Youk’n hide de fier, but wha’ you gwine do wid de smoke?
– Joel Chandler Harris, Plantation Proverbs

President Roosevelt was an ass.

Mister “We have nothing to fear but fear itself”. No fucking shit; that’s the very thing we should be afraid of.

The Great Godmother of all emotional pain is fear. It cripples, paralyzes, and kills.

Our response to fear is ancient and prehistoric, buried deeply within our limbic system. Once it materializes in full, it’s beyond our conscious ability to control. Fear is also the basis for the “Fight, Flight, or Freeze” response most vertebrates on our planet have the pleasure to experience.

Fear is the reason capable, healthy, and swift deer get crushed by trucks, sent flying hundreds of feet in the air to land dead on our highways by the thousands; they’re too paralyzed by fear’s brain-crippling panic to trot the 5 or 6 steps required to live. Fear’s the reason young children wet their beds- often into adulthood. Fear’s the primary reason honorable veterans of war return home only to put a bullet in their head.

DON’T WORRY. IT’S ONLY FEAR.

You just won’t be able to think rationally. You won’t be able to control your central nervous system. You’ll just turn your intellect over to a primitive brain stem AND as an added bonus you might piss or shit your pants.

Thankfully, raw fear is a rarity for most of us in the cushy and comfortable First World. We’re more likely to come across a relative of fear:  humiliation, anxiety, rejection, inferiority, insecurity, worry, overwhelm or some other flavor of emotional pain.

Let me tell you… I abhor emotional pain.

I’ll do anything to avoid the never-ending web of emotional pain. The apprehension of a possible approach ignites emergency survival instincts throughout my nervous system. I’m not stupid enough to simply fear fear… it’s too late then.

I fear the possibility of fear.

I’m not completely insensitive to the plight of others. When I see others in emotional pain, it grieves me. But I grieve out of sympathy; I’m not capable of true empathy. Not because I don’t possess the latent capacity for it, but because empathy requires a shared painful experience.

It’s been a very long time since I’ve experienced significant emotional pain of any kind for any duration. Too long to connect with any of it. I don’t allow myself to experience emotional weakness, that’s strictly verboten. I transcend beyond a place where I might receive merited emotional pain. I morph myself, situations and people around me.

I deploy established human behavior theory undergirded heavily with Machiavellian principles and replete with lies -passively at first then aggressively – to manipulate and control people to completely avoid an encounter which would cause me any emotional pain.

In the unlikely event that doesn’t work, I refuse to absorb any pain. I solidify and become the best and most polished shitty-emotion mirror I can be: I vomit it onto other people, projecting intense and well-directed blame, belittlement or guilt.

Being normal and functional human beings, my wife and daughters lack the ability to instantly transcend beyond emotional pain. They know no lord of deliverance. They’ve never met The Stranger and they never will. The unchosen lack His profound ability to escape the pain of reality by dissolving it and allowing an entirely new reality to materialize.

Oh, The Stranger’s marvelous transformative, regenerative and redemptive powers!

Pity. I love my family. But they’re eternally separated from the One who has the power to Birth a new person within a new reality.

I’m not.

He discovered me forty-two years ago. I’ve never been the same person since.

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You can find out more about my terrible journey dealing with this very issue in my first book, due to release this summer!  You can click here to read more about it on my book page or scroll down to watch my book trailer. If you have a second after, I’d love if you shared it with a friend of yours or two on Facebook or Twitter.