Slowly turning toward fear

I’m on a walk with Bodie. We pass an older woman tending a small garden out the front of her house. 

She calls to him in a sing-song way, “hey little one, hey pup.”

It’s a sweet moment, especially as my part-Rottweiler pooch is anything but little.

I return her hello on Bodie’s behalf. 

(He’s not one for social niceties.)

“I’m actually quite frightened of dogs,” the woman explains. “So I call them all that way, ‘little one’ or ‘pup’. It makes them seem less scary.”

We continue on our way, but this exchange stays with me. 

I’m struck most of all by the tenderness in her voice as she called out to Bodie. You’d have thought she’d had dogs all her life. The love and care with which she named the very thing that scares her.

I find two lessons here. . .

Lesson #1: the way we name something shapes the way we view it. 

My friend Gareth is also afraid of dogs, and he too has started calling Bodie “pup”. He says it helps.

In this club, we do the same thing with the way we name “big, scary feelings”. Somehow that’s a very different conversation than it might otherwise be.

‘Hypervigilance’, ‘suicidal ideation’, etc. -- these can be useful terms in certain contexts, for their precision. 

But it’s also a bit like calling a pup a Rottweiler. Not always the most useful strategy.

Different names can open up different insights, too. Like how the phrase “big, scary feelings” points to a simple truth about the shared nature of suffering: That some of us feel sad or scared a bunch of the time, and don’t always know why.

Whatever particular constellation of labels you happen to have picked up (and however they might differ to mine) we have that much in common.

Lesson #2: the power of a loving gesture toward what scares us.

There’s a phrase my Focusing teacher, Jo Kennedy, uses:

“There’s a difference between feeling a feeling, and acknowledging that you’re feeling it.”

We are so good at ‘just getting through’ the many stressors of a day. We can go through a whole day feeling tense or scared or otherwise unsettled, but never really stop and tend to that feeling.

We feel it, but we don’t acknowledge it.

The truth is, acknowledging these feelings is scary in itself. We’d rather not look too closely.

Or if we do look, it’s often with shame and judgement. ‘Here I go again, getting overwhelmed at the smallest little thing!’ Which just leaves us feeling more tense. 

Breaking that cycle requires a different kind of attention. A loving gesture. A way of saying “hey pup, hey little one”, to whatever scary feeling has arisen.

A simple gesture

For me, it’s often the simple gesture of placing my hand on my heart. 

I do this when I notice the old familiar stirring of overwhelmed feelings. Especially if I’m in public, and can’t immediately escape whatever stressful thing is happening (a confrontational exchange, a busy supermarket checkout). 

My hand on my heart is a silent way of saying to myself: “I see you in there freaking out, I’m here.”

("Hey pup. Hey little one.")

It doesn’t make me suddenly calm. But it does help that part of me, the one freaking out, feel less alone.

It’s a small, gentle act of turning toward, not turning away.

A new ritual

This turning toward, it has to happen slowly. 

(Another Focusing phrase: “we only go as fast as our slowest parts.”)

When I first started doing the hand on heart thing, I don’t know that it made a radical difference all at once. But I’ve been doing it for months now, and I am noticing a shift.

I think of the woman in her garden, saying hello to my otherwise-scary-looking dog.

I suspect she doesn’t exactly feel full of love and free of apprehension when she calls out to each new dog that passes. There’s surely an element of performance.

But I also suspect that over time this little ritual has grown a life of its own. That there is love and care there, even if she still doesn’t want my pooch to come too close just yet.

For me, it’s not so much the gesture itself as the pause it creates, between the feeling and the habitual judgement of the feeling.

When we slowly turn toward our big, scary feelings, with as much love and care and patience as we can muster in any given moment, what we’re really doing is creating a new ritual. Where once I would judge my big feelings and tense up further, now I have a different option. 

Hand on heart. ‘Hey pup, how you doing in there?’

I don’t always remember this option, of course. But it’s there.

Over time, new rituals grow new relationships

I feel that lately I’m in a new phase of my ‘help-seeking’ adventure. 

More and more, I’m seeing these difficult internal experiences not as problems to be fixed, but as small, scared parts of me that above all need befriending, not judgement. 

Each time I check in with care, with these tender gestures of kindness, I like to think I am giving those small, scared parts one more reason to trust me - to believe that just maybe there might be room for them, even when they’re feeling wretched.

This is an easy thing to say, and a hard thing to do. So it’s a process.

And in truth, after years of being poked and prodded and hidden and 'fixed', these tender parts of myself have every reason to take their time trusting my new-found patience with them.

Like any good relationship, it can’t be forced or rushed. The process unfolds bit by bit, in tiny, tender moments.

One ‘hey pup’ at a time.

— Graham x