WE ALL CREATED, in childhood, a winning recipe that allows us to compensate for not being outgoing enough. The recipe allows us to hide inside of a socially acceptable way to be – charming, flagrant, laid-back, responsible, or unflappable. Or any of the thousands of other guises introverts adopt to gain success. For example, my recipe is to be methodical by building step by step procedures to cope with life events.
When you experience fear, your winning recipe is not an effective way to handle it. This is the fourth and last of the posts on ways to reduce fear by going beyond your recipe. Here we talk about seeing yourself not as being your fear, but as being the person who has the fear.
This realization came home to me one terrifying night in Vietnam when the Viet Cong attacked the compound where I lived.
How I Discovered The Context Solution
I WAS A U.S. Army first lieutenant serving as an intelligence adviser to the South Vietnamese Army in Pleiku. I lived in a compound that shared a perimeter fence near the Cambodian border with the massive U.S. Fourth Division. One evening after midnight the Viet Cong shelled our position. I stumbled out of bed and into a trench with my .30 caliber semi-automatic carbine and pointed it towards the forest beyond the fence.
As I lay there the Fourth sent up parachute flares that came down ever so slowly. As the shadows swayed from side to side they made everything beyond the perimeter seem to move. With so much light shining on our trench I felt like we were in a death trap. Fear completely engulfed me. All I could think about was that at any moment a mortar round would explode on top of us. Or that machinegun fire from outside the fence would rake our position and kill us all.
Then the Fourth opened up with an artillery barrage. Their helicopter gunships started blasting the darkness outside the fence. I felt joy and pride but the all-consuming fear did not leave me.
Afterwards I realized that the experience was doubly cathartic. First it showed that my recipe of handling life with stepwise procedures was useless against desperate fear. A crisis typically spurred my recipe into frantic calls for me to launch a process. But when the fear got big enough the recipe was no match for it. An existential threat simply made it run away.
Secondly, the attack reminded me that in the trench I had been the fear. But I realized when the all-clear sounded that I was actually the person having the fear. I was the context for it. This helped me to escape from the prison of my own mind, something that as an introvert I regularly inhabited. By changing my identity in this way, I shifted from fear-as-myself to context-as-myself. That got me enough distance from the fear to stop shaking.
Unpacking The Context Solution
YOU LIKELY IDENTIFY your winning recipe to be who you are. That is, you take yourself to be a person who acts in a certain way to avoid being an introvert. I certainly did that. But when an event directly threatened my life the recipe went underground and got replaced by raw fear.
Being your recipe is one thing. It is a toxic response that can make life unsatisfying. It can also create the drama of unintended consequences and put distance between you and others. But being your fear is altogether more perverse. It is paralyzing, traumatic and searing, doing potential harm to your mental health.
Fortunately the solution is fairly quick and easy.
How To See Yourself As A Framework
AS SOON AS you identify with your fear so strongly that it becomes who you are, you enter a trap. There is a way out, but your winning recipe is nowhere part of the solution – acute fear has a way of driving the recipe out of your head. (That is one way to get distance from it, but at a terrible cost!)
1. Get perspective on your mind.
As with other issues that we have discussed in these posts, the fix starts with watching your mind at work. The mind is often concerned only with your survival, not necessarily your well-being, so its positions can be extreme. Has fear consumed your whole being? Is that the only thing that your mind is thinking about? Nail down whether that is true.
2. Realize what you just did.
Understand that the only way you can see what your mind is focusing on is if you are not your mind, but its observer. You are the context in which your mind exists. It often wants you to think that it is your identity, but as long as you are mentally healthy your identity sits outside of it.
The simple act of observation breaks the spell. I could not observe myself during the attack because I only had a tiny amount of experience in doing that (please see Post #7 and Post #4). But moments after the all clear sounded in Pleiku I did see what I had been doing. If I had realized that during the assault, the danger I was in would not have dropped by one iota. But it would not have been so acutely painful.
3. Get practice at being the observer.
Your best defense against having fear take over your identity is to make a habit of watching your brain at work. Each time you get upset, look inwards and ask what your mind is telling you. Sometimes it makes you wrong, and at others it makes you right – whichever stance it thinks will most likely help you to survive. It puts on quite a show, and after you watch it for a while you may just start to laugh at its antics.
Let it run its course. Keeping your distance allows you to preserve your identity as something separate from it. It helps you to see yourself as the context for your life. Then when fear does strike, you will be better prepared to realize that yes, your mind is full of fear, but that the fear is not you. You are the person who is having the fear.
I Invite You To View Yourself As A Framework Today
- What did you see the last time you were afraid and looked into your mind? How did that help you to have the fear instead of be the fear? 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 to gain practice in seeing yourself as the context for your life? 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: “Telling the Truth Can Skirt Your Winning Recipe And Avoid Danger.” If a particular post does not apply to you, future ones most likely will!
Welcome to the perspective that comes from being
skilled at watching yourself think, and being
free from the tyranny of believing
that your mind is your identity
© 2022 The Satisfied Introvert LLC
Change your life as an introvert by reading The Satisfied Introvert: A Memoir About Finding Safety in an Extroverted World.
“The Satisfied Introvert is courageous and uplifting – do yourself a favor and read it!” –Reader’s Favorite Book Reviews
