My earliest memory of experiencing fear was “overcook the rice”. It may sound silly, but, back in those days, a rice cooker was not yet a thing, and to cook a pot of tasted rice required some technical skills. For a tween like me who did not have a good sense of time, I often overcooked the rice and serve the family burned rice for lunch.
It would not be a pleasant dining experience when one of the important components of a meal tastes solid like the rock and smells smoky like burnt chemical. Somehow, I don't even know whether I was scared of the fire which burned the rice, or scared of the disappointment I experienced from serving the overcooked rice. However, for a tween who was lack of cooking experience, the moment realizing the rice is overcooked, I was panicking and had no idea what to do in the situation, because the outcome of the panic was: there was not enough time to cook another pot of rice before lunch started, there was no solution to save the burned rice in a short period of time, the smoke of the burned rice was filled in the whole kitchen creating an unpleasant dining environment, and I was running between the stove and sink screaming “why, why, why the rice is on fire again” alone without getting an answer from myself to figure out the way how not to burn the rice.
Somehow there was this moment, I decided to make myself sit in front of the stove the whole time, as I made myself only pay attention to the rice pot when I cook the rice; then, there was the good news: I finally cooked the pot of rice right. It probably took me a few weeks to explore and figure out how to cook a pot of rice properly. My decision to only do one thing at a time when I experience fear would enable me to overcome my struggle or challenge; that was the lesson I learned from having fear of "overcooking the rice". Another lesson I learned from cooking the rice in a pot was don’t ignore the fire, it could burn the rice. It is better to take a longer time to cook the rice in a pot in the low flame than rush the time to cook the rice in high heat. The moment of an achievement to cook the rice right was the moment for me to see that, the time when I experience my fear, I have to sit at one place without moving myself to anywhere, so that I can observe and process what I am afraid of, learn how to work with that fear till I can overcome my struggle.
When you experience fear, you either experience danger that something is putting you in risk, or you experience the sense of losing reality that you feel confused of what is actually going on around you.
When you experience fear in hyperarousal, your body and mind are on high alert. You do not feel safe, and your body may experience hyper-vigilant, anxiety, tension, and shaking. At the most intensified level, you may have the fight or flight response as you express dissociative anger and aggression.(MTHS, 2021)
When you experience fear in hypoarousal, your brain feels overwhelmed that the prefrontal cortex starts to go offline, and your body starts to shut down so that you may decide to distance yourself from people and disconnect things around you. The freeze or fawn response you have may result in you limiting yourself in which the experience made you feeling small, passive, depressed, exhausted.(MTHS, 2021)
Whether you experience fear in hyperarousal or hypoarousal, Enabling you to process your experience of the emotion fear in a safe place is fundamental. Creating an internal safe space for the self would provide you a channel to build a transparent relationship with your actual self in the moment of here and now, enable you to have compassion for the self to practice self-care for your holistic wellbeing, help you to navigate yourself to set up boundaries with different relationships and connections around you, give you the learning opportunity to study your pain and living experience. In the safe zone, you created for yourself, you can take the time you require to gain a better understanding of what kind of mindfulness practices, breathing techniques work better for you to regulate your emotion and take care of your well being, at the same time, you can further identify what are the desire, choice, need and value do you want to pursue in life. (MTHS, 2021)
When you experience fear in hyperarousal, Imagine your whole self as a rubber band, when you are experiencing an outburst or feeling angry, you are stretching your emotion and body to the limit where it may break out. To effectively protect yourself, it is beneficial for you to take a moment to exhale. When you relax your tongue as you opening you lower jaw and exhale through your mouth, you allow your body to release the heated energy from inside of your body, in a way, you allow the stretched rubber band to pull back to its safe zone, so that your rubber band would not over stretch to reach the point of breaking down. The moment when you put a brake on your outburst emotion and exhale, you enable yourself to breath and work toward your safe zone, a place where you allow yourself to do learning reflection, obtaining necessary safety, and making effective change.
When you experience fear in hypoarousal, imagine you are a puffer, a balloon fish. When you are experiencing a computer motion or feeling lost, you are in a survival mode where you lose a sense of self. In order for you to grasp your reality, it is beneficial for you to become curious to learn about your living experience, your motivated passion and your potential surviving skill. It is your curiosity of learning that enables you to develop personal growth and achieve your self-actualization. The experience of overcoming hypoarousal is like how a puffer survives from an attack. When a puffer experiences danger, what does it do? The puffer sucks the water around and shows his predator what bigger size he is capable of becoming in order to scare his predator off and gain self protection. Unlike the puffer doing self-actualization in an unsafe environment, your self-learning, self-growth and self-actualization is achieved within your safe zone.
Have you seen a horror movie before? or have you been into a haunted house? Knowing the horror movie and haunted house will scare you and make you in fear, why are you still interested in watching the movie or walking into the devil’s plaza? Emotion can be a double edged sword, while fear shrinks your physical existence and limits your ability to expand for growth, it also can make you feel excited and have the desire to explore what could be in the terror.[WGCTW, 2011] Fear can make you feel scary, at the same time, it also can make you feel excited. Both feelings of fear and excitement may keep people’s internal being in a balancing state when they experience fear, and it is the part of excitement that provides the possibility for people to gain curiosity to explore the unknown in the fear. We are afraid of fear because the emotion of fear comes with many unknown and uncertainty, that has resulted in us limiting our ability to learn and to expand. There is a phrase saying “what doesn’t kill you can make you stronger”, perhaps, we can apply the similar logic into a new phrase as “what doesn't thrill you can make you curious to learn for thriving”. Your curiosity can be an engine for you to learn from your living experience and get out of your state of fear.
Coaching Talk: Perception of the Emotion Fear
How do you perceive fear? or how do you understand fear?
As if fear is an image, what does this image look like to you?
Although fear may make us feel small or insignificant, learning to navigate ourselves in the experience of fear would enable us to achieve growth and develop strength to shine. The question is do you have the willingness to walk into the unknown? Another question would be what it takes for you to feel secure enough to experience the uncertainty? You never truly learn about the emotion of fear until you allow yourself to actually experience it. By the time you are ready to make connections to your actual fear, what strength do you want to establish for your upcoming living experience while getting in touch with your emotion fear? I want to invite you to start your engine of curiosity, the following questions are designed to help you to gain an understanding of your experience of the emotion fear and further support you to develop an appropriate way to respond to your emotion fear.
Meet Your Fear, and Get to Known Each other
the less you know about what you fear, the less strength you felt to take a lead and achieve growth in the situation
the more you know about what you fear, the more you know what could be a better way for you to collaborate with fear
Coaching Talk: Expression of the Emotion
What is in your fear?
What was your initial reaction to your fear? or what do you notice when you are experiencing fear?
How do you interpret your initial reaction? or what does your initial reaction say about you?
What was the outcome of your initial reaction?
What impact does it make in your present life from your reaction?
What is your expression when you experience the emotion of fear? or How do you see yourself expressing your emotion of fear?
Coaching Talk: Action Response to Work with the Emotion
What is in your curiosity when you are experiencing fear?
What enables you to feel safe and secure when you are making connections with fear?
As if fear is a person or an alien, what do you want to know about this person or creature when both of you meet?
What does the dialogue appear like when you are communicating with your fear?
What resource do you have or are aware of that can help you to acknowledge and to learn about your fear?
What strengths do you have that you can use or practice when you are engaging with your fear?
What do you want to learn or overcome by establishing a solid working relationship with fear?
What would you achieve or what would be the reward for you after you overcome your fear?
One of the reasons why we have fear, because something we care about is at risk, and we are not in a position where we can lose it; therefore, when we are experiencing fear, it is better not to make any decision, instead, it is better to take time acknowledging and affirming personal value in which we hold up in our life, so that the decision we make will further support our growth. Sometimes, people do not know what value they have in life, yet, it is the experience of having fear in life that assists them to recognize the value they have evolved in. By exploring the value people have developed and hold up for through experiencing the fear situation, the discovered value would provide effective guidance for people to challenge their current belief system, develop a new value system, and further make decisions on what may enable them to resolve the conflict and achieve growth.
The Chart of the Combinations (Anderson, 2017)
What other emotion that may come with the emotion fear?
The feelings we have experienced in life can come in multiple layers, and it makes our emotional living experience rich and complex; when we evoke awareness of our emotional experience during struggling and challenging time, it is beneficial for us to identify what other emotions that may come with the emotion fear, so that we can navigate ourselves to overcome the troubling or conflicting emotional experience.
The following formula of the combination of emotion is introduced by Robert Plutchik. Plutchik presents 24 dyads that are the feelings composed of two emotions (Plutchik, 2017). Out of those 24 dyads, 7 feelings consist of the emotion fear. By identifying what other emotions you experience in your feeling working with fear, your may gain some helpful insight on clarifying the confusion of your emotional experience:
Guilt (Excitement) = Joy + Fear
Submission (Modesty) = Trust + Fear
Anxiety (Dread) = Anticipation + Fear
Awe (Alarm) = Fear + Surprise
Despair = Fear + Sadness
Shame (Prudishness) = Fear + Disgust
Frozenness = Fear + Anger
(Wikipedia, 2021)
With the understanding of how our feeling can be compose with the mixed of different emotions, I want to coach you to take steps sorting out your different emotions, so that you can create possibility to enable yourself to discover your value and strength to overcome your fear:
Step 1: gain awareness of what other emotion you have experiencing with fear in the situation
What emotions, besides fear, do you notice you are experiencing when you are in the situation?
Step 2: acknowledge what has activated each listed individual emotion
What did you see, hear, taste, smell, do that activated the listed individual emotion?
Step 3: identify how each listed individual emotion affect your thoughts and behaviours in the situation
What has gone through your mind when you experience each listed individual emotion?
How does each listed individual emotion change how you behave in the situation?
Step 4: recognize the value you hold in the outcome of each listed individual emotion?
What values do you see and up hold in the outcome of each listed individual emotion?
Step 5: establish a solid relationship with what you value the most in the outcome of the listed emotion
What strength, skill or belief can you develop from the value you hold in the listed emotion that enables you to become the person you want to be?
The pandemic bring fear into people’s life, underneath that fear, there might be other emotions people have to counter play in their emotional living experience since, everyone live on earth been forced to anticipate to fight with Coronavirus, and the lockdown condition have result in people experiencing anxiety; for some people , they may also feel surprised that social distance have ended some relationship which they have valued dearly before, at the same time, they may experience the awe to witness how the experience of pandemic have change a person to become a total stranger. By identifying the different emotions there are to experience with fear, we can better manage our state and wellbeing, more importantly, gain a better understanding of what is going through our mind and body as well as to learn about our personal value in response to the state of fear. Here is one example on the step to take for sorting out the mixed emotions:
Are you in a state of fear? Are you feeling insignificant? Are you feeling lost?
The feeling and emotion you have, at where you are, is a good place to start a journey of exploration. I want to invite you to allow yourself to stay in this moment, take a few deep breaths and get in touch with your inner strength.
You are the source of guidance.
The reason you are in fear may be because the strength you have has not yet enabled you to fully support yourself to overcome your challenges, however, you do have the ability to nurture your inner strength and to create what you want.
Have you got in touch with your inner strength yet? Beeskit Social’s coaching program can help youth connect and thrive. Beeskit Social believes everyone can raise to heal and get grounded to achieve. The program continually builds on the footprint of trauma-informed practice with a proactive solution-focused coaching approach, that it aims to support and awaken people, to discover their inner potential as well as to build impactful living strategies through the lens of trauma learning, so that, people can develop leadership skills from the inner-self to overcome traumatic experiences and to thrive in challenges. The coaching program can be conducted in three different languages (English, Cantonese and Mandarin) in the setting of one-on-one coaching or group coaching; it is created to provide coaching support to international students, LGBTQ youth and members of the LGBTQ community, the Asian community as well as to anyone who is looking to receive Trauma-Informed coaching support. Beeskit Social is established with a vision that, everyone can learn to thrive from challenges, and become a trauma-informed leader to create new transforming possibilities in the living traumatic world. It is ok to walk alongside with your fear to lead your way.
Source:
Perreault, Yvette. When Grief Comes to Work [WGCTW]: Managing Grief and Loss in the Workplace, a Handbook for Managers and Supervisors. AIDS Bereavement and Resiliency Program of Ontario, 2011.
Moving the Human Spirit [MTHS]: Trauma-Informed Coaching Certification (2021)
"Robert Plutchik's Psychoevolutionary Theory of Basic Emotions" (PDF). Adliterate.com. Retrieved 2017-06-05.
Anderson, J. (2017, March 26). Dyad & Compound Emotions. Retrieved from https://gatehealing.com/dyad-compound-emotions/
En.wikipedia.org. 2021. Emotion classification - Wikipedia. [online] Available at: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotion_classification> [Accessed 15 June 2021].
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