind by their actions, parsing out what I could control and committing to take action.
There’s so much I don’t control.
What I do control are the stories I let rent space in my head that I choose to believe. I control what media I consume that feeds these stories. I control how I show up to my friends, to my clients, to my subscribers, and to everyone I meet every day.
There are actions I can take to process these feelings and change the stories in my head.
The first action I could take was to call my friend and satisfy myself that he didn’t mean to humiliate me with his comment. I tried to talk myself out of this call, not wanting to make a mountain out of a molehill–it was seven words!--not wanting to indicate to him that I didn’t trust him, not wanting to make my trigger his problem, not wanting to risk our friendship with my stupid insecurity, not wanting to be vulnerable and explain that my fear of men dictating things about my body stemmed from an ugly incident I thought was behind me. The list went on.
But I needed to hear him tell me what he’d meant, and I needed my heart to hear that it (probably) had nothing to do with humiliating and shaming me. Because everything real to my heart up to that moment–everything triggering me–was just crap I’d made up in my own mind; assumptions and conclusions I jumped to about his intentions, judgments I made about what he should or shouldn’t have known about me before he typed those words into text, and stories I told myself about how men just didn’t get it, and maybe my friend was a secret woman-hater or un-self-aware asshole.
So I picked up the phone and asked him what he meant by the text. He was the friend I thought he was. He told me his truth, and I shared that it had landed on me differently. It brought us closer. I relaxed. I let all those BS stories about him go. I was still upset, but not at him anymore. The trigger he’d tripped over was gone. The path was open now, and I could process the rest of it. I could transform the fear into anger at the world for victimizing me when I was helpless to do anything about it, the guilt that my girl-child’s body was the cause, the sadness that my pain is but a thin echo of billions of women’s horror through time, curiosity for how this incident reminded me I had more processing to do, gratitude that I could turn this situation into a Mastermind lesson in accepting responsibility for my fear.
I had my voice back. I sat down and started typing this newsletter.
Your power lies in making choices about things you control
Every time we’re triggered into fear, anger, guilt, shame, and sadness, we have the opportunity to go through this process, to let go of what we don’t control and use what we do control to mitigate our fear with choices and actions that express our agency and power in the world. Each of these choices gives us a little more power, and they begin to build on each other. I’ve done this thousands of times over the last twenty years.
Every time I choose not to process the fear, a little more powerlessness lays itself over my heart. Another layer of fear and helplessness settles into my identity. My vulnerability expands when I ignore the unprocessed fear and try to express an act of power in the world.
This is true for little things and big things, and before long–by letting the layers build up–the little things gain the power to ignite the whole pile, trapping me in the belief that I am powerless.
So I go back to releasing the little thing–the text, or offhand comment, or social media attack–in the process chipping away at the whole, big pile.
It’s exhausting in the moment, and energizing when the process is done. And the process never ends. Never. We’re either building a bigger, more flammable pile, or we’re removing layers of kindling one at a time. On and on.
Every time I choose to focus on what I control and use it to process my fear, I open up. I become more clear-eyed. I gain more inner power to do what I can, where I can, when I can in the outside world. I make a bigger difference, one thing at a time, and those things add up.
Want to mitigate the risk of fear-based reactions shutting you down? Use the Mastermind exercise below to start chipping away at whatever fear is up for you right now. Keep it handy. There’s always more to come.
JOIN US: All subscribers are welcome to explore these themes more deeply by joining our monthly InPower Mastermind Zoom call on November 20th 12PM-1PM Eastern. Put this link in your calendar. to join the call and feel free to share your thoughts on the exercises below in Chat any time through the month.
Taking responsibility for your fear
REFLECTION AND ACTION STEPS
Now it’s your turn. Think of a fear holding you back right now. Center yourself in it and use the prompts below to unpack it, process it, and move beyond it.
How to use this reflection: Take at least ten minutes to reflect on these questions. Get away from your computer and set your phone timer if you need to so you can put your todos and worries outside the door to take a few steps back from the normal. Your worries will be there when you’re done. Have something handy to jot notes on (scrap paper, a journal, this PDF) and review the prompts below or listen to this audio version (pausing the recording to jot notes and let your inner wisdom speak up and be heard. Download this worksheet to help you.
Listen to an audio recording of this exercise.
Get into the right headspace:
Take some deep breaths and center yourself.
Ask all your worries and distractions to go outside and wait behind a closed door (They’ll still be there when you’re done, I promise.)
Think of a situation that makes you feel powerless, afraid of being authentic, or unwilling to stand up for things you value
Find these feelings in your body. (If they feel icky, hold there for a minute. This is important that you FEEL it in order to EVOLVE it.)
Give your FEAR a NAME (my humiliation fears are “Agatha” after a classmate in elementary school who was bullied for being fat.)*
Focusing on what is real: (Be honest with yourself)
What assumptions are you making that give FEAR’S NAME reason to be in this helpless state?
What actions could you take to validate these assumptions? To find out which ones are true and which ones are bullshit?
What judgments are you making about yourself or others as ‘good or bad’? If you reserve judgment for a bit and stop labeling things good/bad, what else can you see? What new information comes to you?
Reflect on these questions (let the feelings flow and do not edit your inner voice; do not judge what comes up so you may understand your feelings more deeply):
Ask FEAR’S NAME to give your fearful and powerless feelings words. What does it feel like to be her?
What is FEAR’S NAME angry about? Let her give words to her anger, too.
Under anger and fear are things FEAR’S NAME is ashamed of, guilts and sadnesses. Let her talk about those, too. Give all the ugly feelings her words.
Take a deep breath and look at all the words in front of you.
What is FEAR’S NAME teaching you about yourself that you didn’t know?
How is this information helping you?
What can you thank FEAR’S NAME for helping you understand now? Share your gratitude with her.
Focus on what you control:
What about FEAR’S NAME’s feelings are out of your control? Name everything out of your control all on a piece of paper.
On a separate piece of paper, write out all the things you have the power to do. What about yourself and the situation do you control or influence heavily?
Ball up the list of what you don’t control and burn it (safely) or throw it away.
Look at the list of things you have power and control over. These are things you can do to make a difference.
Take Action:
In the feeling state you’re in right now, what can you imagine doing that you couldn’t imagine doing before?
Focusing only on what you can control, what choices do you have to take action?
What scares you about these choices?
What’s the worst that can happen?
Which is worse? Risking the worst that could happen or risking not taking action?
Choose your risk. Whether you do nothing or everything, you’re taking a risk.
What actions will you take? What choices will you make?
By when will you do these things?
How will you keep yourself accountable to this plan?
* If you’ve never “talked” to a part of you, you might find comfort in learning that–instead of being clinically nuts with all the voices in your head–the idea that you have multiple parts is actually a clinically proven way to explore your psychological terrain and evolve your identity, behavior, and emotional regulation (i.e., Internal Family Systems). If you’re curious ask a therapist to learn more.
VIDEO COACHING TIPS: Fear, detriggering, finding your power….these are such big topics. I posted the two public videos that I have most directly related to the processes I offer above. These are summaries of the hard work that the exercise above and my detriggering tools (free & paid) will help you with. They’re good reminders that this work is always inside us, waiting to happen. These videos are made in the workplace context, but they speak to universal truths and challenging and overcoming our fears.
Summary of the Detriggering Process:
Example of Two People Detriggering a Disagreement:
Want to talk about it? Bring your thoughts on the above to our member chat online and our InPower Women Mastermind meeting next Wednesday.
InPowering Powerful Women,
Dana Theus
Executive Coach
InPowerCoaching.com
Thank you so much Dana for sharing a very vulnerable piece of your story with us. I look forward to working through the de-triggering exercises as you describe.
This was great, thank you so much!