Terror Week Day Two: Separating David from Goliath

Life is simple when David and Goliath are two separate people. David can simply pick up a pebble and unleash a pointed assault. Easy.

More often, though, David and Goliath are the oppressors and heroes in our own brains. Oppressor and protector are the same person. One half of us is a giant called “Fear”. The other half is David, the tiny human trying to survive it.

Fear is perhaps the greatest threat to exceptional writing. The creative spirit is delicate, so fear only needs to blow on it to destroy it. When you sit down to a blank page, Goliath is front and centre. You feel fearful or insecure, so you can’t do your best work.

One of dialectical behavioural therapy’s (DBT) most important tools involves separating the Goliaths and Davids in your brain. It asks you to understand that your fear isn’t you. You are just its observer. This distinction matters because you cannot trust fear. It’s a liar. The first step to overcoming it is recognising that fear and truth are separate things. That means you can fight that fear with rational thinking.

But how do you do it?

Jon Kabat-Zinn developed four stages of mindfulness using the acronym S.T.O.P.

S: Stop. Get out of autopilot and stop what you’re doing.

T: Take a breath. Return to the present moment. Focus on your breathing and your immediate surroundings.

O: Observe. Identify what you’re feeling and thinking. Take note of your bodily sensations and pay attention to your tension. Most importantly, realise that feelings are not you, so they aren’t capable of destroying you.

P: Proceed. Use the information you’ve gathered to effect change.

DBT takes S.T.O.P a step further by asking you to speak rationally to your fear or doubt. Listen to your higher self and use logic to reduce the intensity of your feelings.

It sounds easy.

It isn’t.

You won’t defeat Goliath easily the first time, but if you keep naming and describing your emotions, you can learn to survive them.

DBT doesn’t ask you to fight your fear, though. It only asks you to speak to it. The easiest way to maximise emotional intensity is by trying to escape it, so don’t be tempted to block your fear. Rather sit with it as a friend. Work out which lies it’s telling you. Remember that fear and truth are two different things. Recognise that you don’t have to obey fear. You can feel it and still do the thing you’re scared of.

In time, you might develop tricks for separating David and Goliath. I used to promise myself that writing didn’t have to mean sharing. This allowed me to write freely in the knowledge that nobody ever had to see the results. If I chose to share the work, it was a challenge for a different day.

I also stopped characterising fear as a negative emotion. In response, Goliath shrank, and David grew like magic. All emotions have value. If you don’t put value judgements on them, they’re less destructive.

You’ll learn your own tricks if you keep working on it.

If you’re doing an exercise today, go through your writing and find the piece that scares you the most. Now share it in the group. We will not be critting these pieces, so please mark this work as “not for crit” in the title and above the post itself. Readers can identify with the work and share how it made them feel, but nothing more.