On Fear and Love

There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love. 1st John: 4:18 NRSV

Fear and anxiety run rampant in my family tree and I'm no exception. I've struggled with these dark impulses since my earliest childhood. When these impulses are turned inward they result in depression, when turned outward they usually result in violence towards others, and quite often towards those who are closest to you. It can also show up in non-physically violent ways, but emotionally and mentally/spiritually destructive passive-aggressive behaviors. I'm a black belt on that front.

Fear based decision making is always short term, but typically has long term consequences. When you're raised in a chaotic and unstable environment, whether economically or psychologically/sociologically, you constantly make decisions to help you get through the moment. You don't have the time or energy to think further than that. That's just one more luxury you can't afford. That knot in your stomach or the stress migraine in the back of your head are there for a reason. It's your body's natural and normal reaction to real life stresses and threats happening right before your eyes and ears.

In one sense of course fear is a fundamentally natural and necessary part of being alive. Without a healthy fear of real dangers we'd all die very quickly. Being entirely fearless is to be completely foolish. It'd be the same as being unable to feel pain and subsequently becoming infected and losing more and more body parts to leprosy. I certainly don't suffer from that. The scripture I quoted above deals with one aspect of fear, the punishment side, which Evangelicals and Fundamentalists are expert at. They like to joke about how Jews and Catholics are so similar because they're both so driven by religious guilt, and of course there is some truth to that. But Evangelicals and Fundamentalists are experts on fear; fear of hell, fear of heterodoxy/heresy, fear of a vengeful god holding you over the pit of hell like a loathsome spider, fear of Satan, fear of our own bodies and human desires, etc., etc.

Fear of loss runs throughout my family, myself included, and with good reason, but with terrible consequences. I've lost housing and experienced homelessness. I've lost many friends, including the love of my life Gwenn, to untimely deaths. I've even lost multiple opportunities because of a fear of loss. How ironic is that? One of the other devastating side effects of a fear of loss is hoarding. After being homeless for five months when I was 21 I always swore I was going to live as minimalist life as possible because I saw what hoarding looked like with with my depression era grandmother and my mom, neither of whom could bear to throw anything away, to the point of looking like an episode of the reality TV show Hoarders. I have an old friend who cannot stand to even accidentally catch a glimpse of that show because it's physically painful for her to watch, because she sees herself in those characters.

Hoarding as a reaction to fear of loss isn't just a physical behavior of not being able to let go of almost any object, it can and often does lead to emotional and even spiritual hoarding. The threat of loss can be as suffocating as someone trying to strangle you to death; it's that physically tangible. My mother who I loved deeply struggled with every aspect of this fear of loss. Not long after my birth my father almost strangled my mother to death, but the times being what they were, he wasn't arrested for it. Instead she ended up in a psychiatric hospital for months, getting barbaric electro-shock "therapy" to erase her memories of his brutal abuse. I can't watch the film One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest because of how close to reality it is for my family. For years after that I would ask my mother about various famous/infamous events from the late 1960's and she'd repeatedly tell me that she had no recollection of any of them because they'd all been erased from her memory. No memory of the Moon landing. No memory of the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy or Doctor King. Very few memories of even my own growing up in my earliest childhood as I went through multiple surgeries to correct my cleft lip and pallet, learned to walk and talk, attending my first days of school, etc.

It was a several year long mental black hole for my mother. And even after that period, the ECT was replaced with multiple years of brutal psychiatric drugs combined with her newly developed alcoholism. When you've been traumatized this badly, you sate your pain anyway you can. I still remember the look and smell of the psychiatric hospital we'd go to when she would attend her monthly out-patient follow-ups. Sometimes she couldn't take me when she needed in-patient care, and my older sister would look after me at home. One time I screamed so loud and kicked so hard as my mom walked away from our house that I broke my sister's toe by flinging the pair of old metal roller skates I was wearing. I understand why ECT is sometimes necessary for many folks because of how indelibly these memories are imprinted in our minds. They never really go away.

Anyone who has gone through therapy or any 12 step program (I've done both many times) knows all too well about the many different coping mechanisms we use to get through each and every day. Reactive behaviors are remarkably diverse; ranging from alcoholism, drug abuse, porn addiction, binge buying, hoarding, sexual promiscuity, over eating/starving, cutting/self-harm, suicidal ideation/attempts, emotional and physical violence towards loved ones and strangers, and the sad list goes on.

Obviously this isn't unique to me or my family. This is a massive social problem cutting across class, race, gender, ethnicity and orientation. When I worked in social work in NYC, and later on in Michigan for a short while, I saw each and every one of these behaviors among my clientele. And I would dare to say that in almost every single case these men, women, trans, children and elderly, experienced one, or typically more than one, severe trauma in their background, and the earlier it happened, the more deeply and indelibly ingrained these reactive behaviors were in all of them. The traumas are just as diverse as the reactions to them. It could be homelessness, sexual abuse including rape (the vast majority of my clientele were sexually abused when they were young, both male and female), being in war, losing loved ones to suicide or murder, and like above, this list can go on and on.

The reason I'm writing this essay today is that I'm supposed to be in NYC right now getting a lay of the land about housing and work starting the beginning of next year, but instead I'm still in my soon to be vacant apartment on campus paralyzed by fear and anxiety about driving the five plus hours to Staten Island, NY and revisiting so much difficult personal history. That, and my writing is my self therapy which has literally kept me alive over the years. My mother, to her credit, also used her poetic writing to help her get through her darkest times. It was a life saver to her too. I've definitely inherited her poetic Muse, having written several hundred poems in the course of my own life. It's truly saved my life many times over and it did the same for her and some other members of my family.

Thankfully, there are also an incredibly diverse set of options in overcoming fear and anxiety available to us. They can be writing as it is for me and many others, it can be other artistic expressions, whether painting/drawing, dancing, music, hiking/running, meditation, service to others, belonging to various groups whether religious or secular (this one's hugely important), and yes, therapy and sometimes even proper medication.

Overcoming severe anxiety and fear is never easy. It just isn't. And sometimes you can't just "pray it away" in some facile way. In fact, that advice often has the exact opposite effect on the people most in need of help, insofar as when "praying it away" doesn't work, it ends up leaving the person in much worse shape, mentally, physically, emotionally, and spiritually, because they end up blaming themselves and even God. Good Christians and other people of faith have succumbed to this despair and darkness because this leaves them feeling even more isolated and alone than when they started out. I know this fact first hand in my own life, whether my own dark impulses about myself or of many friends, near and far, some of whom have confided in me about their own struggles on this front.

And when I use the term "front" I'm being intentional. This is a war within, a war against yourself. But every war has two sides (at least), and you have within you another side to this war which sees you/me as loving and deserving of love. And there are people (and animals by the way) near and far who believe the same about you/me. Make allies with this part of yourself and with others who love you exactly as you are.

I love you and me. I need to remind myself of this deep truth. In the words of Robert DeNiro in Brazil, as the terrorist plumber, "We're all in this together." Also, this version works too.