Fallen Fears

When I was very little, about four or five years old, my mother warned me not to swallow bubblegum or chewing gum: “It can stick in your throat, and stop you from breathing.” My mum never bought us gum anyway, as she didn’t like the stuff. But one day, a short time after I was given this warning, I went to a birthday party where the hubba bubba flowed like water. I didn’t mean to swallow it. I just kind of forget that I was chewing bubblegum – as opposed to real food – and in an instant, it was gone.

 

If you’ve ever swallowed gum, especially a fat wad of bubblegum, you’ll know that it feels really horrible. It’s so hard and plastic-y that you can feel where you swallowed it for quite a while afterwards. I came home from the party panic-stricken. I didn’t want to tell my mum that I’d accidentally swallowed the gum, because I didn’t want her to be cross at me – which just goes to show you how stupid small children can be sometimes.

 

Because for the next two years solid, I stayed awake for hours after my bedroom light had been turned off, wondering if this was the night that gum was going to choke me to death, G-d forbid. When this fear eventually faded, it was replaced by others that were similarly unfounded, and all-consuming.

 

By the time I was a teenager, fear was so ingrained in my system and my psyche that any remotely stressful situation would give me a severely upset stomach. I couldn’t eat for days, and would walk around with all my fears churning my insides into soup.

 

I have a lot of family members with the same sort of nervous tension, so I just figured that it was how I was made, and there was nothing much to do about it all.

 

The trouble is, as life went on, my fears grew bigger and bigger. I was fearful about buying a house – what if prices went down and we’d be stuck with negative equity? (This was just before they really started to shoot through the roof, in the middle of the Nineties.) I was fearful about missing a deadline or doing something less than perfect at work – what if my boss would be cross at me, or I’d end up losing my job? I was fearful about walking home at night in the dark – what if I’d get mugged or attacked, G-d forbid?

 

I could go on, but you get the idea. I never really addressed these fears. They’d surface, make me panic, and then I’d find something to take my mind off them, like a movie, or overtime, or a meal out, or a good book. So they just kind of sat inside me, festering, for years. On the outside, everything was fine. I was coping, I was managing, everything was A-Ok.

 

But then two things happened that sent my fear rocketing up so high, I simply couldn’t cope. The first thing was when I was pregnant with my second daughter, and I had unexplained bleeding for five months. This is not such an uncommon phenomenon – I know quite a few people who had the same thing, and all delivered healthy children, thank G-d.

 

But for me, the fear that the pregnancy might not ‘work’ was terrifying. For eight and a half months, my fear literally paralysed me. There were days that I was scared to move so much as a muscle. But I still had a husband, home, job and small daughter to care for, so I had to find some solution to cope again. The solution was tehillim, Psalms. I was very far away from G-d and emuna then, but G-d put the idea in my head to say a couple of tehillim a day, in the behalf of having a healthy child. The tehillim really, really helped. It was the first time I put my fear onto Hashem, and asked Him to help me manage it, because I really wasn’t managing it by myself.

 

Thank G-d, my second daughter was born, and I breathed an enormous sigh of relief that all the fear and worry had come to an end, or so I thought then. Life continued; I started a business that kept me very busy, and then we decided to move to Israel.

 

Again, the fear of ‘what might be’ went ballistic. By the time we made aliya, I was seeing a shrink twice a week because I was having panic attacks at night and finding it very hard to breathe. The shrink helped a bit – enough to get me on the plane. But I realised that I had a serious problem that was only getting worse, not better.

 

I continued seeing a therapist in Israel, but the more I talked about my worries, fears, and disappointments, the larger they loomed, and the more miserable I got. I’d got to the point where I was seeing the therapist three times a week, and even that wasn’t enough to deal with it all.

 

Thank G-d, He had mercy on me, and at this point in my life, we started to really learn about emuna. I’d just received the first ever ‘Emuna CDs’ in the post, and when I heard Rabbi Brody say that all the therapy was only addressing the symptom of the problem, and not the root – I knew he was right.

 

My problem was that I didn’t have emuna. My problem was that I didn’t have a connection to Hashem. I didn’t fear Hashem, and as a result, I feared absolutely everything else you can think of. Once I realised that, and I knew in my soul that it was the truth, I told my therapist that I was going to stop coming. I had to start addressing the problem at its source, and stop looking for ‘ways to cope’ and ‘ways to cover it over’.

 

It was the beginning of redemption, for me personally. But as we’ll see, my yetzer hara wasn’t going to let me go without a fight.