What if some things you do to protect yourself are actually rooted in fear?
Fear is one of the most basic and powerful human emotions, but it can be surprisingly difficult to understand—especially when it shows up as anger, avoidance, control, anxiety, perfectionism, or even shame. In this first episode of our new series, Uncovering Your Hidden Motives, Lynn Roush, LPC, and Austin Conner, PLPC, go beneath the surface to explore where fear comes from and why it can have such a powerful influence on the way we live.
Fear isn’t simply a lack of faith or something you should be able to “think your way out of.” It’s an automatic alarm system designed to protect you when you perceive a threat. Sometimes your body can respond to something happening today as though you’re still living in an experience from years ago. Understanding that connection can bring compassion to reactions that you may have previously judged or felt ashamed of.
In this conversation, we’ll explain what happens in your brain and body when fear takes over, including the instinctive responses to fight, flee, freeze, or fawn. We’ll explore how fear can shape the way you relate to other people and the ways you try to find safety and control. And because this is With You in the Weeds, we won’t stop with the psychology. We’ll also turn to Scripture to ask what God says about our fears—and what it means to bring those fears into his presence rather than facing them alone.
As we begin Uncovering Your Hidden Motives, our hope is that you’ll become more curious about what’s happening beneath your reactions instead of simply judging yourself for them. Let God meet you in the places where you feel afraid, and begin to experience something deeper than simply managing your fears: the security of being held by a loving God.
Highlights from this Conversation
Welcome to our new series, Uncovering Your Hidden Motives. This series takes a deep dive (literally!) on the thought patterns, responses, and behaviors that most of us have but often don’t acknowledge. When you’re able to understand the hidden parts of yourself, you’re empowered to make changes that bring you peace, emotional stability, and healthier relationships.
With this insight into how God designed you and designed relationships to work, you can effectively and confidently love and serve and bless others around you. Ephesians 2:10 captures this perfectly: “We are God’s workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.”
Proverbs 20:5 says, “The purposes of a person’s heart are deep waters, but one who has insight draws them out.” The visual of deep waters is a good picture for what’s going on inside of us. Most of what drives us isn’t actually sitting on the surface. It’s underneath. It takes time, intention, and often the help of others for us to see what’s really going on beneath the surface.
We’re going to tackle each topic in two parts. First, there will be an episode looking at the “roots” of the topic, and then the next episode will be how to manage the “weeds” of the topic. We find that people often start the process of looking at their hidden motives when they come for counseling, so this is information that we often share with our clients and should be helpful for you as well.
Understanding Your Alarm System
Fear is multidimensional and has emotional, relational, and spiritual threads, so let’s start with some definitions. One biblical definition of fear is found in Proverbs 1:7: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. Fools despise wisdom and instruction.” The Bible encourages us to fear the Lord—to have reverence and awe before him—because he is holy, sovereign, powerful, and all-knowing, and we are finite, dependent, and accountable to him.
That kind of fear is different from the emotion of fear that we experience when we have an automatic, involuntary, protective physiological response to a threat in our environment. For today’s purposes, we’re going to define fear as your body and mind’s automatic alarm system. It’s a feeling paired with a physical reaction that gets triggered the moment you perceive a threat, whether that threat is happening right now or is anticipated.
Stated another way, fear is a basic primary emotion that arises in response to a perceived threat, and that triggers a physiological and behavioral response oriented towards self-protection and survival. When your nervous system responds with something on the spectrum between worry to mild anxiety, to a full-blown panic attack or terror, that is not a moral category. It is just biological.
How Fear Takes Root
There are two ways fear takes root in our lives: nature and nurture. Nature is related to inborn and inherent factors, and nurture is related to external and environmental factors. If we start with nature, fear is a natural experience that arises whenever we face some sort of threat. It’s natural because we have the systems built into our bodies to experience that.
Once Adam and Eve succumbed to the temptation of the serpent, a Pandora’s box of threats were unleashed into creation. Now there’s sin and death. There are evil people who want to dominate, control, and hurt others. But it’s not just other people out there. We’ve all got the seeds of sin in our hearts and our lives. Genesis 6:5 says, “God saw human wickedness on the earth and that every thought and intention of the human heart was only evil all the time.”
We can divide ‘nurture’ fears into capital-T threats and lowercase-t threats. Capital-T threats evoke fear in pretty much everybody—like the fear of being robbed or getting into a car crash. But lowercase-t threats are subjective; they’re usually not a threat to our lives. These can include fear of spiders, mice, public speaking, heights, and crowds. These are often learned by observing other people’s reactions to things around us or having unsettling experiences that threaten our sense of control.
Other learned fears can include things that are less visible than spiders or mice but in a way, even more scary. For example, in childhood you may feel scared when someone in your family is angry. You may feel like you’ve done something wrong or someone is upset with you. And even after you grow up and have your own family, you may still feel viscerally afraid if you think someone is angry with you.
There’s a therapeutic framework that we utilize in our counseling that helps us access this visceral experience. It’s called IFS, which stands for Internal Family Systems. It was identified by a family therapist named Dick Schwartz. IFS recognizes different brain states that get established at an early age, often around painful or threatening memories. Those brain states contain their own set of thoughts, feelings, memories, bodily sensations, and beliefs about the world.
These different brain states are called parts. You might have a scared part or an angry part, or an anxious part or a protective part. When you feel scared that someone is angry with you, your brain is accessing the younger part of you that had experiences of feeling overwhelmed or overpowered. Your brain doesn’t recognize the difference between the present and the past. The past literally is present. The better you understand these parts, the more healing can happen for you in areas of hurt or trauma.
When Fear Takes the Wheel
What’s happening in your brain and body when you experience fear? It helps to know what’s happening because you can manage it better and recover more quickly. Thanks to neurological brain science and fMRI brain scans, we know a lot about the ways fear affects the brain and body.
The vagus nerve is connected to the base of your brain stem, and it travels down the center of your body cavity and extends into our arms and legs. This nerve is like a ladder with three rungs on top of it. At the very top is the ventral nerve. And when you’re here, things are calm.
Unfortunately, you don’t always stay in this calm place. You experience threats that evoke fear. The part of the brain that scans your environment for threats is called the thalamus. When it senses a threat, it starts the process that sends you down to the next rung on the vagus nerve to the sympathetic nerve.
When the sympathetic nerve is activated, there are two options: fight or flight. Fight is going towards the threat and try to solve it or neutralize it. Flight is running the other way to get some distance. The thalamus sends a message down to your adrenal glands, which start pumping adrenaline and cortisol into our system.
Your heart starts beating a lot faster. Blood from your arms and legs starts heading to your core. Your prefrontal cortex, which is the part of your brain that’s responsible for conscious and explicit thought, analysis, and cognition, goes offline. And it does this because the ‘thinking’ part of your brain is not moving fast enough to deal with the threat.
Think about it like this. If you’ve got a bus bearing down on you, you’ve got to move quickly. You can’t stop and think about what to do. That’s why trying to force yourself to think logically and rationally doesn’t help overcome the immediate visceral experience of fear. (In the next episode, we’ll talk about how to get your prefrontal cortex back online!)
There’s one last rung in this vagus nerve that people often go to when they’re facing a threat, and that’s the dorsal nerve. This is system shutdown. When people are here, the two options are freeze or fawn. When you freeze, you tense up and even dissociate. Fawn is when you play along, appease, stay with the crowd. If you speak up or protest, there’s a sense that you’ll receive unwanted attention.
All of these responses to threats aren’t right or wrong. They’re natural, biological responses. It’s how your body was designed to respond. Knowing that helps take the shame away from these automatic reactions when they occur. But it is your responsibility to understand what to do with these responses.
When Your Body Feels “Unsafe”
Let’s say you had a very difficult relationship with your parent growing up. Maybe your parent was hypercritical. Maybe they struggled with an addiction. Maybe they abandoned you at some point in your life. As an adult, you leave every interaction with them feeling crushed, exhausted, or wanting to run away. When that parent wants to spend time with you, or maybe needs something from you, you avoid them.
But then you feel self-contempt for wanting to avoid your parent. You feel like a bad person, a bad Christian. But the physiological reaction of defensiveness or self-protection is an automatic nervous system reaction that your body has encoded from learning that your parent isn’t safe.
When you feel angry with yourself for avoiding them, you’re trying to override what your body is telling you. Once you understand the underlying mechanism, you can have compassion for yourself.
When you feel angry with yourself for avoiding them, you’re trying to override what your body is telling you. Once you understand the underlying mechanism, you can have compassion for yourself.
Underlying fear drives behavior in many other areas of life, like overprotective parenting, substance abuse, or numbing out with screen time. God designed you to need reciprocal, safe interactions with people close to you in order to feel safe. If you have interactions that make you feel unsafe, your nervous system automatically shifts into fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. Until you understand where the behavior comes from, you can’t address it.
What Does the Bible Say About Fear?
We have to let God speak explicitly on this topic of fear. He’s the one who created us, the one that’s with us, and the one who’s leading and guiding us, and so he gets the final say. So whatever he says, we need to make sure that we’re orienting our lives to his truth. So what does God have to say about fear? Well, it turns out a lot.
There’s an often-cited passage in the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus says, “I tell you, my friends, do not be afraid.” Jesus is talking about our relationship with God the Father, specifically, the visceral experience of fear. That doesn’t contradict Proverbs 1, because in this context, Jesus is talking about fearing demonic powers and authorities. We shouldn’t fear them. Compared to them, God is the one to fear.
Jesus is not telling us to neutralize or manage our fears, he’s telling us where to go when we fear. God wants us to come to him with our fears. Fear has the capacity to send us running or paralyze us. Yet when we fear in the presence of God, God allows us to endure the fear and manage the fear and trust the fear to him in the middle of it.
Another helpful passage is Romans 5:3-5. These verses describe the outcome of trusting God in the middle of our fear. The Apostle Paul says, “We rejoice in our sufferings, because suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, and character produces hope. And hope does not put us to shame because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.”
Our last reference is 1 John 4:18. It says, “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.” Essentially, this is a verse on attachment. If you’re securely loved and attached to a safe person, your fear will subside. That is neurologically true. Safe and secure attachment buffers us from the unpredictable and often scary moments of living in a fallen world.
But who among us has ever experienced perfect love on this earth?
While perfect love isn’t found on earth, as children of God, we are promised safety in his arms. Not in the sense that we won’t experience trials. We do. But our pain doesn’t go unnoticed. The injustices that we experience will eventually be made right, and we are promised safe passage into the arms of God when we leave this world. So this is an act of continually entrusting ourselves to God as our Heavenly Father, our loving Creator, to tend to the care of our souls and carry us safely home.
Facing Fear with Faith
Here are two specific things to do when you’re fearful. The first one is to recognize and acknowledge that you are afraid. It’s not going to solve everything, but it’s going to solve that internal battle that arises in your mind and your heart when you try to minimize or ignore or shove down the experience.
The second thing to do is to ask God to help you and give you what you need in this situation to survive, to take the next step. God hears every single thought that you have had before you even think it, so you don’t need to hide or feel ashamed to come to him. He wants to meet you in your moment of need.
In the same way, instead of isolating or trying to manage things on your own, ask for help from a friend or family member. Reach out to somebody in your small group or a ministry leader or a counselor.
Stay with us for the next episode on how to manage the weeds of fear in your life because there are concrete, practical, and even surprising ways that you can learn to manage your fear effectively and rewire your brain to be less fearful.
Very good, insightful advice. I particularly like the double step of 1) acknowledging the fear without judgment and 2) taking it to God without shame.
One thing to keep in mind is that for some of us, our parents were the source of big-T trauma, and our fear is a signal that they are in fact dangerous people. In the case of child sexual assault, it's particularly difficult to continue a relationship with the parent or obtain earthly justice.