What Feeling Are You Most Afraid Of?
I started out thinking about this in terms of how I get to know characters I’m writing, only to realize that I imported it directly from something I was already doing in my role as a therapist.
I believe that, if you want to understand or predict someone’s reactions, one of the most essential things you can know about them is what feeling(s) they’re most afraid to experience. This is especially true if the things they do seem to make no sense, or cause them problems over and over again.
For example, if life experiences have taught someone to fear anger, then that person might go to amazing lengths to avoid that feeling.
They have a few options for doing that. One way to avoid anger is to commute it into guilt or shame. If everything is always your fault somehow, then you never have to be angry at anyone else! That’s pretty handy if you’re used to being punished for so much as looking annoyed. If everything is your fault, then you never have to set a boundary, or push back or argue with anyone. Then you’re safe from the repercussions being angry has brought you.
You’re not safe from the people who will use that against you, but you’re safe from your own anger and from people reacting to your anger. At least, for as long as you can maintain this mindset.
Or, you could turn the anger into fear. Every threat is something to run from. Every potential conflict must be avoided or soothed over immediately. Your world may become small and isolated, but still, you’re safe from your own anger, and other’s reactions to that anger.
Being afraid of anger is especially common, but the same principle applies to other feelings, to.
If you’re afraid of disappointment, then the path is clear- you have to strangle hope. If you never hope for anything, you’ll never be let down. If you tend to crash to unmanageable depths in the face of disappointment, then that can seem like a tempting bargain.
If you’re afraid of guilt- particularly if your guilt has a habit of transmuting into all-devouring shame that claims that not only what you did is bad, but it’s proof that you, in aggregate, are bad, then it makes sense to want to avoid it.
You can do less and less and police yourself as hard as possible to avoid crossing any guilt-inducing lines. You could start hiding yourself from others, so that at least their observation doesn’t fan the flames of your guilt into a bonfire.
Or, you could become defensive and stridently refuse that anything you do is bad- or at least bad enough to matter. If you take this course, you must be careful to never self-reflect or doubt the essential rightness of your actions. This is one of the options that I think causes the biggest outward ripple- it’s the most visible, and effects other people so much. Which always leaves me a little startled when people don’t interpret these folks’s behavior in the same way I do. They’re so incredibly consistent.
The classic feeling to fear is, of course, fear itself. And again, you can handle that by ignoring fear (and in so doing refuse it’s warnings and risk becoming chronically reckless), or by obeying it without question (just don’t do anything that scares you ever).
From a writer’s perspective, this is all great because any of of these afflictions will immediately resonate with huge swaths of potential readers.
Even if I don’t fear, say, rejection enough to use untested brain-altering nanites on myself in a bid to make myself acceptable again, I don’t like feeling rejected. I can understand and empathize with that character. And plenty of my readers may fear the feeling of rejection enough to imagine themselves doing that, if they had brain-altering nanites on hand.
This lets me write characters who make all kinds of terrible but compelling and plot-useful choices. The resulting stories may not resonate with everyone. I particularly find that people who respond to a feeling with severe obedience or severe dismissal have a hard time connecting to characters who choose the opposite path.
But the story is going to be resonant and, hopefully, meaningful to someone who has that same most-feared feeling.
And maybe, sometimes, I give that character some way to handle that terrifying feeling a little bit better. And maybe the reader might walk away with a little bit of that resilience in the back of their mind, tucked away for a time when they might need it.
Someone once joked that it was like I was sneaking therapy into my stories like you might put a pill in a peanut butter sandwich to get a dog to eat it.
That feels a little bit mean, and a bit sneaky. The only defense I have is that I think most people know when they’re reading something that’s meant to be healing. That’s one of the best things about reading and watching and listening to media made by people, isn’t it? We seek out proof that our feelings aren’t unique to us. Or, in this case, that our fear of those feelings aren’t unique to us.
And, while many of us love a good tragedy, most of us like to see characters triumph over our fears, weaknesses and insecurities at least some of the time.
If I wasn’t doing that, I don’t think I’d even be writing.
If there are stories that you feel like have done this for you, I’d love for you to write to me and tell me all about it. This is my jam.
Stay tuned next month for the announcement of some public appearances in July, where you can hear me talk and, if you're interested in that kind of thing, get a book signed!
See you next time,
Lee Brontide
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