You're not angry, or irritated, or pissed off...you've just got rats.
(It's an analogy. It'll make sense when you read it.)
The longer I stay sober and the more recovery work I do, the more I realise 99% of my less-than-pleasant reactions or my questionable actions are down to fear and not to whatever nonsense I’ve tried to convince myself it’s about. I can still forget this but acknowledging it and naming it has been pivotal in finding some fucking peace in a world that can sometimes feel hell bent on breaking us down.
Have you ever had to deal with a rat in your house? Unless you’re actively looking for the rat, you’re unlikely to see it. You might not even know the rat is there until the evidence becomes undeniable. Things chewed to sawdust. Food packets demolished. Tiny little bits of shit and splashes of piss left lying around. A musty, unpleasant smell that even bleach can’t eliminate.
Even when you acknowledge that you have a rat, you have to start actively taking steps to eliminate it. You have to identify where it’s coming from, do what you can to prevent it and maybe even set up defences to trap it and kill it.
Fear is the rat in your emotional house. It can be invisible, hard to spot with the naked eyed and almost impossible to see if you’re not looking for it but, just like a rat, the evidence that, behind your back, fear has been roaming willy-nilly throughout your soul will become undeniable. You’ll find that your relationships have been penetrated, nibbled through bit by bit until they collapse. You’ll feel itchy, twitchy and bitchy, as if something nefarious is there but you can’t see it. You’ll see shit everywhere you go but most importantly, you’ll start making decisions based on that rat and the destructions it’s left in it wake.
You’ll start to hide things in case anyone knows you’ve got a rat, you’ll lie and make decisions based on making sure you can hide that rat for as long as possible. You’ll be so busy managing the rat that it won’t matter whether you’ve seen the rat or not, whether you know if it’s a big rat or a small rat, a skinny rat or a fat rat. You won’t have any time or energy to catch the rat and dispose of it because rather than face it head on, you’ve decided to just let the rat run wild, and manage the chaos that it leaves behind. The rat will have taken over your life and you’ll never even have managed to lay eyes on it.
That’s fear. Whenever I lose my shit and start shouting and screaming and behaving badly, or when I start to get really, really controlling, I’ve realised that, nine times out of ten, it’s because I’m fearful. If I don’t stop to figure out what the fear is (whether that fear is real or not, it doesn’t fucking matter…unless it’s examined, it’ll be just as destructive), I will try to hide that fear from everyone else and bury it so that I don’t have to deal with it, in a shit-show of loud and very impressive emotions and behaviours that are uncomfortable for everyone involved. I’ll do all I can to make it about someone else so that I don’t have to admit that actually, I’m feeling fearful.
Fear is, for me, usually insecurity, a lack of self-belief or it can be a totally made up narrative that I’ve constructed in my head without even knowing it that is based in absolutely no fact or backed up by zero evidence. It can be that I’ve told myself that I have to manage everything otherwise it’ll be a disaster, or that I am responsible for everything and if it doesn’t go perfectly, then it’s a reflection of me and everyone will hate me or blame me. All my questionable decisions and bad behaviour are always based on iterations of the above.
If I don’t recognise the Fear Rat, if I ignore the Fear Rat, if I tell myself there is not Fear Rat then I’m allowing it to chew through my defences. But, if I take a moment, put everything down and search for that Fear Rat until I find it, and name it and see it for what it is…I can deal with the Fear Rat and, in turn, with the real problem, and avoid all the shitty reactions.
So, what’s your Fear Rat?
