Fear: What It Prepares Us For

Adapted from a Sage Hill Live Fully Podcast conversation with Dr. Chip Dodd. Edited from the original recording for readability.

About the eight feelings. The eight-feelings framework discussed in this conversation originates with Dr. Chip Dodd in his book The Voice of the Heart. Sage Hill Counseling uses this framework in its work with permission and gratitude.

Fear Is a Feeling That Allows Us to Cry Out for Help

Fear is given to us to set us up to take us to anger. That's the sequence, and it begins with understanding what fear is actually for.

Fear is a feeling that allows us to cry out for help. It's a feeling that allows us to recognize danger. And one essential danger of living everyday life is hope. The moment we hope for something, we're wishing for something we do not have. We're picturing something, hungering for something, reaching for something not yet in our hands. We can envision it, but it's off somewhere else — we've got to get up and go there. It hasn't yet materialized.

So fear, even in its most essential form, is a daily life experience directly connected to a subsequent hope. If you're hoping, you've got fear, whether you recognize it or not. And if you're breathing, you're hoping. You can't help it. It's cellular.

The moment I have fear, it means I'm in need of assistance or help. If you're truly in danger, you automatically cry out. Fear is a preparatory feeling — it's made to allow us to ask for help, and it has certain systems inside it. Fear allows us to anticipate consequences: if I go this way, this may happen; if I go that way, that may happen. It allows us to prepare and practice for results. I need to get A, B, and C done before I go do this. I need to know how to load a gun and shoot it before I go to war. I need to know how to make a move in basketball before I go out on the court — I've got to learn the game. I need to learn to diaper a baby before I have one, and somebody needs to show me how the first time.

Dodd describes his own experience of that dependence. He didn't practice on baby dolls before his sons were born; he depended on his wife Sonia to show him everything. He was afraid — afraid even of having a child, because he pictured failure, and then experienced it too.

Anger Takes Us Into the Experience

So fear anticipates consequences, prepares for results, gets us ready, and moves us to ask for help. But fear gets us ready for something. What actually takes us into the experience is anger. Anger is a desire for change, a hungering for something, a willingness to take risk. The order runs: I want something, I desire — oh, no, I need to get ready, I need help — and fear prepares me to go in ready. Fear prepares us for the challenge, but anger takes us to it. A lot of people stay in the fear as a way of avoiding the anger on the backside.

Dodd tells the story of running the four-forty in high school — what's now called the 400. At about the 300- or 330-meter mark, it's as though a monkey jumps on your back. Coming out of that last turn, rounding the final 100 or 110, oxygen deprivation sets in; the head goes back, you're carrying a weight, and you can barely make it to the finish line. The real runners are so incredible they don't even look like they're experiencing it, but they are. It's the first of the long-distance runs and the last of the sprints, so it's an in-between deal.

For the longest time, he ran that race in fear. Because it was going to hurt, he'd hold back to make sure he had enough left to finish. He ran afraid he wouldn't finish well. Then came the day he wanted to win — wanted to run hard and fast, and to heck with what it was going to feel like at 300. It wasn't that he didn't care; he cared about something else more. That was the first time he ran with anger, so to speak, because he had prepared. Hundreds of preparatory 300s, hundreds of 880s. He remembers a track day when the assignment was ten 300s and he ran twenty, because he wanted it. He was ready. But for a long time he wasn't ready enough to throw caution to the wind — that's a cliché, and really a false statement, but he wasn't prepared to stop caring about the results.

That's why anger is a beautiful experience. In our true anger, going toward something and going for something matters more than the results, more than appearances, more than survival. It's about participation. Showing up.

Hungry Enough Not to Stop

Dodd points to his novel *Anthem to the Invisible* as an example. To this day only three or four people have said much about it. One man he loves has read it three times — it simply takes him that many passes, because it's a rich book, philosophical and allegorical. Dodd thinks it's one of the best things he's done. There haven't been enough people involved with it, and there have been some naysayers. He would love for it to be known now, but it probably carries more meaning than entertainment.

There's a long-running pattern in his relationships: he'll say or do something, and years later someone comes back and tells him it was genius — and he rages at them for not listening at the time. *Anthem to the Invisible* may well be that book, understood twenty years from now.

What that has to do with fear and anger is this: when he wrote the book, he was hungry for it and couldn't stop. He'd had eye surgery and had to keep his head down, and he was still writing by hand with a pen rather than on a computer. He wrote for a solid week — the bulk of it was done in that week, the story completed under a medicated stupor after the surgery.

Fear prepares us

Dodd tells the story of a book he wrote and published — a project he had great hopes for, one he prepared for, in which he wrapped a great story around a great meaning. It hasn't been received well. He still believes somebody needs to champion it, though he's clear it can't be him. What matters for the purposes of understanding fear is the state he was in when he released it: scared to put it out there, very hopeful to put it out there, and willing to put it out there.

The fear was specific. It was that the book wouldn't be what he hoped, that it wouldn't be received, that it wouldn't carry the same meaning to others, that people wouldn't be as curious about it as he was. He had pictured it as a book for millennials in particular — something they would pick up and say, *this guy gets this, this is about us* — a motivation to keep daring to do great things, to dare greatly, to not copy the great industrial complex or become a tool of the corporate world, but to carve their own paths.

So he was afraid it would have exactly the results it did, and he was angry enough to put it out anyway. Now it's out there, and it's simply out there. Is he embarrassed? No. Foolish? No. Could it have been better? He guesses so, but it is what it is, and he isn't changing a bit of it. It's done. He was willing to fail in order to go.

That is the function of fear. It may not be received, but would he rather do it than have it be received? He'd rather do it. Willingness to be afraid can lead us to places where the results may or may not be successful — and doing the thing doesn't take the fear away. Fear is a tool to prepare us for whatever matters to us, whether we go or not. Fear gets us ready. We may not pull the trigger, so to speak, but fear gets us ready. It is essential to facing life on life's terms, because there's a lot of stuff we need to get prepared for before we go do it. Life isn't magic. It's a lot of hard work.

Denial or anxiety

People who are afraid to face their need, and afraid to face situations in which they're genuinely in danger, have two roads available if they deny the experience. Either they will live in denial, or they will live anxious — always on some level braced for something terrible to happen, or treating everything as a danger and staying completely defensive. People who deny their fear and what it is for will be in denial, or they'll be anxious.

What anxiety is doing

The sequence runs like this: the heart says yes, we want something — and immediately we become afraid. Fear is emotional, which means *I am in need of help*. I need to prepare. I need to get ready. I need to ask for help. I need to learn something. I need to wait. I need something.

Instead of sitting in that, listening, and facing what we're really afraid of, fear often turns into anxiety, which is an attempt to solve the fear rather than to move toward the thing we wanted. Anxiety pushes us to attempt to get control of something we actually need to process the fear of. I want to go do this thing, I'm afraid, and I need to get my ducks in a row — and it's never going to stop being scary to go do it. But many of us sit in our anxiety trying to solve every point of fear before we move out. There's a balancing act there, and a wisdom that has to be learned.

Anxiety is an attempt to get control of everything so that I won't have to be afraid — and there's no way not to be afraid, no way to guarantee that something unpredictable can't happen. Anxiety is the imagination of all the negative outcomes that could possibly occur.

But it isn't foolishness, and it isn't a badness. Anxiety is based on experience. It is a physiological response to reality, to my past, and it is biological. It's what allows us to look for tigers and to hear a broken stick as something about to jump us from behind. It's vigilance — jungle physiology, threat physiology. The problem is that most of us don't live near tigers and aren't standing in the dark listening for sticks to break. We have the same anxiety reaction to not being accepted, to potential humiliation, to being rejected, to looking foolish, to attempting something and not succeeding and then not knowing how to grieve.

Anxiety is therefore also a statement of extreme difficulty in asking for help, and extreme difficulty in joining with others so they can help. Anxiety has a lot to do with having done my life alone — I'm anxious because I have to do life without getting help, not facing fear. And secondly, anxiety is a fear of one's own voice. A lot of people get anxious because they're afraid to have their own voice: afraid of their anger, afraid of their desire, afraid of opening their desire to hurt or ridicule or rejection. That's where we really get hurt.

When fear becomes rage

So fear, unfaced, turns into anxiety, and anxiety turns into being controlling. I have to have control of my environment — and most of my environment is made out of people. Anxiety becomes my need to control people: to push them away, to seduce them in, to manage them, all as a way of solving my fear. And when I can't get people managed, rage is the result.

Rage is what most of us have called anger for most of our lives, when in fact rage is a reaction to not being able to tolerate fear and not being able to tolerate not controlling people. It works, in a sense, because people respond to it. They react. Having lived through periods of nobody listening to their fear and nobody caring for them, they read the escalation and conclude: *I'd better do right, because this crazy person is escalating, and if I don't do what I think they need me to do, it's going to get worse.*

Rage is a tiger. Rage is a stick snapped in the woods with something coming up behind you. So a person who reacts to rage with rage, or by shrinking in terror, is being very realistic — until that person can get back into their heart, back into themselves. Rage is such a lack of courage.

Traffic, lost keys, and lost phones

What's astounding is how small the things are that we rage about, and how clearly the rage isn't about them. Traffic. Lost keys. In one household, the interviewer notes, his wife Heather has historically been the one who knows where everything is; when he looks in the refrigerator or a drawer or a closet and can't find something, and asks her to come look, and she opens it and doesn't see it either, it's as though God doesn't see life. Out comes the rage, the pouting, the demanding, the blaming of the kids and the pointing of fingers — *where is my thing that you said?* The fear is not about the pocket knife. It's something deep, historic, and powerful.

Consider what happens when we misplace our phones. Rage is so often about a terrified terror of losing place or losing connection — of winding up tiny in a world that is overwhelming. Lose the phone and it becomes: *I'm alone.* There's no more hostile experience. We go crazy, because without our phones we're going to get in trouble, some emergency will occur and we won't know about it, somebody will try to reach us. And yet we used to live without phones. We lived every day without them — without answering machines, back in the era of beepers.

The phone cannot fix us

Consider the first beeper. Getting one at a first job could make a person feel like the shiz — finally, you had a *thing*. And then the people at work would mess with you, sending alerts you had to go answer and call back. Working full time and going to school full time meant walking out of class, going to the head of the English department, and asking to use her phone, only to hear, "We're just testing you." But the buzz produced a jump every time: *What am I supposed to do? What am I supposed to do?*

And yet there were also times when a device like that would have been really great. Dodd remembers being a little kid, third or fourth grade, spending the night at a friend's house and hearing a siren, and wondering whether something had happened to his mom. He asked his friend's mother if he could call his house, called, found out his mother was okay, and was good again.

So the tool is legitimately used to stay connected. The problem is that we want it to be a pill that makes us not afraid. As Samuel Beckett put it, you're on Earth, and there is no cure for that. We are not going to be able to get rid of fear, sadness, hurt, and loneliness — they are tools we have been given in order to live fully in a tragic place. The phone cannot fix us.

What am I really afraid of?

When we are anxious or raging, it helps enormously to stop and ask ourselves what we are really afraid of — and to give ourselves permission to answer the question rather than judge the question. *I'm afraid that if I don't have my phone, I'm going to be alone, and I can't help you, and you're going to be mad at me. I will not have shown up, and you will hate me for it. Somebody's going to be dead, and if you'd been there you could have stopped it* — which, in truth, you probably couldn't have.

Anxiety that is not about tigers is honestly and truly about a helplessness we never could overcome. It is about our childhood. One of the things Dodd says is that when the feelings are bigger than the actual event, that is about where you came from. When my reaction to an event is bigger than the event, I have gone home to where I came from.

As children there were a lot of things we were legitimately afraid of, and many of us did not have someone to go to in our fear and simply *be* afraid. We had to solve a problem for them instead.

Giving our children everything we're against

Dodd says that so many of the mistakes, the tragic mistakes, he has made in parenting are directly connected to wanting to prevent his sons from ever experiencing *that thing* — whatever that thing happens to be. Say it is being mocked by a coach. To get them to the point where they will never be mocked by a coach, he wants them to be unemotional, to be so tough, to not make mistakes. So he drills them and tells them how not to feel. That is everything he is against. He hands them everything he is against so that they will not have to re-experience what he himself never fully grieved and has not finished.

So many of us are unaware of the marching orders we assumed as children and then carry into our lives. We assumed responsibility for some adult's happiness or well-being or calmness or stability, and we carry that into our grown-up world — into marriages, into parenting, into work relationships and friendships. *Somehow it's my job to* ______. My job to make sure people are happy. My job to not be seen. My job to be the hero. My job to take the blame. And not being in our role is anxiety-producing: we can't find the person to fix, the person to save.

That role always had rules around it about not feeling. It is always about not feeling. The sickness of a home can be measured by how little feeling is allowed to take place — the fewer feelings permitted, the sicker the home. And in Dodd's experience the one feeling that can never *not* take place is fear. In a sick family it is going to come out as anxiety or as rage. Someone is going to be feeling afraid at some point.

Permission to be afraid, and then grief

In our grown-up world, giving ourselves permission to be afraid of what we are really afraid of — even if it is old childhood things — evaporates the anxiety. It is like a magic trick. And if nothing else, we know we are not alone, which is the great helplessness.

From there the solution becomes grief: grieving so much of what was and what we wish had not been. What actually happened, which in the heart of who we are we wish had not happened — that means grief.

Because, oxymoronic as it sounds, we are born with a dark picture: an invisible, imagined experience. We are literally born with a readiness to find exactly who we have never seen. We are born with a picture of desire to be with caregivers who are going to raise us and bring us to creation and creativity, things we cannot even think. We are cellularly born for those things — born to attach. And that is the contrast: how we are born, over against the rules and roles handed down by ordinary parents that separate us from who we are made to be.

A good enough kid, waking up in their world, already knows, *I can go to Mom for this, and I can go to Dad for this.* They are already reading the room. And that is a good skill — good for survival.

Watch the short teaching. This feeling is also covered in the Navigating Feelings video series — watch the fear module. Or explore all eight feelings.