The fear of change is a phenomenon that has persisted through time. For some, it’s a slight inconvenience on an otherwise simple path to creating the life you want. However, for others, it may feel like standing on a receding ledge crumbling under your weight with only a streaming river of molten lava to catch you should you fall. It’s not just scary. Your relationship to change exists in the belief that it can be fatal.
How does change become this terrifying?
There is not one simple answer to explain why we fear change. It’s also not an experience that happens all at once. Change is the natural process of experiencing life. From the time you are born, your world is constantly in motion. Mornings become evenings. Crying becomes talking and crawling becomes walking. Change surrounds you as you learn to relate to experiences, people, and the environments in which you exist.
As you learn about this world, you begin to develop rules that allow you to make sense of yourself and to connect with those around you. As change occurs you can assess,
Am I safe? Can I trust?
When the answer is ‘yes’ and your nervous system remains regulated, you never consider or question the need to control. You accept change as an innocuous part of life. While it may not be a period of comfort, dread is nowhere near. However, when the answer is ‘no,’ the questions that follow are,
Can I find safety? Can I create trust?
You become aware of this new element called control. You recognize that there is a relationship between control and safety. Control allows you to access trust. You learn to hedge your bets and ease any discomfort that accompanies change.
However, when the answer remains ‘no,’ there is only feeling unsafe and living in an environment lacking trust. Your nervous system remains in perpetual dysregulation as the constancy of change challenges the belief in control. The rules have been broken and no longer make sense. You feel like you lack a sense of control while understanding change is not always marked by a period of discomfort. With change, you begin to believe you are an unwilling passenger headed straight for pain and loss.
Knowing that change is not only inevitable but necessary to grow and evolve, how do you stop fearing change and start changing fear?
Recognize how fear moves in your body
Your relationship with any emotion begins with your relationship with yourself. Because fear often elicits a fleeing response, you are likely to miss important nuances regarding your relationship to change. By learning to recognize how fear physically moves through your body you can begin to notice the subtle conversation that is taking place between your nervous system and the world around you. You may realize that your fear is not very loud at first. Instead, it may feel like a slight annoyance and choosing to opt out of opportunities that require you to confront change.
We are often great at disguising emotions to avoid experiencing them at all costs. Notice where your body becomes more tense or activated than other areas to strengthen awareness of your fear. Is it your stomach? Maybe your shoulders? As you become more familiar, you can start to notice each time it shows up and reflect on what you do next. This allows you to establish patterns for not only how you process change, but how you experience fear in other ways too.
Identify what kind of change causes fear
Before you become familiar with the experience of fear, it can be easy to overgeneralize that all change causes intense fear. This is unlikely and often results in overwhelm and shutdown, which prevents you from truly confronting your fear. When you identify in which context change elicits fear, you can grasp a deeper understanding of how safety and trust feel at risk.
Perhaps you are comfortable with others instigating change but dread being the one to introduce it. Maybe it’s change that leaves things open-ended as opposed to change that feels contained that scares you. Maybe you fear change that exposes vulnerabilities rather than change that confronts weaknesses. When you can identify what kind of change elicits fear, you can understand how it relates to your sense of safety and trust and where it might’ve been ruptured in the past.
Stop asking and start answering ‘what if..’
Many professionals would consider playing ‘what if’ ruminating at best and catastrophizing at worst. However, when you confront the extreme ‘what ifs’ with the expectation of actually answering the question, it can often lead to profound insight into your core fears. For example, there was a time when I was terrified of building my practice. As I confronted my version of ‘what if,’ I concluded that my core fear was being unable to financially care for myself. This could ultimately result in housing instability and homelessness. While this may sound absurd, it is the answer that followed my ‘what if.’ Once I answered it, I realized the many options available to me before reaching that conclusion. It also illuminated old narratives I’d heard about career stability. The voice in my head driving this fear was not even my own.
When you stop asking and start answering ‘what if,’ you can gain more clarity on the source of your fear. You may be surprised to find out the voice attached belongs to someone besides you and you have been operating from beliefs that are not your own. You also get an in-depth look at your perceived worst-case scenario. From this vantage point, it can be easier to brainstorm and reverse engineer a solution. If the worst case is truly beyond repair and control, you can feel confident in your opposition to embrace that change.
Make the experience of fear an opportunity for contemplation and exploration
As you develop an awareness and strengthen your relationship with fear, you can begin to shift your perspective on what fear as a whole can mean. Rather than this emotion that signifies a lack of trust and safety, you can approach fear as an opportunity for contemplation and exploration. Each emotion serves a purpose that is beneficial to our survival in this world. Not every emotion is meant to feel good. However, they are each meant for all of us to feel. When you can accept that, you make space to take in all that those feelings are capable of telling you.
Suggested Readings: The War of Art by Steven Pressfield and The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy
