Love is great, but there’s also the healing power of fear

SOCIAL STUDIES - Published Monday August 17th, 2009

You have heard it said that you should do something every day that scares you. For the last few years I have been dealing with infants and toddlers in my household, so every day was new and scary. Recently, I have discovered that the age old adage is in fact good advice.

I got a tattoo this week.

I always wanted one. By the time I was able to make my own decisions about such things I was luckily usually too broke to afford it. Luckily, I say, because had I have chosen an image to represent my late teens or early 20s I would most certainly regret it by now.

Not that others are not capable, it is just that when I left home I was pretty rebellious and angry.

I would probably have made the mistake of tattooing the name of some now long lost girlfriend, or my favourite band's image from the 1980s, either of which would have been monumental mistakes.

Now, it scared me to even consider getting a tattoo. It is permanent, it is societally frowned upon and sometimes (and more importantly) it is painful.

I was scared when I made the appointment and I was scared waiting the month for it to roll around, which seemed to me plenty of time to back down. I was so scared that I posted on Facebook that I was going to get a tattoo in order to make sure I went through with it. I was scared when I walked into the shop, and I was scared when I sat down in the chair.

Could you think of something that scares you that you could do? Every day, or even say once a week? What about public speaking, or bungee jumping?

There is an incredibly interesting program in the United States military right now which takes soldiers returning from Iraq -- especially heavy combat role soldiers -- and forces them to do adrenaline rising, risk taking, and yet mostly safe activities once a week after returning from combat.

So for example, they go bungee jumping, and white water rafting, and sky diving. It's usually something they have never done before is likely to scare them.

The theory is that these people have become adrenaline junkies, living in constant stress for the entire time they are in the operational zone. By teaching them safer ways to get an adrenaline 'fix' -- and also weaning them slowly off the need for stress and adrenaline --you integrate them back into the 'real world' in a safer way.

I imagine this will do wonders to minimize post traumatic stress. It will certainly teach them a safe outlet for the pent-up rage and fear that come along with adrenaline highs.

In a larger way the success of this endeavour would also show us something else; that fear can heal you.

Healthy expressions of fear are there for a good reason, and when we confront them, deal with them, overcome them, and figure them out we can become better people.

My tattoo experience was amazing for a number of reasons, not least of which was that it was psychologically and spiritually healing. Somehow, watching this happen, all of my passions, art, expression, writing, rebellion, merged into one thing and were given expression in a physical reality.

Because I was afraid of it, I put off getting a tattoo until I was totally ready to do it, and when I did it, it was just 'right' and instantly allowed me to do a lot of 'head and heart work' to reconcile who I am now with who I have been at different stages of my life.

Let me suggest to you that we fear things because they are important; we do not fear the trivial and so, besting that fear, we work through it and move beyond it. This is real growth.

It is not just about the adrenaline, it is about recognizing how you feel about things. Fear is not about what you think; it is about what you feel. The guy doing my tattoo jokingly said that it lets you know you are alive.

He might be on to something there.

We spend far too much of our time in our heads, criticizing, rationalizing, prioritizing . . . and there comes a time when you have to get outside of that and feel what you are doing. Perhaps you need to jump off a bridge with a rope around your ankle, or you need to watch a hypodermic needle puncture your skin 10,000 times, or you might just need to get up the nerve to say 'Hi.'

When the breath is caught in your chest, and it seems your heart is beating loudly enough for everyone to hear, when the sweat breaks out on your forehead, when that shaky feeling takes hold of you; you will truly know that you are alive.

More than that, you will be doing something that matters, truly matters, not just to you, but to the universe. It is in those moments when fear meets passion that creativity and art find expression. It is in the expression of our deepest held convictions, the ones that scare us, that we begin to create a world where we are truly being ourselves.

I think we really should try to do one thing that scares us each day.

It could be simple, or it could be complex.

It could change everything.

Facing down the mirror, and facing the truth

SOCIAL STUDIES - Published Monday August 24th, 2009

Have you ever seen a photograph of yourself?

It could just be me, but when someone takes a photo and I see it, the person it portrays is not the person I see in the mirror each morning. I don't mean that existentially or anything, I am being quite literal.

I do not look that old, or that overweight in the mirror.

My expression is more 'happy go lucky.' I am more muscular and certainly better looking.

Not in the photograph, however.

Which leads me to the concept of truth.

There are those out there, from every walk of life, who would like to think that he world is black and white. They would like to believe that the concept of truth is irrefutable; that there are certain things that never change. My suggestion is that they take a good long look in the mirror.

You see, even within the deepest recesses of our minds, truth is malleable. Our brains work more like Photoshop than like some safety deposit box.

All the info we store there is adjusted by feelings, attitudes, emotions, correlations, and comparisons. Thus my self image is happier, stronger and lighter than I really am, and voila, that is what I see in the mirror. I have edited the 'truth' to be what I want it to be.

I remember a beginning psychology course where we discussed the 'halo effect' of falling in love. In essence when we fall in love we blur the edges of reality. The bad qualities get swallowed up by this halo of goodness that comes from passion, or infatuation, or what have you. The truth of who the other is has been edited away by our minds.

The problem with this is that it sounds like it gives us licence to dismiss the concept of truth; which is the exact opposite of what I am trying to get to. I believe that because truth is a concept that is in flux while being part of our relationship to our selves, we have even more responsibility when it comes to what is true.

Truth is individual, but that does not mean we should not own up to it.

That woman who was kidnapped, or rather, who drove to Toronto for God knows what reason and then decided she would say she was kidnapped in order to avoid responsibility for her actions, is a case in point.

For some reason a lot of people think that whatever they like to say or believe is valid, as long as the end justifies the means. Truth being malleable, what is a little white lie, like saying we have been kidnapped. Just in case you are not sensing the irony; it probably cost you, the tax payer, quite a few thousand dollars in police investigation time, while allowing real criminals to get away with things while the police were diverted.

It also, on a personal level for the individual, did a lot of damage to this woman's credibility.

We create fantasy for a lot of reasons. It is better for my conscience to believe I am a good 50 pounds lighter, for example. The fact that reality often fails to measure up against fantasy is even more dangerous.

Take our relationships with the people we love, for example. At some point we are going to have to realize that what we fantasized our lives and relationships were like just does not measure up under the constant stress and scrutiny of running a household, raising children, and managing a career.

I think this is why the divorce rate is so high.

It all starts with the wedding; $50,000 buys you the fantasy that the prince and princess ride into the sunset in the white coach and live happily ever after.

"I have dreamt about this moment for my whole life," says almost every bride.

Well, did you also dream about what it will be like when you lose your job? When you first have to hold your husband's hand while he throws up into the toilet with the flu? Was it your fantasy to go a whole year without sleep or even talking to your spouse after that little bundle of joy comes along?

The truth of life is far closer to a Buddhist aphorism: "All life is suffering."

Which does not mean life does not have its moments of absolute joy.

The only way to find those moments is to take responsibility for our own truths. The fantasies we have are just that, false and twisted realities that do not help us to adjust to just how powerful our lives could be lived if we engaged authentically with the truth.

Instead of creating fiction, we need to accept reality for what it is and work together with those we love to rise above the suffering and find what we need to be happy.

To many people think that whatever they feel or think is reason enough that it should be that way, and so they are okay with the little lies, or even the downright truth altering of saying you have been kidnapped when you have not.

It is not easy to get out of bed in the morning and look around yourself with a sense of having to admit that this is as good as it really is. But that is where we find the power to change.

As long as the fantasy has the upper hand, we will never engage the world deeply and find a new way to be the people we always thought we were anyway.

Or to put it in a simpler way; tell the truth, accept the truth, work with it; it will make life so much easier.