Every day we take steps somewhere. When faced with taking the next step out of an unwanted change or away from a bad situation, we are often fearful because we are stepping into unknown territory – we’ve never been there before.

Fear is a good thing.  But when it keeps us from exploring new options for our life or expanding possibilities or setting new and exciting goals, we need to take a look at what and why we are afraid. 

Healthy fear is a good thing

Healthy fear listens to that internal gut feeling that tells you something is not right or you are in some kind of danger.

Fear is a critical survival warning system that keeps us alive. We hear an unusual noise in the middle of the night and cautiously check it out. We become cautious and observant when returning alone to our car in a deserted parking lot. We lock our doors because we know it is a deterrent. We avoid dangerous sections of town. We drive safely because we want to avoid deadly accidents.

Healthy fear puts in place preventative measures against potential dangerous situations. It tells us to be careful and cautious. It prepares us to take some kind of action. 

The Fight or Flight Response

When our brain registers danger, whether real or perceived, our “fight or flight” response is activated. In the blink of an eye, hormones and chemicals are released. Our heart, circulatory system, adrenal glands, stomach, intestines, kidneys, liver, brain, lungs – in fact almost every organ in the body is activated in some way to meet this emergency. Blood is shunted away from our extremities, liver and digestive tracts to the heart, lungs and skeletal muscles. Digestion is put on hold. Glucose is dumped into the blood to provide energy for the impending fight or flight. Sweating helps take care of excess waste. (See my book “Make Stress Work for You” available on my website).

Once the danger is past, the body returns once again to a restful state; your heart beat returns to normal, your blood pressure lowers and your digestive system continues to digest your lunch. This is a natural and normal response to life.

The problem today is we experience a lot of fears that are not actual life threatening threats, but “paper tigers” that loom large and threatening. When our response to threats are out of proportion, we exaggerate or make the situation worse than it is. When that becomes our normal reactionary response, we can become fearful of taking any next step.  

Next week, we will look at some of the ways unhealthy and restricting fears may be keeping you from moving forward.

©2013 Marlene Anderson

What keeps us from taking the next step out of adversity, loss or unwanted change?

Often it is fear along with its brothers and sisters, anger and anxiety.

The only way to deal with challenging and difficult emotions is to confront them head on.  The first step in moving forward is to acknowledge your fears, anger or anxiety. It sounds simple enough but it really isn’t.

Why? Because in admitting we are afraid, even to ourselves, we might become like the deer frozen in the headlights of a Mac truck roaring down the freeway.

If we admit we are angry, we might totally lose control.

We hang onto anxiety because maybe, just maybe, a solution will come. Only solutions don’t come because we are so uptight, we can’t think of any.

Fear, anger and anxiety make us feel helpless, defenseless, weak, susceptible and vulnerable.

We not only fear for security and physical safety, but our senses of worth and self esteem are threatened. Life has just revealed to us that we don’t have it all together, we don’t have all the answers and we can’t keep pretending we do.

We don’t want to be vulnerable – even to ourselves. Over the years we put together a personal identity and social façade that we come to believe ourselves.

Admitting our fears make us vulnerable, even to ourselves, and threatens our core identity. I am okay only when I have control over everything.

And therein lies the problem.

As long as we are afraid to confront and address our feelings, they will continue to hold us hostage. They will increase and become pervasive. Before we realize it, fear, anger and anxiety become a normal way to respond to everything in life.

But at a great cost. The stress of living with constant fear, anger and anxiety has a huge influence on our physical and mental health. It is estimated that 70% of illnesses can trace their roots back to chronic stress and distress.

It is what we think about and say to ourselves about what is happening in our lives that does the most damage.

If we are constantly rehearsing in our heads the worst case scenario for everything, we are putting our bodies on constant alert to fight or flee.

(See my book, Make Stress Work for You, available on my website).

On Thursday I will talk about how we can manage our fears. If we stay in a bubble of continual fear we will not be able to find solutions to make that next step forward.

©2013 Marlene Anderson

“I am excited about life and the wonderful discoveries I am making about myself and the possibilities and potential for my future.”

On Monday, I challenged you to make the above affirmation a mindset as you turn adversity into an opportunity. The possibilities for a new and wonderful life are limitless. But we do need to believe in ourselves and our abilities to make it happen.

When I was putting together the manuscript for my latest book, “From Winter to Spring”, I wrote about how difficult it was to grieve my loss. From the deck of my home I could see eagles, with powerful outstretched wings riding the thermal air currents, soaring upward until they were mere specks in the sky. I imagined myself soaring like those eagles, serenely floating above my pain and circumstances.

I don’t like heights. Neither do I like changes that turn my life upside down and inside out. But if I am going to soar like an eagle I need to pry my hands off the branch I am hanging onto, spread my wings and fly.

Eagles have incredible eyesight and enormous strength. We can become like an eagle as we work through the emotions of fear, anxiety, worry and anger that create resistance from taking that next step. 

As eagles soar high above the earth, their laser sharp eyesight target their prey from thousands of feet in the sky, and then with their incredible strength they swoop down and capture that prey.

Become like an eagle

When fears become overwhelming, take a time out and “soar like an eagle”. Relax in the security of God’s thermal air currents.

When you need to target those areas in your life that are keeping you “grounded” allow your eagle eye to focus on the problem. When you have identified what that is, allow your internal strength to grab hold of that problem and work through it.

When we recognize what areas require personal work in order to move forward, we need to get past the terror that keeps us clinging for dear life to that tree branch.

So Monday we will plunge right in and tackle those fears.

Marlene Anderson

A bridge takes you from one side of a divide to another. When we are transitioning from a loss we need to build a bridge from our ending to a new beginning.

For those of you who subscribe to my FREE monthly newsletters on this series, The Next Step, you have received additional information, strategies and exercises that can be used to help build that bridge.

If you haven’t signed up, you can still do so and receive past issues on taking The Next Step out of adversity. The 5th newsletter in this series will be released this week.

Making a transition from unwanted endings is never easy. In fact it can be very uncomfortable and unsettling.

After the death of my husband at a time when our professional careers were diminishing, my loss created enormous changes in my life. Yet, as difficult and unwelcome as this loss was, I made some important discoveries about myself that resulted in new meaning and excitement for life again.

You might think this transitional period unproductive as you explore options and discover more about yourself.

But the work you do during this time period is vital and can keep you from repeating the same mistakes over and over again or continue to apply outdated and outlived information to your life.

Making a transition is never a linear path. It goes back and forth from what was to what is today and continues the process of acceptance and letting go.

Change is as important to our health, mental, spiritual and physical as the air we breathe. Yet I am constantly amazed at the deep resistance we have to change.

We can’t go back and glue the pieces of our life together again. But we can pick up the pieces and find new ways to construct a new and even better life.

In a retreat I put together a couple of years ago entitled “Turn Your Gravel Pit into a Beautiful Garden,” I described how we can take the ugliness of our lives and turn it into something beautiful and positive. No matter how bad the past, no matter what was destroyed, in the rubble that remains are the materials to create a something beautiful and new. You are the architect and designer.

So during this month as I blog as we address emotions that keep us in resistance – fear, anxiety and worry, I invite you to put the following affirmation on your refrigerator door and repeat it every day as often as you can.

“I am excited about life and the wonderful discoveries I am making about myself and the possibilities and potential for my future.”

I challenge you to make this a mindset as you go through this self exploration process. The possibilities for a new and wonderful life are limitless. All we need is to believe in ourselves.

©2013 Marlene Anderson, MA, LMHC, NCC

“And the peace of God, which passes all understanding, will keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.” Philippians 4:7 (New Oxford Annotated Bible)

Peace. One moment our spirits are dejected and depressed – the next we are feeling at peace. What changes have occurred to create this difference?

When losses run deep and grief has a longer time frame to complete, we may find ourselves feeling okay one moment and down in the dumps the next.

I have found my spirit and soul fed by the statements of faith, assurance and love I find in the scriptures. It is where I experience God reaching out to me and where I find peace in the midst of any turmoil or tragedy.

There is much I am personally responsible for: challenging negative thinking, reframing self-defeating self talk and changing my focus. I am responsible for taking charge of my life, setting goals, making decisions and working through problems.

But when I am in the midst of traumas, critical losses, uncertainty and pain, I also need the healing Spirit of God.

 Grieving our losses enables us to heal, recover and integrate into our life story what has happened. We are molded and expanded by our losses. As we let go and risk being in uncertainty and anxiety, we discover more about ourselves than we could have at any other time. Unwanted change can create a whole new landscape of possibilities and choices we had not been exposed to.

Peace enables us to stay with the ambiguity and insecurity and doubt until we have worked through it.

Peace comes when

• We don’t know the answers and stop asking the questions

• We accept what has happened and choose to move forward

• We don’t have to be perfect – we are okay just as we are

• We rest in God’s assurances

• We allow love to perform its healing power

• We dig deep inside and pull out the strength and resilience that is there

• We make the choice to become responsible and take charge of our life

• We choose to focus on where we are headed and not where we have been

It is then that peace will energize, motivate, encourage and lead us to a new path that holds promise of purpose and meaning.

©2013 Marlene Anderson

The sun is streaming through my window this morning. I know it is still cold outdoors, but my fireplace warms my heart as it warms my bedroom.

Patterns of light and shadow form on the walls, creating pieces of moving art as the wind rustles the trees outside. I snuggle deeper into my chair with my comforter and steaming cup of coffee and watch in fascination as pine needles and branches form dancing silhouettes on the wall above my bed.

The heavy cloud cover of our Northwest winters can make the winter months gray and dark. But when the sun breaks through, everything that had been dreary and dull, comes alive. The threads in my comforter shine like gold. Everything in my home springs to life with color as the sun’s rays penetrate deep into every room.

When the onslaught of monumental losses or seemingly endless change threatens to overwhelm us, our world can seem colorless and drab. Even moments of fleeting pleasure don’t seem to have a long-lasting remedy for depressed spirits.

When our internal world remains gray for long periods of time, we begin to doubt our life and purpose. We struggle to believe there is a God who really exists and who cares. We need reassurance. We need to accept that just like we still believe there is a physical sun when clouds show no traces of one, that we can also accept that God is real and is there in the gray periods of our lives.

Why is it so easy to believe that the sun still exists when we can’t see it, but we struggle to believe that God still loves us when our world is covered with clouds of grief and loss?

Sometimes the journey through change seems long. And then we receive those moments of sunlight; a glimpse into a brighter tomorrow filled with new life and a new reality with new opportunities. Expand those moments and possibilities.

1. Make a list of all your past accomplishments. Remember the risks involved, the struggles and the challenges you went through. Losses can make our past accomplishments seem small or trivial. Think about them as successes.

2. Make a list of all your strengths, both personal and professional. Don’t minimize any of them. Losses can diminish our evaluation of what we can and cannot do today. Celebrate all of you.

3. Even when you are feeling anxious or uncertain, refocus your thinking on possibilities for yourself and your future. There will be times when you feel you are barely surviving, but that will change and energy and motivation will return.

4. It takes time to regain our balance. Resist making immediate huge drastic or life-altering changes without thinking them through. Take some time to sort out what you need to hang onto and what you can let go of.

©2013 Marlene Anderson