Decisions: Fear, Love & Shame
Fear is a core human emotion; there is no escaping it. We can only process our fears and seek to avoid being controlled by them. Still, total fearlessness would liken us to a psychopath — out of touch with our own vulnerabilities marching forward in nihilistic naiveté. So how should we make our decisions when fear is a factor?
Decisions are more like baking a cake than they are like shooting a bullseye — our goal is to get the ingredients into proper proportion. Fear will be an ingredient in nearly every decision we make. The proper question is not, “did fear contribute to this decision,” but rather, “did fear over-contribute, act as the foundation, core, or base of this decision?”
Just as savory balances sweet, the counter-ingredient to fear is love. Fear is generated when what we love is threatened. No love means no fear. Therefore, our strongest fears will correspond to our strongest loves. In a way, these two emotions are opposite sides of the same coin and come as a package deal; they are always in the cake.
Yet we know there is a difference between a fear-based decision, and a love-based decision. Fear-based decisions are revealed by our preoccupation with negative possibilities, weighing painful outcomes against each other.
With love-based decisions, even decisions related to risk management, the future we visualize is more positive. We weigh warm & meaningful outcomes against each other. So how do we lean more towards the later & avoid the former?
Our first task is to identify our fear; noticing and naming our emotions in order to begin de-basing the fear. The core human fear is shame - embarrassment, exile, or ostracization; finding oneself on the outside looking in, but feeling unwelcome.
This is not simply being unloved, but rather being unloved on purpose. “Fear has to do with punishment” (1 John 4:18). For many of us, our greatest current fear is tribelessness - being punished by being rejected!
Our second task is to reorient ourselves towards the love at the heart of our fears. “Perfect love casts out fear” (1 John 4:18). John isn’t talking about removing our nervous systems and their propensity to anticipate threats (fear), he is talking about the power of fear as the foundation and motivator of behavior. We must reorient ourselves towards a love that supersedes the threats.
So how do we experience this “perfect love” that John is talking about?
Our parents, spouses, and friends may have loved us well, but certainly not perfectly. In some ways these tribes may have been broken. To deal with this, we look to John’s argument which flows like this:
- God loves us (1 John 4:10)
- That gives us the security and responsibility to love one another (1 John 4:11)
- When that happens, “his love is perfected in us” (1 John 4:12).
- That perfect love drives out fear.
So how do we avoid making fear-based decisions? By immersing ourselves into a loving community & involving them. This requires three things: 1) a sense of self as loved by God, 2) the practice of that love with a commitment to vulnerability, allowing oneself to be truly known (as our real selves), and 3) accepting with patience that this communal experience will deliver us this “perfected love”.
This participation is the ultimate shame-killer. It dethrones and de-bases the central fear of solitude that so often drives our reactive, fear-oriented decision making.
Wishing you a trustworthy community,
Seth Troutt
