A note to our Christian family before we start. We love the Church, and we believe the verses people quote to each other in hard moments. This is not a complaint about any of that. It is about one skill, and it is a skill most of us were never taught: what to actually do with fear once it has already arrived.
You are awake at two in the morning doing arithmetic you already did at eleven. The numbers have not changed. You do them again anyway.
At some point you pray, and the prayer is mostly a request for the feeling to leave. You ask God to take it. You remind yourself that He is in control. You quote yourself a verse about not being anxious, and for a few minutes it works, and then you are back to the arithmetic.
By three there are two problems instead of one. There is the money. And there is the fact that you are still afraid of it, which feels like it says something about your faith.
What we were taught to do with fear
God says do not be afraid over and over across the Bible. It is one of the most repeated instructions in it.
Most of us heard that as an instruction about a feeling. Stop feeling it. And since nobody can stop a feeling by deciding to, we did the only thing available, which was to stop showing it, and then to stop looking at it ourselves.
Counsellors have a name for using prayer or Scripture to get around emotional work instead of going through it. They call it spiritual bypass, and it is associated with higher depression, anxiety and stress (Fox & Picciotto, 2019). More broadly, people who habitually push feelings down report fewer close relationships and less social support than people who process them (Gross & John, 2003). You pay for the pushing down, and you keep the fear.
A man running from his own son
David was king of Israel about three thousand years ago. His son Absalom turned the country against him and took the throne, and David left Jerusalem on foot with whoever was still loyal to him, knowing an army was coming.
This is how he opens a prayer in that situation.
"Lord, how many are my foes! How many rise up against me! Many are saying of me, 'God will not deliver him.'"
— Psalm 3:1–2 (NIV)
He does not open with worship. He opens by counting them. Then he does something stranger, which is to say out loud, to God, the exact sentence his enemies are using about God. He is not going to save you. David brings the fear into the room, and he brings what the fear is telling him about God's character, and he puts both in front of God before he asks for anything.
Then the prayer turns. But you, Lord, are a shield around me (Psalm 3:3, NIV).
The order is worth holding onto. The naming is first. The turn is second. He does not arrive composed, and he does not pretend the army is smaller than it is.
He goes to sleep at the end
"I lie down and sleep; I wake again, because the Lord sustains me."
— Psalm 3:5 (NIV)
He slept. The army was still out there. His son was still trying to kill him. Nothing about his circumstances had improved between the first verse and the fifth.
What changed is that he was no longer carrying it by himself.
A lot of us have been handed a promise that does not hold up: that God shows up and the danger goes away. David still had an army outside. Jesus still went to the cross the following morning. What the psalm shows is sturdier than that. Fear's message is danger, beware and prepare, and what it needs is safety. God's answer to fear, over and over, is almost never there is nothing to worry about. It is I am with you. The presence is the safety. David still had the army, and he slept anyway.
Eighty-eight people and a live tarantula
Researchers recruited eighty-eight people who were frightened of spiders and asked them to walk toward a live tarantula. They split them into four groups. One group said out loud what they were feeling, in plain sentences like I am anxious the tarantula will jump on me. One group was told to think about it more calmly. One group was distracted with unrelated conversation. One group did it in silence.
A week later the researchers measured fear response through the skin, which does not depend on what people say about themselves. The group that had said their fear out loud showed the biggest drop, by a wide margin over thinking calmly, over distraction, and over silence alike (Kircanski et al., 2012).
Within that group, the people who used the most frightened words dropped the furthest. Not the calmest words. The most afraid ones.
There is a mechanism underneath it that has been imaged directly. When people put a feeling into words, activity in the amygdala, the brain's threat-detection system, goes down, and activity goes up in a region at the front of the brain that handles deliberate, verbal thinking (Lieberman et al., 2007). Your nervous system does something measurably different once words get attached to a feeling.
Jesus asked three people to stay awake
The night before he was killed, Jesus went to a garden called Gethsemane. He took three of his closest followers further in with him and told them plainly what was happening to him. His soul was overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death, he said, and he asked them to stay there and keep watch with him (Matthew 26:37–38, NIV). Then he went a little further on and asked his Father to take the whole thing away from him if there was any way.
He named it out loud. He asked for it to pass. He asked three friends to stay.
There is a well-known experiment that shows why that last part matters. Married women lay in a brain scanner under threat of a mild electric shock, in three conditions: holding their husband's hand, holding a stranger's hand, or holding nothing. Holding a hand quieted the brain's threat response. The husband's hand quieted it more than the stranger's, and the better the marriage was rated, the more his hand helped (Coan et al., 2006). Presence is part of the machinery. Somebody next to you changes what your body has to do with the threat.
So what is God actually asking for?
What if do not be afraid was never an instruction to stop feeling afraid? What if it is closer to: do not stay here. Do not carry it by yourself. I am with you.
Read that way, it is not a test you keep failing at two in the morning. It is an invitation to do something with fear, in company, that most of us were never taught how to do.
And fear can be done something with. It is the fastest of the emotions to arrive and the fastest to leave. It was built to move through you. It was never built to live in you.
Three things to do this week
One. Say it out loud, every time it shows up.
Out loud, not in your head. Name the emotion and name the thing attached to it. I feel fear about the money. I feel fear that she is going to leave. If somebody is in the room, say it to them. If nobody is, say it to the room anyway. Say the real version rather than the tidy one, because in the tarantula study the people whose fear dropped the furthest were the ones who used the most frightened words. Then pay attention over the next minute or two, not to whether the problem changed, but to whether the fear did.
Two. Pray it the way David prayed it.
He did not compose himself before he started. He counted the men coming for him, and he repeated out loud the worst thing they were saying about God. Only then does the prayer turn. This week, before you ask God for anything, say the specific thing you are afraid of. Most of us were taught to arrive at prayer already calm. See what happens when you arrive the way he did.
Three. Do a Core Emotion Wheel about fear itself.
Not about a situation you are in right now, but about your whole relationship with this one emotion. When were you first afraid of something? What happened when you showed it? Who was around, and what did they do? What did you learn to do with fear as a result, and are you still doing it?
Do it with your husband, your wife, or anybody you love, sitting next to each other, out loud, in the same conversation. Never separately and then compared. The value is in hearing it named by the person beside you, and doing it apart removes the only part that works. It takes about four minutes.
Get the free Core Emotion Wheel
It is a single page with our eight core emotions on it, written in plain language. People use it to finally put names to things they have been carrying for years without a name for them, and it is what the practice above is built on. It is free, and you can do the whole thing in about four minutes with somebody you love.
References
Coan, J. A., Schaefer, H. S., & Davidson, R. J. (2006). Lending a hand: Social regulation of the neural response to threat. Psychological Science, 17(12), 1032–1039. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01832.x
Fox, J., & Picciotto, G. (2019). The mediating effects of spiritual bypass on depression, anxiety, and stress. Counseling and Values, 64(2), 227–245. https://doi.org/10.1002/cvj.12116
Gross, J. J., & John, O. P. (2003). Individual differences in two emotion regulation processes: Implications for affect, relationships, and well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85(2), 348–362. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.85.2.348
Kircanski, K., Lieberman, M. D., & Craske, M. G. (2012). Feelings into words: Contributions of language to exposure therapy. Psychological Science, 23(10), 1086–1091. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797612443830
Lieberman, M. D., Eisenberger, N. I., Crockett, M. J., Tom, S. M., Pfeifer, J. H., & Way, B. M. (2007). Putting feelings into words: Affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity in response to affective stimuli. Psychological Science, 18(5), 421–428. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01916.x
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