How to Overcome Fear and Build Emotional Resilience in Your Daily Life

Hey Freebirds, wishing you all a spooky and spirited Halloween! 

In this special episode, I will talk about something we all feel but don’t talk about enough—fear. 

Fear is something everyone deals with, not just during Halloween but all year long. It can sneak up on us in big moments or small decisions. We’ll dig into why we get scared and how fear can affect your life. 

Here's what you’ll learn:

• My personal story of overcoming fear and the crucial lessons I’ve learned along the way.
• Why we experience fear and how to recognize when it’s become a disruptive pattern in your life.
• 4 steps to manage fear so you can create the life you desire and cultivate more inner peace.
• How to notice when fear shows up in your body and how to befriend it instead of suppressing it.  
• How overcoming your fears can help you enhance your emotional resilience.

This episode is about turning our deepest fears into stepping stones for growth. So, plug in your earbuds as you get the candy ready to hand out, and let’s break down those fears together.

Much love,

Laurie 

These guides will help you take the next step in life. 

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Click here for my FREE “Somatic Healing for Beginners Guide”

Click here for my FREE Core Values Exercise

Click here to purchase my book: Sandwiched: A Memoir of Holding On and Letting Go

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Transcript

Happy Halloween free birds. Before we get started, don't forget, this is the last week that you can enter the contest that I'm running. So please go to your apple podcasts app, click the link, click on Confessions of a Freebird the main page, scroll down past the episodes and leave a review, you'll be entered in to a drawing to either win a $50 gift card to target, or you could use that $50 towards a one on one coaching session with me or one of my monthly classes. So this is the last week. I know there are more of you listeners out there that have not rated and reviewed my podcast, and it would be so appreciated. Second, I have my next monthly somatic class coming up this month we are going to talk about uncertainty. So click the link in the bio and sign up for that. I've had really wonderful feedback from my first couple of classes, and this month we are going to talk all about uncertainty. And God knows, we've got a lot of it coming up with the election. And I hope you enjoy this Halloween special podcast where I am going to talk about fears and what scares us, and give you four steps to help manage and overcome your fear. So stay with me and enjoy this episode. 

Welcome to Confessions of a Freebird podcast. I'm your host, Laurie James, a mother, divorcee, a recovering caregiver, the author of Sandwiched A Memoir of Holding on and Letting go, a therapy junkie, relationship coach, somatic healer and now podcaster, I'm a free spirit, and here to lift you up. On this podcast, I'll share soulful confessions and empowering conversations with influential experts so you can learn to spread your wings and make the most of your second half. So pop in those earbuds, turn up the volume, and let's get inspired, because my mission is to help you create your most joyful, purpose driven life, one confession at a time. 

Hello, Freebirds and Happy Halloween. I thought today I would talk about a topic that is very relatable to Halloween, and that is about fear and overcoming scary things. So fear is a normal reaction that warns our bodies to be careful, but when it becomes a pattern in our lives, that's when it becomes a problem. I know a lot about fear. I think I have lived a lot of my life in a state of fear, which is also a threat response of either fight, flight or freeze, depending. And I'm going to briefly talk about one of the scariest things that I've overcome. I'm going to share a little bit about how to overcome fear from a spiritual standpoint, and then I'm going to share four steps to manage and overcome your fear on this Halloween. So stay with me, because this is sure to be very valuable information, and hopefully not as spooky as you might expect it to be. 

So I've talked about this a lot on this podcast, but one of the scariest things I've ever done was leave my 26 year marriage. Why? Because from all the work and therapy and somatic work and coaching that I have gone through through the last 15 years, I have realized that from a very young age, one of my biggest fears was being alone and more deeply abandon, which stems from my adoption. I didn't always feel safe in my house. Growing up, I had a brother that had a lot of anger issues from a very early age. He had undiagnosed learning disabilities that I've shared before andstarted using drugs and alcohol when he was 13, and I was nine. My parents didn't always know how to handle this, and I didn't always feel safe. 

Fast forward that into my marriage, because we often recreate the dynamics of our childhood in later relationships, and even though some of the things that were happening in my marriage, like betrayal that left me feeling very alone within my marriage. The uncertainty of leaving felt much larger and scarier than staying in the chaos of what I knew, in addition so much of my time and energy during this time that I wrote in my book, Sandwiched that is still available, was going to caring for my parents, raising my four kids, preparing them for college and making sure that they were mentally and physically ready to leave the nest, and I didn't feel like I also had the energy to navigate a divorce. 

There were times when I thought I was ready only for my mom to fall ill and be put on hospice. There was other times when I was ready and even shared it with my older kids and my youngest set of twins developed some health issues, one more mental, one more physical, and I needed to put their needs first. As the adult I was capable of doing that that didn't keep me from beating myself up verbally, which I'll touch on a little bit. But also one of the biggest lessons I learned during that time was I was the only one who could save me and to keep me safe, I couldn't rely on my ex or others to do right by me. 

I also see this happening with some of my clients who are going through divorce with their exes and they want their exes to take care of them. I even see with a couple of people I know that are going through a divorce right now, we think others will take care of us. And that was a really hard lesson I had to learn when I started my healing journey. I wanted to rely on others for advice, others to take care of me. And I know that my adult self needs to take care of my inner child, my different parts, my nervous system. And I recently heard someone say this. It was somebody that Drew Barrymore was interviewing, and I can't remember the individual's name. It was a English bloke, but he talked about, we need to be our own best advocate, our own best parent, because it's not anyone else's job to take care of us. It's our job to show up for ourselves, to trust our own intuition, even when that's fucking hard.

This is when inner child work can come in and help, IFS internal family systems, if you have a coach or a therapist who is trained in that that can be very helpful with this. I've recently had a couple of sessions. IFS internal family system sessions, and have really loved it. And I'm thinking about getting trained in that after I'm finished with my somatic training in the new year, but it took me five and a half years of therapy and several tries before I was able to go through with my divorce. At the time, I wasn't familiar with somatic experiencing and hadn't started working with my Somatic Experiencing practitioner at the time, I didn't know what to do with my dysregulated nervous system and what I was feeling in my body. 

There was one moment when I was in therapy that I was so dysregulated and pissed that I threw my wedding ring across the room and stormed out of our therapy session. I can't tell you how good that felt. And just to boot, I also told him in that moment that I wanted a divorce, but what did I do? I went back to him because I did what my nervous system told me to do at that time, and that was stay. Okay, because staying in something I knew felt less scary, even though it was an unhealthy relationship, it felt less scary and more familiar than leaving a relationship with the unknowns, the uncertainty of the future. So that is my biggest and scariest fear that I've overcome. What's yours? 

And this doesn't just have to be big about marriage. This could be if somebody left you and you are feeling alone, if you're thinking about going through a career change, trying to reconnect with a family member that you've been estranged from, thinking about dating or making a move. All of these things, because there's so much uncertainty around them, can create a lot of fear and overwhelm. And fear is real until you're willing to address it, it will keep showing up in your life, and you will continue to feel that same unease in your body, and in some cases, it may even turn into dis ease or eventually disease, if we don't address it. 

One of my favorite spiritual leaders, Gabby Bernstreet Bernstein, talks about fear. She says, Fear is the resistance to what it is you desire. When you let go of that resistance and fear, you become a magnet for what you desire, what I want to say about that that's not always easy when the fear is lodged in your body and your nervous system. But it's true, and I believe we need to tackle fear from different angles, spiritually, emotionally from our nervous system, from our thoughts, but the biggest place is our body. She also talks about when you let go of that fear and you can work through it, that's when you become a super attractor, when you start to let what you desire in, but when you do all these spiritual things yourself and you still feel stuck, that's when you need to look at it through a somatic lens, because somatically, fear shows up as a threat response, either a fight, flight or freeze response. 

For me, personally, I have a lot of fight in me, I had to to survive parts of my childhood, including dealing with my brother, who I talked about earlier, who was very troubled, who had anger issues, who took it out on me and my other brother and started using substances from the age of 13, we can choose fear and scarcity, or we can choose love and abundance. It's your choice. Hi, free birds. I wanted to take a quick moment out of this episode and tell you about a friend and mentor of mine, Julie riesler, she is a master coach and founder of Intuitive Life designer coach Academy certification program. She is starting her 12th cohort on january 30, 2025, and is offering early bird pricing if you sign up before December 31. 

I personally worked with Julie a year and a half ago, and I'm part of her monthly membership program called sanctuary. I interviewed several master coaches and felt that Julie was in alignment with me and had my best interest at heart. She really helped me become the coach I am today, and I am so thankful for that. Also know that I don't endorse products or services. I don't believe in or have tried myself her Intuitive Life, designer coach. Academy Certification Program is a very comprehensive four month program that I recommend this extensive and experiential, integrative life coach certification. Training will build your confidence, intuition, empower you with specific tools, methodology and proven steps you need to create a coaching practice that changes lives and enhances. Your spiritual connection, even if you don't want to become a coach, it is an incredible healing experience in itself. Learn how you can become a transformative life coach, certified through the intuitive life designer coach Academy by clicking the link in the show notes. Now, back to this episode. 

Now, I'd like to share four steps that I recommend to managing your fear. The first one is we need to acknowledge it and name it because doing so puts it out there. This could be something big, like leaving your marriage or facing the unknown, moving changing careers to pursue your passion and living with less money. Or maybe it's finally facing your trauma and putting yourself into a program or working with somebody one on one, whether it's a therapist or somatic experiencing coach or practitioner like myself, and finally deciding to heal so the fear stops controlling you, or maybe this is something small, like making a presentation at work, speaking up for something that's important to you with a family member, friend or partner, communicating a hurt when somebody said or did something, but you are too afraid of how they may react when we say it out loud to yourself or write it down in a journal or piece of paper, it makes it real. Acknowledge it and start to make meaning of it, even if it feels like you're hurting the cats in your head. When we acknowledge it, it helps to loosen its grip on us. Somatically, it may not feel easy at first, because when we're dysregulated, we don't feel safe, but when your nervous system is in a threat, response, a fight, flight or freeze, your nervous system will not feel right or easy. The whole purpose of working with our nervous system is to help you create new neural pathways, and sometimes that takes time. It's a habit to change, and it's a practice. 

Number two, we don't want to judge ourselves. Judgment equals punishment, whether you're punishing yourself with your negative thoughts, or you're judging others for what's going on with them and how their behavior might be affecting you or keeping you from doing what you want or need to do, when you judge yourself for being frozen or stuck or you're caught up ruminating and negative self talk, you are creating or deepening a limiting belief. Sometimes the sensory information that comes from your body can also cause you to have more negative self talk. A good example of that was me beating myself up for not leaving my marriage sooner. I would sit in therapy with a pit in my stomach feeling like I was a loser because I was unable to leave even though I was raising four daughters and caring for my elderly parents while trying to keep my family together, I was attached to my ex and had built this family with him over 28 years. And that's not something that you just can easily leave without feeling overwhelmed, but with five and a half years of therapy, a lot of spiritual work, making sure that both my mom and my kids were in a good place, I was finally able to do that another spiritual leader, Michael singer talks about taming the roommate in your head. Do you like the company that you keep and that negative self talk? In coaching, there's many tools that help us deal with these limiting beliefs and negative self talk. Uh, but a very simple one is just telling yourself the opposite of that negative talk. Our brains are meant and wired to keep us safe, so they are going to look for danger, so they're going to go to the negative. So that way it keeps us safe, if that makes sense. So if your voice in your head is saying, I'll never find somebody if I leave my marriage, or this is the best job I can get, see if you can flip that to the opposite and tell yourself this, I will find somebody if I leave my marriage or this isn't the best job I can get, and keep saying it until you feel it in your body. It's that fake it till you make it. But until we can truly embody it, that's when we can really template that and have that bodily wisdom, I'll call it, and that takes time. I've done this for myself, and it works. We just have to be patient with ourselves. 

Number three, feel it. Notice where the feeler shows up in your body. Typically, when we come to sensations, it's usually in the head, back, chest or in our stomach, gut area. See if you can notice the sensations and name it. I get a lot of restriction in my body. I have a lot of tingling in my body, I might get a lump in my throat. If this is all foreign to you, download my beginner's guide to Somatic Experiencing that's in the show notes to help bring language to what you're experiencing. That's one of the first steps. I also offer a monthly somatic coaching class, small group coaching class that can help you. And I bring a different topic every month as well. Notice where your feet are touching the floor. Another great one to get into your body is follow your heartbeat and the blood flowing through your veins. This may be a little bit hard at first, and it's very subtle, and that's okay. And this is all a practice, and the more we do it, the better we get at it. But this practices help to regulate our nervous system, so we can notice when we are in a fight, flight or freeze state, which is a threat response in our nervous system, do something that feels regulating. It's important to develop a toolbox of regulating resources for ourselves, anything that makes you feel more present, more pleasant and curious. Some ideas, take a piece of paper and put a line down the middle, on one side right, external things, and on the other side right, internal things. I also talked about this in last week's podcast, and write down all the internal things that you can do to help you feel more present, pleasant and curious. So that could be yoga, that could be meditation, that could be just noticing the chair underneath you. That could be using your five senses, external things, going for a walk, connecting with friends, getting off social media. Those are some examples. Instead of keeping yourself busy and numb on social media or TV, which keeps us in that threat response of fight, flight or freeze, and we want to learn how to shift out of those threat responses. How do you know what threat response you're in? A good question to ask is, if you feel activation in your body, you feel a heightened sense and you have a hard time coming down. You might feel restriction in your body and your hands are sweaty. Ask yourself, Do I want to hide under the covers? Do I want to run away from this situation? Or do I want to fight? That will tell you if you are in a fight, flight or freeze response, going back to external things, another good. One is playing music. One of the I was at a small dinner party last night, and one of the things that a fellow Somatic Experiencing practitioner that was there read an article that talked about playing music is one of the best ways to move our nervous system into a state of happiness and joy. I know when I was going through some really tough times, I would put on a couple of songs that really spoke to me that like, if you feel like you need to cry and get something out, I would play these two or three songs, and it would just immediately put me into that state so I could release those tears. I can also remember, like playing music before I would go on a date, or I was going out with girlfriends, to just put me in that mood. Music is a beautiful external resource, petting your dog. The idea is, with all of this, is to come into our bodies in a tolerable and safe way. We want to build the capacity to be with the dysregulation we might feeling so we can discharge it or get it out, so we can come back to a more regulated nervous system. Another thing is, visualization is a great tool. See yourself on the other side of your fear or accomplishing what you desire. How do you feel once you've accomplished this, when you've gotten that job or you've completed the move. We want to template that feeling now and see if we can keep tapping into that which will help us move through that fear towards our goal. Because at the end of the day, the only way to the other side is through.

And fourth. Take small steps, even if it's scary. In coaching, we call this turtle steps, or baby steps, take such small movements, that it feels easy, that it doesn't feel like work. Maybe, if it's you're looking for a new job, you just update your resume, or you just look on LinkedIn to see what's out there. Be curious in the somatic world, we call it titration. The idea is we want to stretch you and your nervous system, not stress it. If we stress it, that is going to put us back into a fight, flight or freeze response. 

So just to recap, the four steps to managing your fear is one, we want to acknowledge and name your fear. Number two, we don't want to judge ourselves. Judgment equals punishment for either yourself or the other people that are involved, feel it, to heal it, notice where the fear shows up in your body. And can you stay with those sensations, whether it's for a minute or two minutes, and track it. See what happens if you can't see if you can just connect with your hands, with your body, where it touches the chair, and lastly, take small steps toward it, even if it's a little scary. So I hope this wasn't as spooky as you thought it would be, and I hope you consider using these steps to overcome your biggest fears so you can create the life you desire and find more freedom within this is hard work, but the reward is worth it. And if you are interested in working together, one on one, please reach out to me or join me for my monthly somatic class. My next one will be next week, on November 6, and I'm wishing you all a very safe and sane Halloween, everybody. Thank you, free birds. 

Thank you for listening to this episode of Confessions of a Freebird. I'm grateful to be in your ears and hearts. If you're interested in becoming a freebird, I'd love to support you. Please check out my website at laurieejames.com to learn how we can work together, or to sign up for my newsletter so you can receive tips on how to date and relationship differently and ultimately find more freedom and joy in your life. If you found this podcast helpful, please follow or subscribe, rate and review and share it with friends so they can find more freedom in their second or third act, also. Until next time.