What would love do, instead?

There was a time, when my parenting was entirely driven by fear.

There were obvious reasons for it. My baby son wouldn’t gain weight and had severe food allergies. My days were all about creating meals he could – and would eat. I was obsessed with chubbing him up and being the mum that would beat nature’s quirks. I nursed him for 18 months, to support his immune system and help with his eczema. I studied wholesome recipes and nutrition. Without fail, I took him to the health visitor every week to have him weighed and measured. When I went to get some medical advice, the GP just looked at him and wrote ‘Not thriving’ on a form to send him off for tests. ‘Not thriving’ was not a diagnosis for him. It was the most brutal verdict and unjust judgement on me, that I have ever experienced. ‘Not thriving’ sent me off into a frenzy of fearful checking, comparing, blaming, defending and feeling sorry for myself – constantly. Always with the looming possibility of us getting it wrong.

But there were other fears that came with it, too. Fear about work, money, identity, future. I could write blog posts on each. Fear now totally dominated my life. There was a constant loop of checking, strategising, planning, projecting, acting out and blaming. It was rather exhausting.

All of these made sense, given the amount of fear I was experiencing.

None of these helped my son, or me for that matter. None of these were even about him but all about managing my fear.

None of these got me closer, more attuned or intuitive to him or even myself. None of them felt empowering.

I’m sharing this with you because I know that fear dominates a lot of our decisions as parents, adult children of aging parents, partners, team members or leaders. Fear always comes with a perfectly packed bundle of very good reasons and evidence, that makes it look like ‘it’s mine’ to personally solve. It always looks like it is real and the more we act out of it, the more it will multiply and solidify and become even more personal. It is hardly ever about just one thing. It usually looks like the whole game of life is rigged against you.

Fear, as a come-from, is such a limiting space. In parenting, it almost always takes our attention away from the very person we are here to help. I see so many well-meaning, dedicated and loving parents suffocating their rapport with their kids out of fear. In teams, fear shows up in how we manage information, who we support, where we speak up and how we take on responsibilities. In relationships, fear leads to more separation between partners, mistrust, insecurity, dishonesty and misunderstanding. In whatever area you look, it comes with unmistakable signposts: Comparison, overthinking, urgency, the need to be right, blaming, looking out for faults in others, double checking, micro-managing, anger and frustration. But not only does it not feel nice, coming from fear clouds our attention and ability to respond rather than just react.

You may say, I know that, but how do I get rid of fear?

I have good and bad news for you here. Let’s get the bad out of the way first. You probably won’t. Fear is a feeling and there is no cure for a feeling. A feeling is the shadow left by a thought that has already been thought. So, unless you numb your senses to a point where you can’t process thought, or you slow it down so much that you digest it in chunks, or you master to only think happy thoughts from now on, you will get a visit from fear ever now and then. Every thought comes with a flavour. Fearful thinking brings the feeling of fear, fresh every single moment. The reason we experience fear over a long time is that we keep thinking the same kind of thoughts and their many ‘babies’, without realising.

The good news is that fear is ‘only’ a feeling, which is actually tremendously important for our survival as a species. We just turned this state of heightened alert and intensity into a permanent come-from. We identify with it. If any feeling is always the flipside of thought, fleeting, random thought we take for real in this moment, then fear is just that, too. The same kind of thought being thought repeatedly will come with the same kind of feeling being felt repeatedly. We then think, because we feel it again and again, it must be us. This is where understanding helps and True North comes in.

What shifted my fear around and that of so many people who learned this, was something very simple. I learned to recognise my good buddy “FEAR” in its different disguises. Not as the many problems I need to fix before I can be okay, but as a FEELING. The signposts it comes with are always the same. If you skip the ‘good reasons’ and evidence, just for that moment, you can face something you can handle, before it handles you. It is not at all complex, only the context we put around it, makes it look like it is.

There is a powerful antidote to fear: Love, as cheesy as it sounds. Love is a capacity we are born with, a power that lives in True North. There are, by the way, whole movements out there in the world, helping people shift from fear to love. Look it up! This is not my invention, but definitely my experience.

I saw one day that all my actions and worries regarding my son's allergies were about me dealing with my fear rather than being with my child. And simply seeing that made me make different choices. It didn’t make sense to spend my day reading up on unhelpful doctors, pitfalls or other parent's experiences, while my baby was begging for attention. It didn’t make sense anymore to have him weighed all the time, only to feel disappointed again. It didn’t make sense to make such a fuss around his eating, introducing new foods all the time, thinking that this would make him eat more.

Today, I’m grateful every time I spot the fear. It's not that I like it but I’m not afeared of it in the same way. I know I can deal with it. Recognising 'fear' helps me get perspective in a moment of stress and dis-ease. I started using a new question in moments like that: What would love do, instead? It’s worth trying for yourself!

You will always have to deal with life and the challenges in front of you, but from love (i.e., True North) there will be an entirely different repertoire of tools available to face them with.

I’m going to end this with one of my favourite quotes of all time:

“If the only thing people learned was to not be afraid of their experience, that alone would change the world.” Syd Banks

P.S. By the way, our son is still allergic to foods, but he is one of the most thriving young people I know.