BW 186
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Speaker: If you've ever laid awake at night with thoughts of fear running a rampant through your mind. The this episode is for you. Hi, my name is Emily. I was widowed in 2021, became a certified life and grief coach, and now it is my mission to help widows find hope, heal their heart, and build a life that they can love.
Again, this is episode 186.
One of the questions submitted by one of our audience members for a podcast topic is this question around fear. So let me read it to you. I often feel terrified. I won't have enough money to maintain my home and my lifestyle. Fear doesn't feel good. It feels foreign. I don't know what to do with fear. So whether or not your fear is around your home, your lifestyle, finances, we're gonna talk about what to do with fear.
So let me just start by saying that as someone who's widowed, as someone who's lost, someone that you love, that [00:01:00] you have been through something that most people will never experience, your whole life is now divided. In this before and after state, before my person died when we were together and then after.
And when you lose your person, you also lose not only maybe financial safety, emotional safety, physical safety, and so much more. Everything that you thought you had was ripped away from you was the rug was pulled out from underneath you. Even for me, I was the breadwinner for many years. Nathan hadn't worked in about 10 years by the time that ultimately he ended up dying, and I had worked for some of the same people for close to 20 years.
So it didn't make any sense to me why I was worried about finances, why I was worried about money and what was gonna happen, [00:02:00] but the fear was still there. And when we get caught up in this fear thought spiral. We catastrophize to the worst possible scenario. So many decisions I would think to myself like, oh, and then if this happens, and then I'll lose my job, and then we'll go bankrupt, and then we'll go homeless, and then my kids will be screwed up for forever.
Like you can just really go down a path very quickly whenever you're leaning into fear. So you have gone through something that. Majority of people around you have probably not personally experienced, and so of course your nervous system is screaming at you, I'm not safe. Something bad is going to happen.
It's trying to predict something bad that's going to happen. A lot of my clients that I work with, what we talk about is like when you experience a traumatic exper something traumatic. All of a sudden, your nervous [00:03:00] system in your brain goes. Into this hypervigilant state of keeping you safe. There can be a lot of undercurrent within your own body that just reiterates, I'm not safe, I'm not safe, I'm not safe.
You look for danger everywhere, whether it's where you park in the parking lot, whether someone's looking at you a little too long, whether something might be a trap, like you just are much more intensely aware of things that could go wrong. So today I wanna talk to you about what to do with that fear.
Most of us were not taught how to handle fear in a healthy way. And let's be honest, we weren't taught to handle emotions in a healthy way, right? We're taught to shove fear down that we need to face our fears and just tough through it, or pretend that we're fine. And meanwhile. We're laying in bed at night at 2:00 AM and all the thoughts are just running wild, right?
We're just [00:04:00] imagining all the things that could go wrong or all the what ifs or all the, I don't know what am I gonna do about this? What am I gonna do about that? And so fear just really becomes this dark and heavy cloud that just follows us around the problem isn't that you feel fear, which I know sounds a little counterintuitive, but the problem is not that you feel fear.
The problem is when fear is in charge, when it's driving every decision, and you don't have any tools for what to do with that fear. So today I am gonna walk you through three things. One, how to bring fear out of the dark and actually name what's going on. Two, how to check the facts so you can see the difference between what's happening versus what fear is predicting.
And number three, how to make a simple fear plan. So your fear has a job instead of it running your life.
We're [00:05:00] gonna talk about this in a very practical way, and also with a faith-based lens, because for some people there can be an added layer of guilt of if I really trusted God, I wouldn't feel this way, or I just need to pray the fear away. I just need to remember God is in control and all my fear will magically melt away from my body.
So let's talk about what fear actually is and why it feels overwhelming. Fear is a signal. Fear is like a smoke alarm in your body saying, Hey, something feels dangerous, something feels off. You need to pay attention.
Fear is a signal about perceived danger, not a verdict, about your future. Okay, so one of the concepts that I teach inside of the Brave Widow Academy is all of our emotions. We think, I think about it a couple of different ways, and the analogy of us being in a car, okay? All of our emotions, fear [00:06:00] included, are like check engine lights on a car.
It's telling us there's something going on. There's something that we need to investigate. There's something that we need to look into, but might be nothing, might be small, might not be as bad as we are anticipating. It's just a signal. It's just a picture of. That something important is happening and that we wanna be curious about that.
I also have heard the analogy that emotions, including fear are like having little kids with you in the car. You don't wanna shove your feelings in the trunk of the car. Like you wouldn't put little kids in the trunk of your car and just shove 'em away and not look at 'em and pretend they don't exist, which is what some of us are taught to do and what some of us do.
But you also don't want little kids driving the car and making decisions, and that would just be a disaster. So when we are in a car with little kids, where do we want them? We want them in the [00:07:00] backseat. We wanna be aware of what's going on. We wanna be able to see them as needed. We want to know that they're there, but we wanna remain in the driver's seat.
Control of our decisions and our actions and fear is the same way. It's a good indicator that we can investigate something, that we can be curious about what's causing it. That we can address something that needs to be addressed, but it isn't necessarily a verdict that something is going to happen. It's just the perception that there may be danger.
Fear can actually be helpful. So in the example that this person asked a question about, I don't know if I have enough money with my lifestyle, with my home, with my finances, and so I'm really afraid. So the helpful part of that fear is. I need to look at my finances and I need to come up with a plan.
Maybe I have enough money and maybe I don't, but that would be a helpful [00:08:00] fear. An unhelpful fear is more I'm doomed. I'm gonna lose everything. There's no, I can't even bother to check my bank account because I know it's gonna be bad, and so I'm just gonna push it under the rug and avoid it as long as possible.
It's all over. My life is over, like that is an unhelpful fear.
So when fear comes up, again, it's like a, the smoke alarm analogy. We don't shame the smoke alarm. We don't get angry at the smoke alarm. We don't avoid the smoke alarm. We're gonna listen, we're gonna check for a fire, and then we're either gonna take action or we're going to turn the alarm off, going to actually do something. So the first thing that we wanna do with fear is we wanna bring it out of the dark. Fear grows and operates in the dark and in the vague. We wanna look objectively at the fear. And so what I teach my clients, anytime an emotion or a thought comes up that isn't helping them, is that instead of feeling consumed by it, driven by it, overruled by it, [00:09:00] we're gonna hold it in our hand like an object. Okay? We wanna hold that fear, that thought, that feeling, whatever it is, and we wanna hold it up in our hand and we wanna be curious about it. We wanna look at it almost detached as oh, that's interesting. I have this fear. What? What am I afraid of? What exactly am I afraid is going to happen?
What is it? Is it I'm afraid I'm gonna lose my house? I'm afraid I'm gonna lose my lifestyle. I'm afraid I'm not gonna be able to take vacations. What is it? It. Just looking at it with no shame, no judgment, only curiosity. I'm feeling afraid. I'm feeling anxious. I'm feeling fearful. What? Why? What is it?
What exactly is it I'm afraid about? Okay, what am I afraid of? What am I afraid is gonna happen? In what order would it happen? How soon would it happen? And so the more that we shine light on the fear. The more like a shadow fear is gonna start to shrink. The second thing that we wanna [00:10:00] do is we want to gather information and we're gonna check the facts.
Okay? Fear operates in the vague, fear grows quickly in the dark, and so the more facts that we have, the more information that we gather, the less. That fear can continue to grow and expand. All right, so in this example of finances and being afraid that we don't have enough, what we wanna do is pull all of that out of the dark, into the open.
What are the facts? And in this, I think this is a great example of someone who would do really well working with a financial planner, financial advisor. There are lots of them out there. There are even there's an organization called Wings for Widows, and they have all sorts of free financial coaching and assistance to help widows with just.
Getting their hands around what the facts are, what they can actually [00:11:00] do and accomplish. And so this would be a great example of sitting down with an expert or a pro, someone who can help you really start crunching the numbers and putting this together and understanding how much money do I have? How, what is my budget gonna be?
How much do I need to live? Bare minimum, how much do I need to live to maintain my current lifestyle? If I continue down this path, what does that look like five years from now, 20 years from now? Pulling all of those pieces together and just gathering more information. The more information you have, then you can actually start to come up with a plan.
So you will, when you don't know whether or not you're gonna have enough to survive or whether or not your life's gonna stay the same, you can't really make any decisions because you don't have enough information to make a decision. Another example of where I see this come up a lot is with [00:12:00] widows who are considering moving to a different house buying a house, building a house.
We have many clients who have done that or are currently going through that process now, and one of the fear spirals they get caught up in is, I don't know. I haven't bought and sold a house in a really long time, and I don't know what would I have to do and how much is my house worth and what is our house is going for now, and what if I decided to build and where would I live and what if I end up hating where I moved to?
And what if I don't find something that I like and on. This fear just grows and grows because we have no information. And so in the last podcast episode, I talked about certain decisions we can delay. If there's not a need to make a decision right now, we can put that on a shelf and say, I'm gonna, I'm not gonna go down that path and think about it.
I am gonna delay that decision for a time when I'm ready to make that decision. In the case of the finances, because there's fear and worry that we don't know whether or not we [00:13:00] have enough to maintain our current lifestyle, I wouldn't delay that decision. I would start gathering information. Now for the widow who's thinking about moving or whether or not they wanna sell their house, we can also do the same.
We can gather information. So if it's around buying or selling a house, that looks like talking with a few different realtors, interviewing them, finding one that you want to work with. Maybe having them look at your house and give you some estimates. Maybe you even wanna get an appraisal, maybe you wanna start looking at houses online just to see how much are they going for?
What parts of town are seem to be really popular right now, like getting ideas of what do you want in a house? What's important to you versus what do you not care about? If you don't have that information. It's really difficult to make a decision. It's super intimidating, but the more information we gather, the more light we [00:14:00] have to shine on that fear, on that uncertainty.
Our goal here is to separate the catastrophic story. From our current reality to take the perceived danger and to look at it and observe it closely, and then to be able to make an informed decision about what we need to do next. Step number three is we wanna make a fear plan. We wanna give a, our brains a job when our brain is feeding us fear. It's pushing fear to us. It's trying to get us to do things based out of fear, but we are in control of our brains. It's not in control of us. So objectively as the brain is pushing fear and pushing some of those thoughts into us, we are going to push back.
We're gonna give our brain something to do. We're gonna give it something to focus on so that it isn't trying to rule us using the emotion of fear. Okay? So [00:15:00] we know we're gonna gather some information. And these can be small, tiny steps. So maybe the first step is looking up some financial advisors or a financial planner who would be near you that you can meet with them in person or have a conversation over the phone.
Maybe the first thing is finding someone who could help you with just unpacking the finances. Another thing that we could do is just to start to gather information again, no shame. No judging yourself. No. Oh, I knew I wasn't watching this money and I should have done this, and I should have done that.
Like none of that. Okay. We're just purely in data gathering mode, which means we are writing down the accounts that we have and maybe the balances, and we are writing down the bills that we have, or we're going into our bank account and we're downloading one of the statements so we can go through and see how much we're spending where.
And again, no judgment, no [00:16:00] shame, just the facts, factually writing down. What money we have available, if there is an income coming in, or if there is investment growth or any of those things. What that is, looking at what our expenses are and just having those things in hand so that when you are working with a financial coach or planner that you have the information to fill in all of the gaps.
There are a lot of free budgeting apps. And websites that you can use that will help you with just. Simplistic budgeting things, but I also think if there's a deeper fear of not understanding your income and your finances or investments, that it would be really advantageous to work with a financial planner, not only to understand where you are right now, but also to plan for the future and what you want that to look like, [00:17:00] because your plans may be changing.
It is just gonna give you information, arm you with that information so that you can make decisions that are best for you.
Once you have all that information, once you've started to shine the light on fear, you get it out of the vague. We get into the details of what's actually happening. We understand where we are versus where we wanna be. Then we can start to make informed decisions. Maybe we need to cut back on expenses.
Maybe actually we're doing really well and we don't need to make any changes. Maybe we need to pick up a. Side job or a part-time thing that will just help bring in some income to pay off some debt. It could be a wide variety of answers, but until we have the details of what is actually happening, it's really hard to make those informed decisions.
And of course through this process we want, we do wanna pray and we do want to go to God. [00:18:00] And as for his. Guidance through this to ask us to be able to boldly address our fears and to navigate the unknown, to navigate learning something new, to being able to understand what's really happening like that is an important part of the process.
And by taking these baby steps forward, God can then help open and close certain doors so that he's guiding our path of where we need to go.
Now just because we do this one time, we go through this exercise one time, that doesn't mean that fear is never gonna come back or that those old thoughts and fears and doubts aren't gonna creep up through your spine. Of course they are. So I want you to be prepared that this is just one rep.
This is one practice of navigating fear and. Pulling it out of the dark, there will be other fears that [00:19:00] pop up in your life. And so this is really building a skill set. Of being able to identify an emotion, to be curious about why you're feeling a certain emotion, to objectively look at it, to name it, to address it, and then to make an informed decision about what you wanna do based on the information you have from being curious about that fear, right?
So again, it's fear. You can ride in the car with me. You can sit in the backseat, but you're not gonna have the steering wheel. That's me. I'm in charge. And so what will happen is over time, the more that fear keeps coming up, the more that you're put in situations that you've never done that thing before, or you have a scare with your finances or whatever it is, you are just gonna become more skilled and more adept at being able to be curious about the mo emotion, to gather information, to deal with the fear, and then to make an [00:20:00] informed decision.
All right. I'm gonna tell you a, I could tell you so many stories of clients that we have in the academy or in coaching who have navigated through some really big fears. But I'm just gonna tell you one story.
We have a student in the Brave Widow Academy who's also done some one-on-one coaching with me. And so as we were working together, she was looking at this family home that she's had for, 20 plus years, and she was in a situation where she. She needed to sell her home before she could build a new one or move into a new one.
But she's like, I don't know how that would work, because I couldn't sell my home. And then someone let me live there for however long it takes to build my new home. And then, I don't know, like, where would I go in the in between? I can't move in with my kids, don't. Have the right setup for that.
And I don't know that I could afford to live in a hotel for however long it takes to build a house. I don't know what [00:21:00] my house is worth. I don't know what I could afford to buy. And just all the doubts and all the questions and all of the unknown, right? And so as we went through coaching, I just continued to encourage her
the reason you feel so much fear is because you don't know. You don't have enough information. You can't make a decision on buying a house or building a house because you don't even know what your house is worth. So let's start by talking to a realtor. She talked to a couple realtors. She was discouraged, about the process or about the interactions and how much they were telling her that her house was worth currently on the market, and she just wasn't really connecting with anyone.
And I just kept encouraging her. I shared with her Dave Ramsey has a, program that, that will help you find people that have certain standards in your area. So she went and found another realtor and we talked about some questions she could ask to understand, is this a realtor that does this a lot or is this a realtor that [00:22:00] sells one house a year?
But she was able to meet with that realtor who came and looked at her house and said, oh, actually I think your house is worth. X amount, which was way more than what she was expecting. Our coaching calls are on Mondays, and so I remember so clearly it was one week she was telling me like, oh, the realtor wants to come with me on Wednesday. She wants us to meet with a builder. I just feel like this is a waste of time because I just, I still don't see how is any of this gonna work?
I don't understand. I would still have to sell my house. Someone would have to let me live here for a while and then. I would move into my new house. I, she was just really discouraged and I was like, just meet with a realtor. You guys go talk to the builder. I'm like, just get more information.
Just see, if this realtor sold as many houses as she says she sold, she probably has a lot of connections. She could probably help you out. So that was on a Monday. She met with a realtor on Wednesday. By the next Monday, she's like beaming when we get on the call and I'm [00:23:00] like, oh, how did your meeting with the realtor go?
And she's I've already sold my house. I'm like, what? Wait, what
I just sat there stunned for a minute because I've bought and sold several properties. I can't say that it's been done within a week, but I was like, like what happened? Tell me what happened. A week ago you were telling me how impossible this is gonna be, and now you're telling me you've already.
Sold your house. You have a contract on your house. What? From Wednesday when she met with a realtor and they met with the builder, they already had pictures of the house post taken, posted online. The realtor hosted an open house that weekend and my client was telling me it was. Torrential rain, like the weather was horrible.
There were like rivers of water going through her front yard and she's like, it didn't matter. It didn't keep people away. They came out and she actually ended up selling her home to a couple who they needed some time before they [00:24:00] would be ready to move in, and they were willing to do like a delayed contract and closing of the house so she could live there for a couple of months before she would need to find a temporary place to stay, and she ended up getting more than she thought she would get for her house.
She ended up feeling really good about knowing exactly where she wanted to build and what she wanted to build. And so in the span of a week. She was able to accomplish something that had just been swirling and swirling for months. For months. She lived in uncertainty and not knowing what she would do and wrestling with if she should stay or she should move, or what would that look like and how would that be possible and how was that gonna work out?
And then in that one week, she was propelled forward and I just encourage you, as you are wrestling with fear or any strong emotion that just keeps coming back and keeps coming back, that we can navigate that by [00:25:00] objectively looking at specifically what it is that we're afraid of. By pulling fear out of the dark, out of the vagueness, getting really clear on what it is we're afraid of.
What are all the facts surrounding. Fear and then being able to make an informed decision.
So if this is where you're living right now, if you are stuck in fear about the future, if you're stuck in uncertainty about what life can look like for you, or what next step that you should take,
This is exactly what I help my clients do and students inside the Brave Widow Academy, and I would love to be able to help you too. You don't have to untangle fear all alone.
Our next round of the academy starts Thursday, April 2nd. I would love to see you there. To learn more or to join, you can go to brave widow.com/academy.
before we wrap up. If you're listening and wondering. Am I doing grief right? Am I stuck or am I actually moving forward? I made something just for [00:26:00] you. I created a free quiz called The Four Seasons of Grief.
Speaker: In just a few minutes, you'll find out which season of grief you're in right now, and the one next step you can take today to move forward . Just go to brave widow.com/quiz. Go take the quiz, find your season, and take your next step today.
