When Fear Wasn’t The Whole Story
When I fractured my toe, I had plans to leave for a backpacking trip less than two weeks later—an adventure my friend Susanne and I were both nervous and excited about. We had trained for months, bought the gear, worked through Achilles pain and low back pain, challenged ourselves with elevation, and gradually increased the weight in our packs. We had prepared for this. Suddenly, I was in a walking boot, and the trip was no longer possible for me.
There were a lot of feelings around that.
One of the first things I noticed was how difficult it felt to tell my friend Susanne that I couldn't go. We had been encouraging each other and training together for almost three months.
I could have labeled what I was feeling as fear. And it was fear. I was afraid to tell her, and my body was reacting. My heart rate increased. My chest felt tight. I noticed a sort of cold tingling moving through what otherwise felt like a heated body. It felt as if I were curling up on myself, hiding.
But if I had decided, This is fear, and stopped there, I would have missed what came next.
I did tell Susanne, and of course she was incredibly supportive. She expressed sadness for me, not for herself. Yet as I stayed curious about my experience over the next few days, I began to notice there were deeper layers. I hadn't only been afraid to tell her. I was angry that this had happened. I was sad that it had happened. I felt responsible for changing something we had planned and looked forward to together.
And eventually something much older surfaced:
I ruin everything.
That wasn't an emotion. It was a story.
It connected me to a memory from when I was about five years old. I gagged on a piece of turkey gristle and threw up at Thanksgiving dinner. My mother had worked so hard preparing the meal. It was her first time hosting and cooking Thanksgiving dinner.
My mother pulled me from the table and into the bathroom. My memory is that she told me I had ruined dinner—that I ruined everything.
Were those truly her exact words? I will never know.
What struck me later was how much the two experiences had in common. My mother had worked hard preparing that Thanksgiving dinner. Susanne and I had worked hard preparing for our trip. In both situations, something happened with my body that I hadn't chosen and couldn't control, and something important that had been planned for was disrupted.
Maybe that is why telling Susanne felt like so much more than simply telling a friend I couldn't go on a trip.
But this time, the ending was different.
Susanne wasn't angry with me. She didn't blame me for changing our plans. She was sad for me.
What I do know is that the way my five-year-old body felt in that moment is connected in my memory to the story I ruin everything. Maybe this is connected to one of the holding patterns I still recognize in my body. Maybe this was where it began.
Or maybe not.
I hadn't been thinking about Thanksgiving when I broke my toe. I wasn't consciously connecting Susanne with my mother or a backpacking trip with a childhood dinner. I didn't begin by searching for a childhood wound. I simply kept paying attention to what was happening within me.
The experience unfolded in layers.
There was physical sensation. There was fear. There was anger and sadness. There were thoughts about disappointing someone I cared about. There was an old memory. And within that memory was a story I had once learned about myself.
If I had been told at the beginning, This sensation is fear, that wouldn't necessarily have been wrong. Fear was part of my experience. But it wasn't the whole experience.
This is one reason I am becoming cautious about assigning particular emotions or meanings to sensations in the body. A tight chest does not necessarily mean grief. Tension in the hips does not tell us that shame is stored there. Even identifying something as anxiety may describe only one part of what is happening.
Our experiences are more individual and more complex than that.
A word can be helpful. Naming an emotion can help us communicate and sometimes help us understand ourselves. But a name can also narrow our attention if we allow it to become the answer.
Instead of immediately asking, What emotion is this?, perhaps we can begin with something simpler:
What am I noticing?
And then stay curious.
A sensation may lead to an emotion. An emotion may lead to a thought. A thought may bring a memory. A memory may reveal a story. Or nothing else may come at all.
There does not have to be something hidden underneath every sensation waiting to be uncovered.
The practice is not learning how to correctly decode the body.
The practice is learning how to listen without deciding in advance what we are going to hear.
Let the experience come before the interpretation.
I could have labeled what I was feeling as fear. And it was fear. I was afraid to tell her, and my body was reacting. My heart rate increased. My chest felt tight. I noticed a sort of cold tingling moving through what otherwise felt like a heated body. It felt as if I were curling up on myself, hiding.