“It starts shortly after waking up,” she said. “One moment I’m still warm and cosy from sleep, and the next the fear factory starts up. And it starts spewing out fears and warnings, and I can’t stop it.”
It was our first coaching session. She came to me because she was tired of feeling fearful and worried.
“Does this go on all day?” I asked.
She stopped to think. “Well, not all the time. It’s not like I’m scared all day long. But because there are a lot of things I worry about, it’s like that worry forms a slimy residu that sticks to me and I can never get it off, not even when I take a shower.”
“What do you do with that?” I asked?
“I tried everything,” she answered. “I’ve tried to find out where the fears came from. I tried to isolate the most fearful thoughts, and reframe those. I tried meditation. And visualization. And creating a positive mindset. And distracting myself. And some of it worked a bit. But the factory always started up again. And that slimy residu never left. I can feel it now.”
I asked her to close her eyes and get comfortable. ”We’re going to explore that sticky feeling,“ I said. “We’re not trying to get anywhere. We’re just looking.”
She nodded.
We went in.
I heard her move around her chair when the fears seemed to get nearer. I heard her sigh when she didn’t run from it and realized that somehow, the fears just … stepped back.
At the end of the call I asked her about the slimy residu. Was it still there?
“I don’t think so …,” she said surprised. There was some tingling, as if the body remembered there used to be something there that was gone now. She closed her eyes to feel harder.
Could it really be gone? She hadn’t even noticed it left.
She opened her eyes. “I think it’s really gone. I can’t believe it!”
Throughout out work together the fear factory kept working.
But less.
And less.
Its employees took vacations.
And irregular time off.
And the fears and worries it spit out were less powerful.
And it didn’t stick on her skin after hours.
I recently heard from her.
She told me there are still fearful thoughts at times.
And sometimes, worries come up, too.
“But it doesn’t stick to me anymore,” she said. “I know how to be with them now. And it just goes again quickly. It’s like I’ve suddenly lost 50 kilos. And they stayed off.”
Trying to fix her fears had kept them alive for years.
They lost their power once she stopped all the ways to get rid of them.
(And she didn’t even need them to be gone anymore.)
Love,
P.S. Fears and worries don’t need to be fixed.
They stop holding you hostage when you stop trying to manage them.
That’s the shift that happens in private coaching.
P.P.S. Liked this blog?
There’s more in my exhale mails. No spam, no funnels, no fluff. Just some relief in your inbox. Sign up below.
Get exhale mails — a bit of relief in your inbox: