When Fear Shows Itself: Part 2
Thoughts on Working Through Fear.
Baby steps. That is how you must work through fear, a belief that you are not safe, the terror that it may happen again. The question becomes, How? How do I confront terror? Because as you now know if you have been in an accident, have lost a loved one suddenly, have experienced an abusive relationship, have been sexually abuse, or even have just gotten your heart broken, you may find that you are now afraid that it will happen again. Perhaps at any new moment or with any new person you meet.
When we have a fear response it often gets stored in the body. Let’s say you have always loved riding your bike until recently, when a car accidentally merged into you and you’ve broken a bone. During the time that it’s taken you to heal, you have replayed the event over and over again in your head. Every time you are in a car and see a bike next to the car you are in, you now replay your accident and are afraid that the biker will be hit. This is a form of post traumatic stress related to your accident. You’ve always had great associations with bike riding. Now, when you are riding, it is as if every car that passes you on your bike is going to hit you. Maybe you no longer enjoy riding your bike because your bike rides now induce small panic attacks and uncommon spells of fear. Maybe this is an indicator that you should stop riding your bike forever, but probably not.
How do you work through this??? Well, by riding your bike, of course. We must do the exact thing that scares us in order to learn to not be afraid again. Maybe the first time, or first twenty times, of riding your bike will be terrifying after your accident. But each new time that you ride your bike and not get into an accident is proof that you are in fact safe to ride your bike again. Does this mean that you wont ever get into a bike accident again? I’m sorry, but no. There is some innocence that has been lost when bad things happen to us. We must move through the world with a different awareness that we may not be completely safe.
Confronting your fear is the only way that you will work through it. And how you choose to take this task into your own hands is completely in your control. When you realize that when and how you confront your fear can be your choice, you take some of your power back that you lost when something bad happened to you, totally out of your control.
As a therapist, I specialize in sexual abuse trauma and PTSD related to abusive relationships and incidents where people have been raped, taken advantage of, and exposed to painful relationships with partners and/or caregivers. Part of what is so painful about this type of betrayal within relationship is that it makes it hard to trust others again. Unfortunately, something that can be so sweet, so good, so exciting and passionate, is now paired with fear. That inherent innocence that we are all capable of when trusting another person has been taken away; now when trying to trust another, all one can think about is what might go wrong if they do. One of the scariest parts of post-traumatic stress in a relationship is that it feels like what happened before may be happening again, whether it is being cheated on or being abused. These feelings and fears make it very difficult to date and/or trust again in relationships.
So again, when working through fear, many would like to jump in and get it over with. I recommend baby steps toward confronting the fear. There are many layers to traumatic incidents that must be explored. When we go into the fear and tell our stories all at once, we may not be resourced; we may not be able to titrate our feelings, bring ourselves out of the fear if we need a break. That is why it’s helpful to have another person to share with. Therapy can be incredibly useful to begin to navigate ones’ needs around healing an event like this. I notice that when one talks about a traumatic event in therapy, they often forget that they can feel ok again. I will often remember something that they told me they enjoy, such as friends, family, or a happy memory, and I will remind them of this to bring them back to an ok place. Other resources may include yoga, chocolate, your dog, a book… you get the point. Everyone has their own unique resources that feel good to them. Therapy can be used to identify what your resources are, so when you experience that fear again while dating, while riding your bike, and within relationships, you now have a map to resource yourself. When we confront the fear, we often return to the fear state that we were in when the traumatic event happened; maybe this is a freeze response, maybe it’s a flight response. Maybe we cling again to someone like we did before, even if they aren’t who we need. It’s really important to learn how to breathe, and it’s really helpful to have someone you trust to tell you to breathe again, and to help you identify what’s happening.
It might seem like you will never recover, like you will be afraid forever. I want to tell you that your fear can be worked through. Your decisions are possibly being made out of a place of fear, but as you confront your demons, you can begin to make decisions out of a place of love again. Just as the seasons change, our emotions can too, with gentleness and a guiding hand.
Bianca Aarons LMFT is a licensed psychotherapist in San Francisco through the auspices of the Grateful Heart Holistic Therapy Center. Bianca’s specialties include attachment, trauma, sexual abuse, post traumatic stress, relationship issues, depression issues, couples work and work with teenagers. Learn more about Bianca at www.biancaaarons.com, email her at BiancaAaronsMFT@gmail.com, or call her at (415) 553-5346 to ask any questions or to set up a consultation session.
When Fear Shows Itself: Part 1
Understanding the Mechanisms of Fear Better.
During a deep spell of the most uncommon fear that I have ever experienced in my life, a quote showed itself to me that said, “ Fear is the only feeling that grows smaller as you move toward it.” This of course indicates that fear itself will grow bigger as we hide away from it. It also led me to wonder, in my work, how is it possible to allow the fear to exist within us, for a long enough time, that we can tolerate leaning in towards it?
Fear, you see, is in the territory of the unknown; we cannot control it, we struggle to understand it, fear to work through it. Fear itself can be a glimmer in our minds, a hurricane that takes over our lives, an unopened package that unexpectedly opens. How fear and trauma works is a mystery that we can never fully know.
What exactly is fear? I am humbled in my limited knowledge as a psychotherapist of how fear works, but I would like to share what I have grappled to understand. Fear. On a scientific level, fear is a physiological emotional response that has been developed over millions of years as an adaptation to survival within life. Yes, the survival-of-the-fittest depend on fear responses, to this day, to survive. Once a dangerous stimulus is registered by the frontal cortex of the brain (for example a car crashing into your car or a snake in front of your next step), a signal is sent to the hippocampus and the amygdala, which then send signals to the hypothalamus. The hypothalamus releases “stress hormones”, such as adrenaline and epinephrine, which then trigger a fight-or-flight response.
Fight and flight are not the only fear responses. Lets break down the four (yes four) instinctual fear responses. Up until recently, there were three known fear responses. You have probably heard of them as they are well know: the fight, flight, and freeze responses. They are fairly self-explanatory as well. All survival mechanisms are triggered by the stress hormones. The fight response initiates a protective, self-defensive, and sometimes violent response. An example of a fight response would be if a bird attacks you and you attempt to bat the bird away. A flight response is, well, running for your safety. A version of this in the animal kingdom is when the Ostriches in Africa run from the lions who are gathering to attack them. An example of this in a more convoluted, human world would be if someone fled the state that their perpetrator or attacker lives in to feel more safe. The freeze response is demonstrated when a rabbit sees a predator. Although adrenaline is pumping through their body, they freeze to remain invisible. After they are safe, they often shake to discharge the fear and adrenaline energy that was being held in their body as they sat still, waiting for their predator to leave. Humans also have freeze responses during attacks. For example, someone who is held at gun point may freeze, instead of trying to run or fight. Victims who have reacted with a freeze response have an especially hard time recovering from their attack. Not only did they feel helpless during the attack, but they also stored all of the fear in their bodies after the attack. The hopeless/ helpless feeling often lingers in someone's body, shaking their self-agency and their confidence that they are safe. Unlike animals, humans do not “shake” or have a mechanism to work through the stored fear energy after a freeze response. When the fear is stored in the body like this, it is often reopened during events that remind the victim of their attack. This is how post traumatic stress disorder works.
Recently, I heard through a colleague that a fourth fear response has been identified. This fear response is know as the fawn response, or as I like to call it, the “cling” response. This response seems to be an exclusively human fear response. The cling response is where the victim of abuse clings to their perpetrator, the person who is abusing them. Think of an abusive relationship; often times, in an abusive relationship, the victim of abuse has a very difficult time leaving the relationship. Their fear response is to cling to the person abusing them, to protect themselves from more abuse. A very classic example of the cling response is Stockholm Syndrome, where a kidnapped victim comes to believe that they love their kidnapper. This type of trauma is often replayed in a current abusive relationship, but may stem from an earlier relationship, perhaps with the victim’s parent in their childhood. This type of replaying is an example of post traumatic stress disorder and relational trauma.
In my next blog, I will discuss more on working through fear, post traumatic stress disorder, and relational trauma.
Bianca Aarons LMFT is a licensed psychotherapist in San Francisco through the auspices of the Grateful Heart Holistic Therapy Center. Bianca’s specialties include attachment, trauma, sexual abuse, post traumatic stress, relationship issues, depression issues, couples work and work with teenagers. Learn more about Bianca at www.biancaaarons.com, email her at BiancaAaronsMFT@gmail.com, or call her at (415) 553-5346 to ask any questions or to set up a consultation session.
Love, Self, and the Addiction to Perfection
(and learning to love yourself, of course)
Addictions can come in all different shapes, sizes and forms. When one thinks of addiction, they often assume that an addiction is referring to a substance, such as drugs, or an activity, such as sex. There are many types of addictions; food addictions, love addictions, ect. Addictions are coping mechanisms that are formed when emotions are intolerable and stress levels are unmanageable. Often times, a person feels out of control of their addiction, and when they try to manage or change it, they find that the addiction gets worst.
Many addictions can be misunderstood or misjudged, such as the addiction to control or abstinence. Anorexia is actually an addiction to avoiding eating or preventing food intake. "Sexual Anorexia" or contact avoidance is yet another misunderstood and highly unseen addiction, where one can go unnoticed in being addicted to finding ways to avoid relationships and prevent themselves from having sex.
One of the most recent addictions that I have encountered is the addiction to perfection. The signs of this are when someone feels that they cannot do anything because they cannot, or will not, be perfect enough when they do it. Many people who have an addiction to perfection find that they experience procrastination or a hard time doing anything at all for the daunting reality that what they do will not fit their own expectations. A person who is addicted to perfection will walk away from a partner who is not "perfect" enough, or walk away from a potential partner because THEY THEMSELVES feel that they are not perfect enough, or will just avoid dating in general for the same reasons. An addiction to perfection can stilt a person from being able to do things that they could maybe do if they were ok with "good enough", like get a good enough job as opposed to being jobless in lieu of the the perfect job.
An addiction to perfection is surprisingly, and comparatively, as difficult to work through as other addictions. And to work through this addiction, and many other addictions, some deeper issues may need to be confronted around fundamental sadness, self-hatred, grief, and hopelessness that may lay just beneath the protective layer of the addiction.
Bianca Aarons LMFT is a licensed psychotherapist in San Francisco's Duboce Triangle neighborhood. Bianca’s specialties include attachment, trauma, sexual abuse, post traumatic stress, relationship issues, depression issues, couples work and work with teenagers. Learn more about Bianca at www.biancaaarons.com, email her at BiancaAaronsMFT@gmail.com, or call her at (415) 553-5346 to ask any questions or to set up a consultation session.