Building a Healthy Relationship with Fear

I never would have thought that visiting a waterpark in the Wisconsin Dells could be such an opportunity for transformational personal growth, but for each of the last two years, Great Wolf Lodge has been an extraordinary measuring stick for what I am learning about myself as a father, as a husband and as a human being in general. Last year at Great Wolf Lodge I learned a great deal about letting go of expectations. As a result, I wrote a fun piece about it called Greek Gods, Great Wolves and a Block of Cheese  which you can check out at my website in case you are newer to following my writing or you missed it when I first wrote the piece. This time around at Great Wolf, the backdrop of the waterslides and wave pools was an opportunity for me to take specific notice of my own relationship with fear and how much that relationship has influenced my parenting over the last six years since becoming a dad. 

I have struggled with fear for my entire life. Many of my fears are perfectly reasonable and rational. I have no desire to free dive off of a cliff in Acapulco. That's way too scary for me. I am not interested in competing in a mixed martial arts tournament. My years on a dojo floor are in the past. As a general rule, I am never going to scuba dive in an underwater cave. Enclosed spaces are panic inducing for me in pretty much all situations. I do not go out walking or jogging by myself late at night in the dark wooded areas behind our north side Chicago home. My sense is that I would be fine, but I see no need to take any chances in a world where so many people seem to be struggling and desperate these days.

I also have MANY irrational fears that I have dealt with through the years. By irrational fears I don't necessarily mean that the fear itself is always irrational. Sometimes it is more the amount of energetic weight that I give to the thing that I am afraid of. For example, I live in some level of constant fear of dying despite the fact that I am reasonably healthy and I don't do things like jump off cliffs, fight in MMA tournaments or scuba dive in caves. Many people are afraid of dying. I just happen to think about it way more often than I prefer. Another one of my running irrational fears is the fear of scarcity. I often feel like I am going to run out of resources like money, time, energy or love. For example, I worry about money every single day despite the fact I have lived fairly comfortably for the entirety of my life.

In what is perhaps one of my more famous individual episodes of irrational fear, I take you back to a decade ago when my wife was trying to convince me that we should start renting out our cottage in Michigan at the times we were not using it, as to help provide revenue to cover some of the costs and make keeping the cottage a sustainable proposition. I had no desire at all to let strangers stay in my own home, even if it is a part time, summer getaway space. The idea of strangers in my home scared the daylights out of me. In a line that has now become synonymous with the apex of my irrational fears, I said to Christiana, "Imagine what would happen if someone who was staying in our house decided to put anthrax in our flour jar?" Seriously?! What in the world was I thinking? This was long before my choice of intentional sobriety so alcohol may or may not have been involved in my ridiculous and defensive argument, but that line has certainly provided a great source of amusement to my wife and many others in the years since. 

Like many people I know, my struggle with fear started at a very early age. I had a remarkably safe and happy home to grow up in as a child, but after doing years of deep work in therapy, coaching and other group self-development, it is absolutely clear to me now that both nature and nurture played a role in my relationship with fear and insecurity. I have no doubt that I came into this lifetime wired to have a propensity for anxiety, so matter how stable my childhood was, there was a high probability that I would be a cautious and at times timid child. Combine that tendency towards anxiety with the fact that I experienced a few different episodes of bullying in my early childhood, some of which were egregiously damaging, and I had a perfect recipe to develop an unhealthy relationship with fear.

As I look back across the arc of my life, I can see how fear has played a part in nearly every major fork in the road. Of course it is perfectly natural to approach transition and change in life with caution. I on the other hand have spent far too many years trying to cling to a path of familiarity to such a high degree, that even modest changes can be panic inducing for me. Where some people walk themself out to the edge of the cliff of change with a normal level of caution, I have to spend hours worrying about what the walk to the edge of the cliff will look like before I can even begin to think about how much more courage it will require for me to take an actual leap of faith. The amount of life force I have had to waste just to push on through my everyday life under an umbrella of fear is unquantifiable.

Things have been changing over the last couple of years though. I still worry more than I would prefer and at times I'm a little anxious, but I have been building a new, healthier relationship with fear that honors my need to protect myself (and others), but does not leave me paralyzed in a state of inactivity. I trust you have all heard about fight or flight response where the amygdala sounds an alarm to the rest of the brain to prepare to respond to potential danger. A third and potentially more troublesome response in times of potential danger is the freeze response. 

Over the past two years I have spent hundreds if not thousands of hours working on understanding the inception point of my own experiences with Fight, Flight, Freeze and what I have learned has quite possibly been the most empowering thing I have learned about myself in my entire life. There is much more to this story and it won't be too long before I start telling it, but I am committed to making sure I have processed and healed the trauma that has continually been reactivated over and over again through the years before I start talking and writing about it more. My vision is to work on a book about my relationship with fear and its origin after I finish up the ghostwriting project I have been involved with for the better part of the last year. I am infinitely grateful to my friends and family who have supported me during this discovery process. I have also had great therapists, coaches, mentors and teachers along the way and as a result, I have started to build a new, healthy relationship with fear that I feel is just the tip of the iceberg of change. 

In our two days at Great Wolf, I watched my daughter Emma work on her own relationship with fear, one waterslide at a time. Last year she wanted me to be at the bottom to catch her every single time, even on the tiniest little ones. This year before I even waded into the knee deep water at mini slides called Totem Towers, Emma had already come down once all by herself and was on the way back to the stairs. She even did the enclosed tunnel slides all by herself this time, which she did not do at any point on our previous visits. When I realized that Emma hadn't even waited for me to position myself at the bottom to catch her, my heart was split by conflicting emotions. One half of my heart was bursting with pride that she was finding her own way and being brave about things that formerly scared her about water and dark tunnels. 

The other half of my heart felt a weight of sadness that my little girl didn't need me in the same way that she used to, and noticing her new independence introduced me to a series of all new fears that I am going to get to continue to learn more about as I give Emma enough space for her to build her own relationship with fear, all the while staying just close enough to swoop in to the rescue if needed. 

Later that afternoon while we were sitting in the hot tub, I pointed to the top of Lookout Mountain, which is one of the taller water slides at Great Wolf. Even though the slide is a good bit higher than any of the slides that Emma had tried up to that point, it is a nice winding ride and the entire chute is open to the ceiling with no parts of the ride in a tunnel so my sense was that Emma would enjoy the ride if she could move through the fear of height of the ride. 

I said to Emma, "Maybe sometime later this weekend you might like to try to bigger slide? It's not in a tunnel and it's a very fun ride." Emma immediately dropped her head sheepishly and began to frown to show her disapproval. I told her that she didn't have to try the ride, but if she decided that she wanted to, that we could go down together on the same double tube and she could pick the color of the tube. We sat in silence for a short period of time before Emma said, "Daddy, I want to try it!" I told her that I was proud of her and that she could let me know when she felt ready, to which she enthusiastically said, "I want to try it now!" 

We grabbed a blue, double float and climbed the 36 stairs to the top. In the launch area it took a while to get Emma situated in the front of the tube and she definitely had a few second thoughts, but after a some tears and letting a few people go down ahead of us, we pushed off into the winding trail of water with screams and laughter. As we splashed into the water at the bottom and floated safely into the lazy river, Emma shouted the word that every parent has heard countless times through the years:

"Again!!!" 

That moment was probably the happiest moment I have had yet this year and I have had some pretty terrific moments. We proceeded to go up and down Lookout Mountain at least 30 times to the tune of over 1000 steps, all of which I carried the raft every time. By the end of the night Emma had even gone down by herself on a single tube and by the end of the weekend, she was carrying her own tube to the top by herself as well.

As our time at Great Wolf wound down, I couldn't help but notice how much my relationship with fear has shifted in the last couple of years. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my wife and daughter, my warrior training weekends, my sometimes twice a week therapy and the countless men's community meetings I have sat in or moderated. Like everything else in life, building new, healthier relationships with anything or anyone means doing the work. 

In our last hour at the waterpark, I ventured to the dark corner in the back where I seldom go. In that corner lurked the tallest slide of them all. The one that is enclosed in a dark tunnel from top to bottom. The one that has the possibility of reactivating my vertigo from my head trauma a couple of years ago. Something inside me began to tingle as I thought about whether or not I wanted to give it a go or play it safe and wade out into the wave pool instead. 

I grabbed a float, climbed the 60 stairs to the top and without even pausing, launched myself down the dark tunnel. I immediately spun around backwards, which was by no means my preference, but in less than a minute I came out of the dark and into light, only to find Emma and Christiana at the bottom cheering me on. "Way to go Daddy!!" Emma screeched. Just like she has so many times in the last six years, my daughter Emma had become my teacher and my inspiration. I would be lying if I told you that I loved the ride or that I immediately screamed, "Again!" but I am proud of myself for doing it once, even if I never do it again. My new healthy relationship with fear is being built one baby step, one water slide and one day at a time. 

Well that's all for this week. Tomorrow is Emma's final day of Kindergarten. I'm sure I'll have plenty to say about that next week along with whatever else comes up along the way. 

Peace and blessings for a wonderful week,