Meanings You Create Can Offset Your Winning Recipe And Lessen Fear

SINCE CHILDHOOD EACH of us has used some kind of a winning recipe to compensate for not being outgoing enough. It allows us to hide inside of a socially acceptable way to be – analytical, different, funny, polite, or sexy.  Or any of the thousands of other personas that introverts adopt to win in an extroverted world. For example, my recipe is being methodical by building step by step processes to cope with life events.

In the last three posts we discussed how to prevent your recipe from creating issues in your relationships. In this post and the next three we deal with why a winning recipe is not an effective way to respond to fear. It may even make the fear worse.

The problem with the recipe is that it constantly calls you to direct your attention towards it instead of towards the fear. Here we take a look at meaning, and how to alter the way you hold it. Doing so can reduce your fright even in the face of a terribly serious peril.

I confronted such a threat one night deep in the Georgia woods.

How I Discovered The Meaning Solution

AT AGE 22 I was a newly-commissioned second lieutenant in the United States Army.  I was going through officer basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia and the highlight of the program was the dreaded Escape and Evasion exercise.  Over two hundred other lieutenants and I were dropped off in a field in the dead of night.  We had to find our way north to a safe zone without getting captured.

Between us and safety were a hundred hardened Army sergeants and privates.  Half of them had clubs and the other half restrained angry German Shepherd dogs, all waiting in a tree line several hundred meters ahead. That was a pre-smartphone age – if they caught anyone there would be no evidence of whatever abuse they chose to inflict on us. I grew up in the suburbs of L.A. and had never been in a fight, let alone in a forest at night.  I was terrified beyond description.

In the dark we trainees all ran at full speed towards the forest. Once there I slammed into a tree trunk and fell behind the others. Within seconds screaming soldiers and snarling dogs captured the three men just ahead of me. I lay at the base of the tree enduring long moments of agony as dog and a handler circled back to within meters of my position.  But there were too many human scents in the air and the dog did not find me. Eventually all the action moved away towards the north.

I lay there with a dozen sticks digging into me and blood in my mouth from a torn lip. I became foolishly indifferent to what might happen next. But soon the terror returned, along with my winning recipe. It urged me to look desperately for any step by step process that might save me. That only intensified my fear because here no such process could help.

Suddenly an answer came into my head from a completely different angle. I had accepted the meaning that my only option was to try to escape to the safe zone. But when I stepped outside of my mind I saw another possibility.  I could try just to evade and not reach the safe area. I re-interpreted the exercise to mean – for me – that mere evasion would be an enormous win. Others might call me a coward.  But they would have had no idea of how much courage it took for me just to press on and to survive this night of horrors without a dog or a soldier catching me.

Striving for that was so much beyond what I thought I could accomplish that it filled me with passionate resolve. My fear ratcheted down and after ten hours of blundering in the dark and concealing myself I made it through to daylight without getting caught. Perhaps ten to twenty-five percent of the other lieutenants had done the same.  To our surprise that outcome still counted for something in the course scoring.

Unpacking The Meaning Solution

THE MEANING YOU assign to your situation drives your fear about it.  That in turn calls your winning recipe into action:

Meaning ➝ Fear ➝ Winning Recipe

I originally made the Army exercise mean that I had to try to reach the safe zone.  I knew I did not have the skills to do that. Fear immediately drove me into a fruitless search for a step by step process to avoid capture.  That only deepened my terror.

I went to the source – the meaning I held – and shifted it into a different interpretation.  I changed the evasion part of the trial to mean a huge success for me.  When I did that the fear dropped away and with it the urgency to run my recipe.

That was a key shift in consciousness that stayed with me my whole life. From then on I saw that any meaning I held in my head was only an interpretation. It was not an unvarying truth, and to treat it as such closed off a whole universe of additional possibilities.  Such as some that might support me better as a human being.

How to Create Empowering Interpretations

LOOK AT WHATEVER you are making something mean.  Ask if maybe there is some other way to look at it that would serve you better. Learning to shift meanings into interpretations is valuable, especially when you are so consumed by fear that it triggers your winning recipe.  When that happens you often can think of doing nothing else but what it tells you to do.

Here is how to use meaning to handle a fearful situation:

1. Watch your mind at work.
As we saw in Post #4, sit quietly and imagine that you are looking into your mind from the outside. Observe your winning recipe as it makes urgent demands calling you to double down on however it always tells you to be.  It could demand that you be calm, doubtful, intense, quick, or stoic.  Or any one of the thousands of other ways introverts choose to cope. Above all, notice that you are not the recipe, you are the person who has the recipe.

2. Ask what you are making the situation mean.
What meaning have you assigned to the situation? What are you assuming about it that makes things so frightening?

3. Create a new interpretation.
Step back and ask how else you could view your predicament. What other possibilities could you envision? What other courses of action might work?  Regardless of how outside your normal way of doing things they might be?

In particular, which actions most favorably support your humanity and your well-being? Which ones position you to grow and potentially to contribute to others? Lock onto the most favorable interpretation and have the situation mean that.

For me it meant to live to fight another day.  That meant avoiding the physical and psychological trauma of a failed escape attempt. A successful evasion attempt was an outside-the-box interpretation that diluted the fear and delivered a good outcome. In the face of an overwhelming threat that is sometimes the best you can hope for.

I Invite You Today To Create A New Interpretation Of Whatever Meaning Is Driving Your Fear

• What meaning is behind your fear? How has creating a new interpretation worked for you? If you would like us to consider sharing your story anonymously with The Satisfied Introvert community please email it to me at thesatisfiedintrovert@gmail.com.
• How can I help you change that meaning into an interpretation? Please go to the Contact page and enter your name, email and questions. I cannot answer everyone, but will do my best – especially if the answer could benefit others.
• To be notified of new posts to The Satisfied Introvert blog, please go to the Subscribe section at the bottom of this post and enter your name and email. Under no circumstances will we share your information without your express permission. A new post appears every two weeks. Coming up next: “A Trusted Person Can Counteract Your Winning Recipe And Reduce Fear.” If a particular post does not apply to you, future ones most likely will!

Welcome to the competence that comes from changing

 

meanings into new interpretations, and discovering

 

new possibilities that improve your well-being

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