Fear & Pain - 1/2

I’ve observed that all negative behaviour, such as habits and addictions; all things unhealthy, hurtful or damaging to self; anti-social and destructive activities are always grounded in one or both of two nasty little beasts, FEAR and PAIN.

These two little “puppies” really are like pillars in a Roman Temple - they hold the whole thing up. One or the other always rears its ugly little head if you dig deep enough. Knowing your enemy really helps us to target the attack. Sometimes they’re really difficult to identify, but when they’ve been fingered correctly, a great relief is possible. The first aim of counselling should be to identify the cause of the condition.

I’m not saying that all fear and all pain are wrong. Pain is a genuine response when something is wrong. When we break a bone or burn our skin we feel pain. That’s only natural. The pain says, “Woah! There’s something wrong here. Don’t do that again”.

Likewise when we get to the edge of a high cliff, or face a bigger dude than we are in an impending fight, we experience a perfectly natural fear that says “Hang on a minute! No more progress in this direction unless we balance the odds for survival!”

What I am saying then is that when we dig deeper into negative behaviour, we always find these nasty pillars of negative fear and pain propping it up.

The different levels of psychoanalysis go something like this:

• A casual observer may say - he’s just a drunkard
• A close relative may say - he has a problem with drinking
• A psychiatrist may say - he’s an alcoholic because of learned patterns of behaviour from his alcoholic father
• Going deeper however we may be able to say something like - he is suffering from pain or fear, that prevents him dealing with the issues from the past and has not yet learned to deal with it all, and thus escapes though drink.

I see a lot of addiction based on fear and or pain. I’ve watched as over the years many people around me have chosen to dig deeper, have dealt with the underlying cause of fear or pain, and have then been able to throw off their addictions, sometimes quite quickly and painlessly.

Fear cripples us because we can’t move onwards in life. In business it keeps an entrepreneur in the “safe” zone - always working under capacity. In personal life it cripples one’s ability to maintain intimacy. In social settings it locks us down to those people that we have been forced to inter-relate to or those who have come close to us. In a spiritual sense it can cause us to see God as a big ogre in the sky, out to “get us”, rather than a loving Creator who cares for us and wants relationship with us.

Pain does much the same thing. “Once bitten twice shy” is the saying that comes to mind here. It’s not that we are entitled to a painless life. Far from it. But when something causes us pain or hurt, especially in our formative years, our growth and development, can be crippled.

I see it often in relationships between people married for some years. Those who have chosen to work on their relationships do so continually; deliberately putting past hurts aside and reaping the rewards of intimacy and friendship. On the other hand in the marriages of those who end up with distance in the relationship you can almost always track the source of the distance back to one clearly identifiable point in time where pain “got the better of” one partner. Asking the question “Can you think back to the time or event that caused the distance?” will almost always bring a comment like: “Yes, when he/she said/did [whatever]” and there you have it - pain as a primary cause of distance in a relationship - negative behaviour.

It doesn’t matter what the addiction is - immorality, unfaithfulness, drugs, smoking, excessive drinking. It will always come down to one or both of these two - pain and fear.

Many emotions especially like anger, feelings of rejection or depression or worthlessness are also perpetuated by these two “pillars”.

In the Good book, the Apostle John was the closest of the disciples to Christ and he recounts the time when Jesus first met Peter. Originally named Simon, this guy was a real rough diamond who had a lot to learn about himself. Talk about out of control emotion, Peter was constantly putting his foot in his mouth, trying to take over the show, sorting things out and people (like Jesus himself!) but Jesus knew what he was doing when he changed Simon’s name. He had plans to help teach Peter to overcome the sorts of hurdles that many others succumbed to.

Here it is:

Jesus looked at him and said, “You are Simon son of John. You will be called Cephas” (which, when translated, is Peter).
John 1:42

The amazing things here is that despite all the negative stuff from the past that Simon harboured, Jesus helped him overcome his fears, then deal with his pains and then to eventually graduate, His first preacher, author of Scripture, a wise and respected man who was eventually honoured to be martyred for the Cause.

It’s not what Peter did or where he got to that is the real story however, its where he came from, and what he overcame along the way that is worthy of our attention.

It’s the VICTUS IN AMBITUS way to first identify and then deal to fear and pain.