Caged by Fear…But That Was Yesterday!
“One can choose to go back toward safety or forward toward growth. Growth must be chosen again and again; fear must be overcome again and again.” — Abraham Maslow
“To become everything that one is capable of becoming.” That’s what the highly influential psychologist Abraham Maslow believed to be an individual’s highest calling: “self-actualization.”
In a nutshell, he believed in focusing on our strengths, our interests, and our abilities rather than dwelling on the symptoms, on the struggle. Instead of focusing all of his efforts on studying people with different disorders, he conducted research on happy, healthy individuals to better understand what habits and characteristics they had in common. You can read more about Maslow HERE.
“One can choose to go back toward safety or forward toward growth.”
It seems counter-intuitive that our struggles and fears are a place of safety, but it’s a matter of succumbing or not succumbing to our natural way of thinking; the way we’re “used” to doing things.
“Growth must be chosen again and again.”
I recently wrote a guest post for YouTuber and podcaster Lauren DeLeary, another ex-Evangelical who works to deconstruct belief systems like the one she and I came from. She talks about Christian fear — specifically, the fear of being wrong.
“DO NOT FEAR BEING WRONG. This is huge. Christians are soooooo scared to be wrong about anything.” — Lauren DeLeary
I’ve chosen to focus my blog on self-transformation (the “growth” part) and being an ex-Evangelical because for me, the two are linked, and I believe that many face the same path. “Growth” is where I’m going, and fear — especially a certain species of Evangelical Christian fear — is what I’m working to overcome.
“…fear must be overcome again and again.”
As someone who struggles with Anxiety and who was also raised by Evangelical missionaries, here are some example of what that fear looked like:
- It looked like a child who enforced self-discipline when she misbehaved.
- It looked like constant self-devaluation because “self-esteem” and “self-love” are dangerous.
- It looked like a teen who didn’t care to form her own opinions because she felt that all the beliefs that mattered had been given to her.
- It looked like a girl who attributed her struggles with anxiety to demons, which led to even more fear and self-devaluation. Because why couldn’t she make them go away?
- It looked like a young adult who couldn’t understand why she couldn’t read her Bible enough, pray enough, go to church enough; why doing all the right things didn’t seem to make her stronger.
- It looked like a young woman who constantly sought affirmation and direction from others, who didn’t know how to trust her own opinions, beliefs, and desires.
- It looked like a woman who feared social connection because she still held onto the belief that she was inadequate, and she didn’t want to “bother” people.
These patterns are my safety, but they are not my potential. They are not my place of peace.
And, don’t get me wrong…I don’t blame the Evangelical church for all my struggles with mental health. I don’t believe it’s the “boogeyman.” I do, however, believe that the community in which I was raised exacerbated and fed it.
“…fear must be overcome again and again.”
Imagine that you are trapped inside a cage, which, over time, is reinforced by more and more iron bars.
That place is your safety. Nothing can get in, but nothing can get out either.
When you choose to do something outside your comfort zone, escape the strongly constructed prison, you throw yourself against them, getting hurt and bruised.
So, you decide to break them down more intelligently. You feel them, study them, search for their weaknesses. Doing just this with the fears that bar me has been an important part of growth.
Here’s the thing though. We can become so preoccupied with the bars of the cage that we know the bars better than the being dwelling inside of it.
Whenever you begin knocking against the bars of the cage, or working to take them apart, remember that those bars have nothing to do with you, the being living inside.
And this, I think, is what is so powerful about Maslow’s quote and his focus on healthy individuals.
Because inside, we have potential; we have interests, strengths, dreams. But, if we’re always looking back to the past, studying it, taking it apart, we can forget to learn about the person we’re trying to free.
What about this? What if we take the time to learn who that person is, and to make him or her stronger, more concrete?
Then…maybe…we’ll become too powerful for a simple cage to contain.
Because those fears that I experienced? That was yesterday.
“Growth must be chosen again and again; fear must be overcome again and again.”
