What Does "Moving Forward, Facing Uncertainty" Mean?

One of my favorite websites is where I learned about the four fear responses. At the age of 27, during one of the darker winters of my life, I stumbled across this website during my ongoing personal research and it was a treasure trove of illuminating information to me.

By this point in my life, I understood that I was conditioned to living in fear to some extent. I felt like I was constantly in survival mode, hypervigilant, and exhausted. Clinicians labeled this experience “anxiety”, whereas my personal preference was “intense distress”. Their proposed theory was that I was experiencing some moments of being triggered, and other moments where I was at “baseline”, or feeling relatively okay. But the reality I had learned in the previous years was that my existence was a constant state of being triggered or on alert for danger. The problems were that I couldn’t explain exactly why, and that their methods for resolving these issues didn’t work for me.

Learning about emotional flashbacks was the first eye opening piece of information I absorbed.  Through this I learned that the “intense distress” I felt constantly were emotional flashbacks being triggered by daily experiences, and for me, particularly with other people. Without context for these feelings, I would tell myself nothing is wrong and I shouldn’t feel so many upsetting emotions. This would only intensify my internal distress. Understanding these feelings as emotional flashbacks gave me context and allowed me to say, “I feel this way because of a past experience”, rather than dismissing the feeling because there is no present danger.

When I say to myself “I feel this way because of a past experience”, I open myself to a series of helpful practices that help reduce my distressing feelings or emotional flashbacks. These include grounding practices that bring me into the moment, reminders of my scope of control, and methods of increasing my feelings of personal safety. I regularly use these new skill sets to cope with emotional flashbacks when they occur in my day to day life.

When I am met with a threat or perceived threat, or when experiencing an emotional flashback, my go-to fear response is freeze. This has affected my natural breathing patterns, which I have to actively work on to allow for normal and deep breathing, as opposed to shallow. I also struggle with a related symptom called dissociation which makes it difficult for me to access some information in my brain, most often about my own life or about emotionally charged subjects. My brain hides information from me if it believes there could be some kind of threat by my remembering the information. There are also practices and exercises I use to help me decrease these kinds of symptoms.

So when I tell you that I lived a life of chronic stagnancy, this is where that behavior was rooted. I heard so much rhetoric around “motivation”, getting “self-motivated”, getting motivated through “inspiration”, or getting motivated by “staying accountable to others”. Motivation was never my problem. Fear was, and is, my problem. I could not get out of bed or leave my house because of intense, debilitating fear that coursed through my veins alongside my blood. Stagnancy wasn’t just a poor lifestyle choice for me, it was a maladaptive survival tactic. And unlearning that mess requires an entirely different handbook.

As I’ve learned and slowly adopted many of the helpful skills and tools that decrease the dysfunction in my relationship with fear, I can see more clearly the role that fear and uncertainty play in our day to day lives. I grew up believing that feelings of fear and uncertainty were bad negative things that were to be avoided. I am learning that this is false.

Fear is a tool that we can use to better assess risks, take care of ourselves and others, and ultimately learn about new things. Avoiding feelings of fear means avoiding learning about risk assessment, avoiding learning how best to take care of ourselves and those around us, and ultimately, avoiding learning about new things. This is counterproductive if we seek to live in a world where we are able to face challenges confidently and cooperate well with people we come in contact with. To me, “Moving Forward” means meeting my fears as they come up along my path, learning to address my fears skillfully, and making the changes I need to make when necessary.

Uncertainty is an inherent part of life that cannot be avoided, no matter how hard some of us may try. Despite increasing technology to reduce the uncertainty in our lives, we still cannot count on the weather forecast or the traffic report to be entirely accurate. Our days are filled with moments we never planned for or anticipated, some of them being positive. Uncertainty is the element of randomness in all of our lives, and attempts to control this can lead to higher levels of anxiety and distress. I am working to build up my resiliency as this is one reason I continue to struggle with leaving my home. Inside my home I am able to control or anticipate many of the random factors that would be impossible to manage or plan for out in the world. For me, “Facing Uncertainty” means accepting the random and uncertain elements of life and learning to navigate those situations or experiences skillfully and in real time.

Moving Forward, Facing Uncertainty is a reminder that fear and uncertainty are not bad things, but useful experiences that will help me continue to grow.

[Embedded Links: http://www.pete-walker.com/, http://www.pete-walker.com/flashbackManagement.htm, http://www.pete-walker.com/fourFs_TraumaTypologyComplexPTSD.htm]