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Today, we are talking about learning to respond as your higher self in the face of fear. 

The most important reason to do that is to understand that you are in control. 

When we feel out of control, we feel like ControlZilla; we're upset that other people aren't meeting our demands, acting appropriately, or agreeing with us in the right way, and we find ourselves frustrated, a little bit bitter, angry, and experiencing all the negative emotions. 

If you've learned anything else in these blogs, it's that emotions matter. 

If you want to have the best life ever, you have to learn how to act as your higher self in the face of fear.

There's so much in this world to be fearful of. 

There's no getting through life without feeling fear unless you're Gandhi. I'm sure he felt fear at some point, too. 

We often try to control the outcomes when we're in fear. 

I was chatting with a friend the other day. 

We were talking about her life situation and how she had a lot of fear around a family member, not because that family member was harmful but rather because the family member might stumble into harm themselves. 

My friend was this worried, which is fear, right?

Worry is fear. It's not against the law, but it's definitely not helping us live our best lives. 

She was just worried, worried. We talked about it. 

I said, okay, so you're trying to control outcomes with your worry. 

That is the only reason to worry. You're trying to control an outcome because you feel helpless doing something about it. 

As we talked about that, what would you rather do? I mean, cause worry is a lot of energy out the window. 

That's an investment you're never going to get back. 

If you're investing all your energy into worrying, are you living the best life, or do you want improvement? 

The only reason to operate from that standpoint is that we are telling ourselves a story about our past. 

Some of us have rather dramatic, chaotic, and traumatic pasts. Some of us had great pasts, but we've encountered a few surprises in our lives. 

There's something we're telling ourselves when we are trying to control the outcomes that are less than our true self, our inner self, our spiritual self, our inner guidance. 

However you want to say it, it's that thing inside us that makes our arms and legs move and our brain think. It makes our heart beat, right? 

Whatever your higher consciousness is, whatever you want to call it, I call it God, spirit, and inner guidance.

I believe that those are three key components to understanding how to act as your higher self because if you're not acquainted with that person, then it's going to be more difficult to tap into a higher sense of peace, safety, or knowing that everything's going to be okay. 

If you're just shooting from anxiety and depression and pain, right? 

When we are controlling the outcomes, we are our lower self when we're facing fear. 

I asked my friend, asking, do you want to be in the face of fear and be a controlzilla? Or do you want to be in the face of fear and show up with love in your heart? Which one feels heavier? 

She was actually very honest. She said love feels harder because you just want to, and grips are really tight when you're in fear. 

Why would you go to love that feels like you might not care, you would give up, or that you're trying to check out? 

You're avoiding the actual situation; you're not looking at reality. 

That was an interesting perspective, and we'll all have them. 

We will all have a different perspective on this because we all have different life backgrounds, upbringings, conditioning, experiences, relationships, etc. 

We have to leave lots of room to think about this and how it will work for you.

When she said that, I said, "Okay, you're right. 

If you have never experienced choosing love in the face of fear, then the natural knee-jerk reaction is to try and control outcomes. 

Try not to let somebody harm themselves. Try not to let somebody, and this is not somebody that's depressed. 

This is somebody who's declining for years, right? 

Harming themselves would be certainly not their intent, but it may be unavoidable in their aging years. 

Worrying is not going to change aging. Worrying is not going to change an accident. 

If worrying is another form of controlling or focusing on what you don't want if worrying is actually coming from fear and it's your lower self, then how much more could you offer to somebody if you were operating from your higher self? 

Love in the face of fear is an important choice to make when you're experiencing something that may be scary. 

I know people who are terrible test takers, and it's scary for them to take tests. 

I know people who have narcissists in their life, and it's scary for them to think about leaving. 

I know socially shy people, and it's scary for them to leave the house and join a group. 

If you fear something, which we all do; no one gets out of this life without experiencing fear on some level, then it's important for you to make a choice. 

Often, that choice needs to be made ahead of time. 

When a moment of fear shows up, you'll have a game plan in your back pocket. That is key to choosing what to do in the face of fear. 

First of all, make the choice ahead of time. 

I would rather operate from my loving adult self rather than maybe my wounded child self, who would want to try and control everything even though they felt powerless to do anything to change. Does that make sense? 

If you've had a wounded child within you for all these years, there are many, many times the way that child got wounded was to feel helpless, right? That's where control comes from, feeling helpless. 

Even if you had a great childhood, if there are times that you want to be controlzilla because you feel helpless, there is a wounded child in there somewhere. 

There's a wound. There's some pain. Okay? 

Maybe we're not saying it was your parents or the people you love. 

We're saying something happened between age zero and now that left a wound. 

There's got to be a perfect purpose behind the choice you're making, though. 

If you're trying to get out of pain, they get the word; that's a taking word. That's trying to extract something that's not being offered, right? 

If somebody is trying to be controlling, then it's tough for them to get what they want or avoid pain because they're trying to take it; they're trying to extract it, and you can never really achieve it.

If you believe in the law of attraction, you cannot attract what you want with the word get, with the intention, the purpose of getting. I want to get something. 

I want to get safety for myself by controlling somebody else and where they live and how they live so that they won't put themselves in jeopardy. 

I want to get something. I want them to change so I can feel better. 

That's never really going to happen because that's codependency, that's an illness, that's unhealth, that's mental illness.

If you're the only person you can control and choose to operate from your loving higher self, then the purpose you're doing that for is to give, not to get, but to give love to yourself and others to find ways to check in with yourself. 

Why are you feeling fear in the first place? 

First of all, it's super powerful to give yourself that kind of understanding. Understand why you're in fear. 

If that fear is standing in front of an audience, where did you get the idea that it would be scary? 

There is an inner child somewhere inside you that is receiving the message that you might be judged, that you might fail, that you might not be perfect, or that you might not be good enough. 

There is a wound; taking personal responsibility for that emotion is essential to healing or facing fear with love. 

I am learning that you're choosing love to give something to yourself. 

You can't give it to others if you haven't given it to yourself. 

It's going to fall on deaf ears. It's going to be hollow. 

You do this for yourself before you can do it for somebody else. 

Eventually, you will be able to do this for other people who are showing up for them. 

I have probably mentioned. I'm not sure. 

I have a couple of podcasts, but my daughter had a time in her life when she called me at 3 a.m., and her house was burning down. 

I'm not laughing because it burned down. I'm laughing because holy smokes. First of all, it is just a sudden thing that you have to find yourself jumping out of your window in the middle of the night. 

But second of all, I'm so grateful that I was in a place in my life where I didn't make her emergency my emergency. 

She was already in enough fear, and she called me and crying, Mom, my house is burning down. I knew ahead of time.

First of all, I have had enough experiences in my life to know that if I were to choose love in the face of fear, things are going to go so much better than if I were to try and control things. 

If I were to have tried to control things, I would have tried to fix the emotions she was having.

I would stop her from crying or normalize our conversation, which would be ineffective. 

It would have been very ineffective if I had done that because I couldn't control her, but I could control myself, which is choosing love in the face of fear. 

I chose what do I wanted.

What's the outcome of this phone call? 

I only had to think of that because I didn't know her house would burn down.

 I don't know what emergencies will arise in the future, but I knew that I wanted to be a calming influence in my family and friends' lives. 

If that was my intent, I had to do the work inside of me to learn to love myself and take responsibility for my pain and joy. I had to do that work. 

But in this case, I could stay calm and recognize what was going well because I had done that work. 

My daughter couldn't see it then, and neither would you. Neither would I have when you had this sudden disaster thrown at you. 

I was able to say, you're okay, right? She's like, yes. You're in a safe place, right? She said yes. 

There's nothing you can do right now except get yourself to a hotel, call your insurance company, and wait for the police report because they're not letting you back in tonight. 

If I hadn't done the inner work and taken responsibility for my own pain, I, being an empath also, and a number two on the Enneagram, who is the helper, would have been ControlZilla all over the place, trying to protect her from pain, me from pain, and not avoiding the responsibility for feeling it or trying to take away her right to feel the way she wanted to feel about it. 

Just to put everything back at the status quo because I hate conflict. 

I didn't want anyone to be unhappy. 

If I hadn't done the work, you can tell it would not have gone well. 

Probably, she wouldn't have thought to call me. 

If I had been somebody she didn't trust to stay calm. 

By that point in my life, she probably wouldn't have called me anyway because she probably would have known it would have been more upsetting to me than helpful to her. 

Can you see how much you can benefit others if you do this work for yourself?

 Knowing that you desire it, I really do want to be my higher self and act from that loving place inside of me. 

Then, finding joy, peace, safety, lovability, and worth internally is so important that it should be done in advance—before the next emergency arises.

The next fearful thing shows up. 

The next thing you say is that I should push myself outside of my comfort zone, but I don't dare because you haven't made that connection with your inner self, your higher self. 

Your intent is super, super important. 

You've got to have an intent to learn from your pain. It's a little bit ironic that the times that we know the most are from pain. 

That's why it's okay to have the pain. It's OK to feel what you feel. 

The only problem is when it turns into controlling behavior. That means you're not taking responsibility for the fear that you feel. 

If you take responsibility for your fear, you'll be able to sit back when you feel rejection or abandonment imminent. 

You're going to sit back and go, hang on, hang on. 

The inner child in me is starting to cry. 

My pain is showing up, and I want to avoid it like crazy. I want to apologize and say I'm sorry; let's work things out. I'm trying to backpedal. 

The thing that I fear the most, whether it's rejection or judgment or social anxiety or whatever it is, is the thing that you want to avoid at all costs and avoid your personal feelings about it. 

It is the thing that we're going to learn from the most. 

Our education comes from the way we feel and from looking at why we think the way we feel. 

Pain is an indicator that we haven't taken full responsibility for something. 

One of my highest negative emotions to carry around with me is shame. 

Shame, woo! I tell you, it took me years and years and years to work on this. I'm not saying I don't still feel shame, but it took me years and years and years to work on this. 

It's like, why do I feel shame? Is that a shameful thing? Did I do something to be ashamed of?

I even had counselors and therapists tell me when they were questioning why I was in their office because I was complaining about my relationship and wondering why it wasn't working; they literally said shame on you. 

I was like, oh, excuse me, I think I'm in the wrong office. Cause somebody who understands me would never ever say that.

I was there to be understood, which was not taking responsibility for my emotions.

I wanted them to tell me that I was okay, that I was worthy, that I was good enough. 

They weren't there to do that, and they were right or wrong for saying that to somebody already in pain. 

Luckily, I was thick-skinned enough that it was almost like a flash going through my brain, and I was like, whoop, you're in the wrong office. 

You need to get out of here. You're not getting anywhere. You're wasting your time.

I did this work on my own, involving much research and lots and lots of resources—I couldn't even name all of them.

I can tell you that it started with a few mentors of mine who lived in the local neighborhood, and I would just watch it like a fly on the wall. I

It's like, how are they being a good mother? What are they doing? How come they don't seem to be in pain? What are they doing differently from what I'm doing? Then that was back in the, I don't know, 90s. 

That's when Brene Brown's book first came out. I did read that, and wiping my brow every page that I turned, I was like, whoo, it's not just me, it's not just me, because she was all talking about shame. 

Shame is a product of fear. 

I was taught that rejection and abandonment were imminent in my life. 

There was a lot of shaming going on also behind the scenes. 

Gaslighting, shaming, you name it. 

In order to try and control me because my parents' greatest fear was looking bad in public, they wanted to look like the perfect parents so nobody could see their shame and their pain. 

You can see that pattern trickle down. 

If you're somebody who's experienced that, you know what I'm talking about. It's like, oh, but why do I carry this guilt and shame around with me all the time from my parents? Why can't I just get rid of it? 

Here's the good news: you can. 

You can get rid of it, but you have to learn to take responsibility for your own pain. 

Once upon a time, there was a time in my life when avoiding embarrassment about my relationship was crucial. 

Out in public, it was a real show. It's like, wow, we pulled out all the stops, but behind the scenes, it was not like that. 

There were yelling and screaming matches and lots of pain back and forth. 

In those times, I knew that when I was that elevated in my pain, it was not my higher self. 

I knew that, and I was actually ashamed of acting that way. I knew that there was something better in me to present in that moment of fear that I was going to get rejected or abandoned.

The good news is that I started asking myself a question: what do you want? What do you need? You're acting like a raving lunatic. What do you need? 

That's when I started realizing there was a little child's voice, very tiny, very small, very quiet inside of me, that would answer back. 

It took me years to hear it. 

It started out as a sense and turned into a feeling. It worked its way into audible language and emerged very powerfully emotional. 

I just want to be loved. 

It was very quiet and subtle, but all those years, I started to notice it as it got louder and louder.

I became less satisfied with my getting upset, being in fear all the time, and trying to control the outcomes, so I started hearing what my inner child was begging me for: just love me. 

I was seeking that through control on the outside of me. I wanted to be accepted, loved, and valued by everybody else so I wouldn't have to. 

That was a pivotal moment for me when I had that very thought.

I was like, oh my gosh, I want everyone else to do it so I don't have to because I don't think it's possible. I don't think I am lovable. I don't think I am worthy of love.

 I think that's selfish. I think you need to suck it up and work harder to be loved. 

You need to try to be loved. You need to earn love. 

Those were all the false beliefs that I believed were true growing up. 

I took them into my adult years and my mothering, and unfortunately, I spent many years teaching my kids the same falsehoods about earning love. 

That love is a compliment. 

You're going to have to work hard to get one from me. 

That's exactly what I had to do to get one from my mother. 

When I was turning this around, it wasn't actually too late for me. 

I turned it around, probably mid-mothering between my older kids and my youngest kids, especially after mothering. 

Learning to love and take responsibility for your own pain and joy is asking your inner child, what do you want? What do you want? 

You've got to open your heart and open yourself up to the possibilities of what that looks like. 

You want to be valued; you want to be seen; you want to be understood. 

What is it that you want when you're in the throes of controlling the outcomes because you're in the face of fear? 

You've got to ask yourself, what am I telling myself? 

Am I telling myself that you're unlovable and you're going to have to work hard? 

Am I telling my inner child, who already feels helpless to take away anyone else's pain, that they need to earn love? 

They need to be better? They need to be more pleasing? 

They need to be satisfied with the little love they get that they don't get to experience. 

A bunch of love, they can only have a little bit of love? 

What is the story? You're telling yourself a story; I was telling myself a story. 

We tell ourselves these stories and it brings out the worst in us.

If we could tell, dialogue with that inner child, that wounded self, and explore the origin of the pain. 

Where did I learn that? That falsehood that I have believed all these years is true, and somewhere inside of me, I kept telling myself that it was not true. 

That can't possibly be true. 

Looking outside of yourself and trying to get everyone else to love you because you're trying, you're efforting, you're earning is never going to happen. 

It's not their job to love you. We got to look to the inside. 

That's where the work is done. 

You have to go back to that inner child and tell her, in the face of fear, that it's okay. 

You're not responsible for everyone else's unhappiness. It's okay. 

You're lovable—you always have been—and that's in stone; you can't undo it, so stop trying. 

You have to have that dialogue with that inner child. 

You are valuable; you don't need to work hard, you don't need to earn it, and you don't need to do anything other than be still right now. 

That just gives the inner child so much more confidence. 

It's like, really, am I still going to be loved? Am I still going to be okay? 

I'm still going to be valuable even if I'm not trying really hard, even if I'm not trying to control the outcomes. Yes, the answer is yes. 

Just in case you were wondering what to tell your inner child. The answer is yes. 

They don't have to try. It's okay. You are not responsible for the outcomes. 

You're not responsible for other people's feelings. 

You can let them have their feelings. It's okay.

The only thing you can be responsible for is your own pain. That pain is information. 

It's there to tell you that there is something more that needs attention inside of you. 

You have to check in.

Why do I feel like I'm about to be abandoned? Is that a bad thing? Would that be me opting out of an unhealthy relationship? Would that be me opting out of an unhealthy environment? 

That could be a good thing. 

If your brain tells your inner child that you're not going to find love elsewhere, you had better take this while you get it. 

Then you beg to keep an unhealthy relationship as part of who you are and your life. Yeah, that's going to be a disaster, and you know it. 

You have to talk to the inner child. 

Almost like visually taking that inner child's hand and walking them out of the middle of traffic to a safe place on the sidewalk. It's like, don't worry, I got you. 

You're not going to be abandoned. You're not in danger. 

Abandonment feels like the danger of being hit by a car or something. 

That's what being fired at work feels like; that's what losing a relationship where you've invested your entire self, your entire identity into your work or your relationship with a significant other. 

It feels like you just walked out into oncoming traffic, and it's scary. 

You've got to take your adult self, your adult brain. 

There is an adult brain there somewhere that is not part of the wounded child, needs to take hold of the wounded child's hand and walk them out of traffic, out of danger, over to the sidewalk, kneel down, get on their level and ask them, what do you need? 

How old are you? Because you were a certain age when that fear was first put in you. You were a certain age, and you were probably acting that way. 

When I was screaming and yelling in my relationship as an adult, that person was about five years old, and she was trying to get her mother's attention to see her and validate her. That child wanted to be loved. 

My earliest memory is of wanting to be loved and being a little confused about why asking for a hug was a bad thing when I was three years old. 

There is a knowing inside of you of how old you were when you first had that same pain that you're recognizing within yourself as an adult. 

He or she is a certain age. Get down on his or her level and ask, how old are you? 

What do you think is going to happen right now? 

What was the fear in the first place?

Then confirm you're okay now, and you'll be okay. 

Even if it's just second by second, I'll stand here with you this second, and I will stand with you this second. 

It's going to be okay as we work our way through the pain and take responsibility for how we feel because nobody else is going to do this work for you. 

You've got to be your own support system, safety net, loving energy, and encourager. 

You need to be the person who checks in with you to take responsibility for the pain, listen to your inner guidance system, and trust your intuition. 

You've got to learn to trust yourself all over again because we spend so much time out there looking, hoping, wishing somebody will pay attention to us and give us good advice, loving attention, understanding, or seeing us for who we are and what we do. 

It will never happen, and if it does, it's unhealthy.

When you are sure of who you are, you're confident. 

You do take responsibility for your pain and your joy, I should say. 

You're connecting with your true worth and finding the purpose of why you're choosing love in the face of fear, why your desire is to strengthen your inner connection, why your intent is to learn to take responsibility, and why you really do want to learn what's still causing the pain. 

Everything changes. 

Then, you can be someone who shows up in a relationship that doesn't drain you. There's no drama. 

The trauma doesn't rear its ugly head anymore. 

You can work, get a bigger job, get a raise, step outside your comfort zone, stand in front of the crowd, or participate in social events. 

When you learn to connect with your inner self, you can't do anything; especially, you'll learn how to do that in the face of fear. 

That's where courage is encouraged. That would have been a better title for this episode. 

Encouraging your courage. Hopefully, you've formulated some of your own ideas as you've listened to this, and you're getting some understanding that there's some work in you to be done. 

There is some lovability to be embraced within you, some worthiness inside you, and some desire to be of value to others. 

You can only do that consistently when you've already done the work inside you. 

If you really want to operate from your higher self in the face of fear, you have to decide now. 

This is the time. 

I want to come from my higher self, my loving self, and show up for myself. 

That's the person you're working on right now. 

It's also good to make that choice, like if something is coming up in my life. 

Note: You can access the full blog content in audio versions on Spotify and YouTube. Happy listening! 🎧

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