You probably know it before words can explain it.  Perhaps in a hum, a buzzing, a tightening that arrives before it lands as a formed thought.

Fear is a recurring subject for me, one that appears to be at the root of (dare I say ‘all’) my own misery, the majority of it for my clients, and seemingly the world.

I didn’t believe it at first, but the longer and more deeply I’ve sat with what really derails me, I invariably arrive at fear; some instances more obvious than others but the feeling tone is the same.

At a primal level, all organisms hold an element of fear purely out of the organic desire to survive.

Personal fears we’re well acquainted with can include the fear of losing one’s life, home, marriage, children, loved ones, livelihood, freedom….

There’s a raft of more idiopathic, nebulous fears that often don’t have an obvious source. We see them in familial disputes, habitual reactions, attachment styles, relational patterns and behaviours. We don’t see but feel these in the need to get things right, to be relentlessly ready, to defend, protect or hide ourselves… to be right, first, quiet, loud, alert, serious, nonchalant…

There’s a question I often come back to:

‘What is it that I absolutely have to be?’ 

It doesn’t need an immediate answer. Just notice what arises.

Fear from bigger, more obvious sources — from specific experiences — often surfaces in a feeling tone very similar to the original event. It might have left you vigilant, defensive, frozen (or something else).  If so, any of these can reverberate in your system as though the event is still happening, or happening again.

And yet, the worst version of fear? The real bitch?  It is the fear of fear itself.

So formidable it can become trauma in its own right.  (Trauma being not solely the event but rather, how it is stored in the system.) When fear of our fear takes over, it becomes the presiding operating system, such that no other program can be installed.

This type of fear keeps us feeling trapped. Paralyzed by the possibility that anything like it could take us directly back to when it was at its worst.

It prevents us from approaching it and in doing so prevents us from healing, from accessing the very practices that can help us resolve both it and the original experience. It chokes the flow of life.

You see, fear is driven by fear. That’s how it survives. It’s the most prolific and prosperous feedback loop going — even more so than your social media algorithm. The more we experience fear, the more fear there is and the more we fear fear, the more fear there is to fear.

And yet — the system generating all of this is not broken. It is doing exactly what it was built to do.

What we don’t often consider is how complex and ingenious the whole human response system is — and the indispensable role it fulfills. Particularly with bigger, more traumatic events, the responses that may feel stuck in your system now were the precise mechanisms by which you survived. Those responses literally saved your life.

Your nervous system takes its job seriously (that’s a good thing) and thinks it still needs to be on the job, such that those once-necessary responses became somewhat ingrained. Now, with the experience in the past, it’s safe and perhaps desirable to invite them to gently let down their guard.

In all of my studies, I’ve become aware of only one way out of the trap of fear and it’s to go IN. Once we do so — mindfully and thoughtfully — we can soften it around the edges and gently create space around it.   We go into it and get to know it in small doses, titrated by the same method used in chemistry class. One drop at a time.

“One drop at a time”  is both metaphor and method.

‘Titration’ is an approach becoming known in the healing of trauma, popularized by Peter Levine, the founder of Somatic Experiencing® (SE). A hallmark of SE, titration results in the gentle parsing apart of various aspects of challenging experiences, inviting experiential, digestible and sustainable resolution at last.

In practice, this can look like pausing at the edge of something uncomfortable rather than pushing through it. Noticing where in your body fear tends to land — a chest that tightens, a breath that shallows, a jaw that holds — not to analyze it, but to develop the capacity to be with it. Just long enough for your system to register that you are here, that you are safe, that something can begin, slowly, to settle.

This is the essence of somatic work. Paced and, perhaps counterintuitively, remarkably kind.