Some Background on Fear Blocks Love

Hello, and welcome back to Fear Blocks Love, a more spiritually-inclined psychology podcast, where we discuss the various ways our efforts to not feel fear, blocks us from acting in line with compassion towards others and ourselves. I'm Dr. Tara Deliberto, a clinical psychologist - and as I like to say, recovering academic (which we'll get into). And I'll be hosting solo again in today's episode to share a bit about how this podcast got started.  I thought you might find it helpful to have some background before we get into the nitty gritty details of all of the various ways that fear blocks love.  So, let's do it! 

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Prior to my present podcast hosting endeavors, I was an academic on faculty at Cornell University's medical college, Weill Cornell Medicine… and I opened and directed an eating disorders program for adults at New York Presbyterian hospital, which is one of the best psych hospitals around. And I was really grateful to be in those positions because they allowed me to learn lessons both professionally and personally that I would not have otherwise been afforded the opportunity to learn.  Although I learned quite a bit professionally in these roles, here’s we're going to actually focus on the more indirect personal lessons that came from this experience. 

So, one of the very interesting things about being in these academic and leadership roles was that I was able to look at what was happening in my patients who had eating disorders and my own life and see parallels; not in the content of what was happening - because I was no longer struggling with eating and body image at the time - but in the process.  What was happening in the eating disorder was similar to the process of what was happening in my own life with achievement. 

For instance, my patients had the ideal that thinness was really something to strive for (and were getting sick in the process) and I had the ideal that achievement was really something to strive for (and was getting sick in the process).  Upon reflection, it seemed, both of these ideals - thinness and achievement - were rooted in fear (i.e., fear of not being good enough, fear of having to strive towards upholding our identity of being a “thin” or “accomplished” person).  For my patients, with eating disorders, their identity was wrapped up in being someone who was thin or fit; and my identity was wrapped up in being an academic and achieving and publishing and directing and leading and professing and the whole ball of wax.  

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So, there was this really beautiful parallel process happening whereby what I was teaching my patients - and teaching my students to teach patients - was something that I could use in my own life; again, not in content per se - because eating and body image was something that I had already worked through earlier on in life - but I could use the same lessons of: de-identifying with an ideal based in fear and shifting to the process of upholding the ideal of compassion towards myself and towards others. 

In the world of eating disorders upholding the ideal of compassion would be tolerating the fear of gaining weight while choosing to compassionately nourishing one’s body; and with achievement it would be to tolerate the fear of failure while choosing to compassionately honor my mental & physical limits by working less and taking care of myself more.  In this way, shifting away from a fear tied to one’s identity (e.g., as a thin person or as a success) and towards compassion (e.g., taking care of oneself) is the process by which fear does NOT block love towards oneself.

It is also the process by which fear no longer blocks love towards others. If you’ve had an eating disorder - or you know of anyone who’s had an eating disorder - you know that it disconnects a person from their loved ones.  The defensive maneuver of avoiding fear of weight gain and judgment results in people being internally occupied as well as physically absent.  People with eating disorders, for instance, might be so in their own minds obsessing about calories that they choose to not go to a loved one’s wedding.  The same is true for so-called “over-achievers” who might be so preoccupied with their endeavors that they are unavailable emotionally and physically to their loved ones.  

So, how does fear block love to others in these instances?  Well, interpersonal relationships are bidirectional.  If you end up cutting yourself off from someone in the process of trying to avoid your own fear of judgment or failure, you are not only cutting yourself off from others; but you are cutting them off from connecting with you.  Right? So they are left without the ability to connect to you.  And there's the lack of compassion. It's not direct in that you aren’t necessarily trying to uphold the ideal of thinness or achievement to disconnect… but that's the outcome. The outcome is a disconnect with your loved ones. And that is significant. 

When we are holding on really tightly to needing to be a certain someone, we become afraid to not be that person. In this process, we often fail to consider the effects on oneself and others; thereby, failing to put compassion first.  So we end up in a situation where we're indirectly - but actively - actually hurting ourselves and others when we operate from here.

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So the thing is, it’s actually pretty hard to recognize that the thing that we think will make us happy and more confident etc. - like thinness or achievement - that whole pursuit is just a trap, just a lesson in what not to do.  Sometimes we have some insight into the fact that the very thing we’re striving for is making us both sick and unhappy.  But it’s hard to recognize.  We get messages from everywhere - our schools, parents, mentors, friends, social media, etc. etc. etc. - that we have to be something to be worth something.  But your worth is inherent.  You don’t need to prove anything.  You don't need to prove anything. 

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So, the good news is that there's actually an antidote to this process of playing defense against fear and compulsively: striving to avoid your own fear of not being good enough, and simply to feel your fear rather than avoiding it, then set it aside and act with compassion. In doing this over time, we become aware that what we thought was going to make us happy is actually the very thing in which striving for it makes us unhappy.  We can develop that awareness that thinness and achievement, et cetera, is actually not the ticket.  And when we start putting compassion first, we become inherently fulfilled because what we're already doing is the only goal… which we covered a little bit in the first episode, but I wanted to kind of reiterate here for good measure. So, only through facing our fear and engaging in acts of compassion towards ourselves and others, do we then only then start to decouple our identities with what we thought was so important (e.g., thinness achievement, whatever) - all the BS stuff  - and start to understand the true power of engaging from a place of love. 

For me personally, de-identifying with achievement involved, decoupling my identity from someone who achieves… you know, a faculty member of Cornell's medical college and a director, titles, and all these papers, and all these citations, and publishing a book, and being an author… and realizing that all of that is noise.  All that noise is not my identity. My identity is someone who cares. And that's it.  Full stop. 

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Pulling back out of the weeds here to notice yet another parallel process: at the time I was making these more psychologically oriented observations about ideals being based in fear and tied to identity, I was also listening to the works of Ram Dass, also known as Dr. Richard Albert. Ram Dass was a psychologist (who I later found out, actually worked in the same building at Harvard that I later did, which I thought was really cool).  Ram Dass became a spiritual leader later in life.  Summarizing quite a lot of history and wisdom here, Ram Dass spoke a lot about going east and meeting some profoundly spiritual people who taught him the lesson, that there is only fear and love.

This conceptualization really stuck with me [obviously]. And I was thinking about it quite a bit. In that process. I started shifting both my personal spiritual work and my professional work to actually fit within this framework because I found it so helpful. I found it so helpful that we can either be operating from fear or love, in that we always have a choice.

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And upon observation of myself and my patients at the time, this seemed to become more and more of a self-evident truism over time.  So, what was happening was that there wasn't only a parallel process between my work with patients and my work on myself, but professionally speaking, but my work on myself and my personal spiritual endeavors as well.

So, there was a lot happening all at once here.  A lot of parallels being drawn. So, professionally this fear versus love paradigm helped me to conceptualize all of these observations that I was making. And it helped me to come up with this kind of two part system whereby there are deals based in fear and other ideals based in love.  It's one or the other. So, for years now I've been cataloging, fear based ideals as I kind of come across them in my life and work and writing out their compassion based counterparts.  So far, I think I've come up with about 50, maybe a little more.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the very first fear ideal I cataloged was “having a thin looking body” and “nourishing my body while accepting the way it looks” as the love-based counterpart.   As I’ve mentioned, there are a lot more where that came from.  So from this list, I created a self-assessment from the fear and love ideals; and those turned into items on the assessment. 

So the ideas for the self-assessment that every person is to decide for themselves, whether or not a given ideal listed as fear based is actually based in fear for them.  If you're not sure, all you really have to do is ask yourself variance on the question of “how anxious would I be if I no longer embodied this ideal?” So for instance, “On a scale of zero to 10, with 10 being the most, how anxious are you about gaining weight?” or “On a scale of zero to 10, with 10 being the most, how anxious would you be if you were no longer able to achieve?”

And I would argue, that if there's any anxiety felt there on that zero to 10 scale, then there's a case that the ideal in question - at least in part - is rooted in fear for you. It might not be a particularly intense fear - or it might be actually a particularly intense fear - but if there is fear there, then you might be kind of sidetracked from compassion in the process of holding and upholding an ideal based in fear and pursuing that.   So that would be where your work is. 

So the work is to be done really in discovering who you really are without all that limiting fear in the mix...  and I would argue that who you are without that fear is who you really are.  That's you.  But that's a much larger debate.  We could maybe get some philosophers in here on, on that topic… but I would argue that who you really are is who you are when you are acting from love and not from fear.

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Another note on this topic for this episode, that we'll explore later as well: when we're coming from a place of fear, things are inherently divisive. So if I'm coming from a place of fear, the mindset is that my body needs to look better than your body. And my achievement needs to be better than your achievement.

When we have these fear-based ideals like thinness and achievement, there is inherent competitiveness. Now coming from love. It's a totally different story. Love is inherently unifying. Love is inherently uniting.  And so if you're truly coming from a place of love, my doing my thing is not only not at odds with you doing your thing, but they're together, better.

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So that brings us to this very podcast and what we're both doing here. So, what I'm doing here is attempting to embody my ideal of compassion by sharing this information with you, because it's been so helpful to me.  Maybe it'll be helpful to you. So, because it's been helpful to me, it calls to me to share it, because it might be helpful for you.  Right? 

And I've, you know, really examined my motives here with this… and I could be wrong and things could change… but right now I truly think that me doing this podcast is coming from a loving place. And therefore, me doing my thing with this podcast will hopefully create a cohesive and unifying situation where we are both better.

I'm also using this podcast as one spiritual practice among many.  I'm doing this very podcast, despite a variety of fears that come up around it that I have, and without expectation of reward or a focus on the outcome of how great it will be.  The only outcome I am directing my attention towards here with this podcast is doing it from a place of compassion and speaking every word as mindfully as I can and checking myself in the process of recording this and internally choosing to feel fear, put it aside and act from love. So, that's my practice with this. And I believe that if this is the practice that good will come from it. I mean, I have no idea in what form, but I think good will come from it.  

So that said, if someone, however, is hurt or confused in some way by the content here, which can happen (because the road to hell is, is paved with good intentions)... I believe that if we do what calls to us and do it from a place of compassion that we can overcome bumps in the road. And if someone is hurt or confused by the content here, I hope that it's shared in a respectful way. And then for me, the spiritual practice then becomes to notice my defensiveness, listen with an open mind and perhaps even apologize if it's needed; and grow, and maybe change my view on something.  So I'm opening myself up to the opportunity in advance that some things might come along the way that really changed my mind or that I have to apologize for. And that's okay. That's okay. 

Alongside noticing what I might be feeling as aversive, it's also important to keep that excitement about what might come from this in check.  Right? Not getting too high on positive feedback or praise or pets on the back. For instance, the other side of the practice for me, in addition to feeling fear, as well as going and leading with compassion, is not getting attached to the outcome; not getting really attached to any sort of praise.  Right?  All of those things together collectively are the spiritual goal because it's not about me. Right? I happen to be hosting this podcast, but it's not about me. This is about us together. 

Ram Dass has a quote that applies here: “I can do nothing for you, but work on myself. You can do nothing for me, but work on yourself.”  Whoa. Right? It's pretty big. “I can do nothing for you, but work on myself… you could do nothing for me, but work on yourself.”  So that's what we're doing here. I'm working on myself for us and you're working on yourself for us. 

And I'm using the word “us” very intentionally here, because you are included in that whole.  We can't forget yourself when we're talking about behaving compassionately, right? Because the idea is to behave compassionately towards others and oneself. We don't want to act compassionately towards others at the expense of ourselves, but we're going to work in a compassionate way where all ships rise - so to speak - so that you're not discounting yourself when aiming to behave with compassion. 

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So in another interesting way, we can have our own parallel process. But based in compassion, not fear this time. So, while I'm choosing this podcast, as one of my spiritual practices, among many, you are invited to also use it as a practice as well. If you're so inclined.  Right? 

You can, for instance, listen to this podcast and monitor your own fear and judgements and attachments, and that can be something you do or not. You know, it's really completely 100% up to you, what you do with this podcast and the content in it. If there's something that's not particularly helpful, leave it.  Take what you like and leave the rest.  Through the process of listening to this podcast, I invite you to leave what's irrelevant. Simply let it go. Right? And on the other hand, if something else does resonate with you, by all means, really go with it or sit with it, observe it, hold it lightly, or carry it with you and see how it applies in your own life over time.  And you can use each episode as an opportunity also to kind of recalibrate your North Star away from fear and towards compassion. So it's an opportunity to reset. 

And so by entering into this endeavor with compassion and love together, Hopefully we can create this kind of mutually beneficial, upward spiral.

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All right. Just a little more background before we close for the episode.  Not to belabor the point here, but you know, I'm really not doing this podcast to get rich and famous.  I'm sitting here laughing to myself about the way in which other folks in the past have approached me regarding a treatment manual that I published.  And the assumption there was that I had made a lot of money or had become famous from it somehow. And, I sold - for the record - like tens and tens of copies. And I put more time and effort and money into that treatment manual than I could ever make back. All told, I think it's like 800 pages of material. 

So, for the people out there who are looking to get rich and famous… the way not to do it is to write an 800 page treatment manual for disorder that unfortunately, very few people actually wanna treat because it's so hard.  Precisely because it's so hard to treat and I receive training in it, it felt like the right thing to do.  And it was a helpful spiritual practice for me to write that manual, in the same way that this podcast is a helpful spiritual practice for me. 

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So, to close the goal here again, is to move away from this divisive fear and competition to grow together with this podcast and using it as a medium for both psychological and spiritual exploration. And we can experience by putting into practice what's talked about here, what it's actually like to decouple our identities from something rooted in fear and to shift towards embodying compassion. And I think we have it on pretty good authority from people like the Dalai Lama, that putting compassion first is ultimately quite freeing.

Thank you very much for taking the time to listen and for your thoughtful consideration of the ideas presented here.  I hope that there was something you were able to find in this episode that was helpful for you. And I invite you to join us again next time. This has been another episode of Fear Blocks Love, with me, your host, Dr. Tara Deliberto. And remember you have a choice of fear or love.  Until next time…