Carla Marie Manly - Joy from Fear: Create the Life of Your Dreams by Making Fear Your Friend

Copyright 2019 by Carla Marie Manly

All rights reserved.

Published by Familius LLC, www.familius.com

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication

Data 2018961640

Print ISBN 9781641701211

Ebook ISBN 9781641701709

Printed in the United States of America

Edited by Katharine Hale and Sarah Echard

Cover design by David Miles

Book design by Brooke Jorden

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

First Edition

This book is dedicated to all of those who courageously embrace the journey with transformational fear. May the loving self-awareness you cultivate bring true freedom and joy to your soul and your world.

I offer my deep, humble gratitude to Love. You have been faithfully at my side and in my soul; you have never failed.

Contents

Simple, Effective Tools for Balance,
Mindfulness, and Letting Go

PREFACE

I am ever grateful to the extraordinary researchers, authors, and clinicians who have informed my work. From the works of Carl Jung to Thomas Moore, I have been enlightened and guided by those who have gone before me. Joy from Fear but scratches the surface of many areas that deserve in-depth, focused attention.

As with any important life journey, it is recommended that you consult with your primary caregiver and engage the active support of a trained psychotherapist when needed. It is my prayer that this book offers you a guided introduction to greater joy, well-being, and transformation.

It is important to note that the case studies in this book are represen-tative amalgamations. Though their names and stories have been changed to maintain privacy, the journeys and realizations depicted in them are real. They are not intended to, nor do they, depict any one actual person or situation.

INTRODUCTION

Why Fear Makes a Much Better Friend Than Enemy

I want you to throw away your preconceived notions of fear, along with any particular opinions of anxiety and its causes. In doing so, in opening your mind and your spirit to what might be an entirely new way of thinking and of being, you will embark upon the most challenging, illuminating, and richly satisfying journey of your life.

If you feel as though you are sometimes drowning in a lonely sea of unhappiness, in meaningless chronic anxiety, depression, or hopelessness, this bookthis journeyis for you.

Whether you are struggling to discover or maintain nourishing relationships, a fulfilling career, financial ease, or greater harmony within your family life, this book will offer you welcome assistance. If you are searching for a deeper understanding of who you are as an individual from your sense of spirituality to a greater depth of inner awarenessyou will encounter fulfilling guidance. If you are searching for a life that is free from the weight of anxiety and stress-induced illnesses and for a healthy sense of delight within your physical being, you will find well-honed tools in the pages ahead.

You might be wondering how one small book can offer so much. The answer is both simple and complex. It is one familiar aspect of fear that strangles us, holds us back, and keeps us living lives filled with stress, unhappiness, and emptiness. It is another hidden aspect of this same fear thatwhen listened to and understoodaffords us the opportunity to engage in the lives of our dreams.

This book will welcome you into the world of transformational fear, where you will find that fear has two faces, not just one. The first face, destructive fear, keeps us tangled and immobilized. The second face, constructive fear, is a hidden ally we can come to recognize and know. Through this journey, you will come to notice and appreciate this trust-worthy ally; you will come to make transformational fear your friend.

From Living a Lie to Living Free

In a few simple sentences, I will tell you about a woman I know very well. On the outside, she seemed to have it all. She had the right education, the right house, the right kids, the right clothes, the right husband, and even the right car. She was a successful high-performer, working dutifully from dawn to well after dusk. She did everything that was expected of her and far more. She wanted everyone to be happy and pleased; perfection was her goal.

No one knew that she was dying on the inside. The woes of her difficult history had been repressed but not forgotten. The perfect marriage was a farce. The job that paid the bills was not the one of her dreamsfar from it. It was a job of duty and subjugation; it was entirely devoid of joy. Yet she continued to smile, to carry on. She might have walked off the earths edge had it not been for the bright light of her two sons; she wanted to survive and thrive for them.

At what seemed to be a most inconvenient time, a momentous epiphany hit her smack in the face. She realized that she was modeling for her children how to accept a barely-lived life. Hers was a life of gray, endless days of toil, a loveless marriage, and a job that fed upon her soul. Shed come to feel that she was a pitiful shell of a woman who accepted far less than she wanted and far less than she deserved. This woman was unwittingly trapped in the grip of a nearly inextricable, invisible web of fear that kept her constrained and internally dead. This devastated woman, as you may have guessed, was me.

Unwittingly, largely unconsciously, I began my journey away from fear in the early months of 2005. I woke one morning and whispered to myself, I would rather live under a bridge than live this life. I truly meant those words. I had no idea where I was going, how I would get there, or if I would survive the rigors. I knew one thing only: that my life was not worth living if I did not try. Despite complete uncertainty about what the futuremy new worldwould hold, I had decided that I would rather die than live the smothered, suffocating, and meaningless life I had come to accept.

Had you told me at the time that my life thus far had been ruled by fear, I would have stared at you uncomprehendingly, staunchly and whole-heartedly disagreeing. I would have averred that I was an independent, strong, tenacious, and determined woman. Had you pushed me further, I might have recounted my varied external successes, my accomplishments, my sound capacity to tend to whatever business was at hand, and the highlights of my education and career. I would have tossed my head back, looked at you with fierce eyes, and steadfastly ignored that I was dying actually suffocatinginside.

And yet, with an objective backward glance, I now clearly recognize that I had lived the vast majority of my life in the silent, overpowering grasp of fear. Much of what I am now able to acknowledge, now that my inner gaze and sense of self is much clearer, was impossible for me to see when I lived in fear. Fear had served to mask my vision, to slowly infiltrate my world until I did not recognize it for the jailer it had become.

I see in my not-so-happy childhood that much of the way I was raised indoctrinatedwas based in fear. As the ninth child in a large Catholic family, I was raised to fear my father, my eldest brother, and God (in that order). I was taught to fear leaving the safety of the family. I learned to fear the world in general, for strangers might discover the secrets, woes, and frail stability within the family. Without my realizing it, pervasive fear had become the glue that held our family together. It was this glue of fear, this internal message, that unconsciously permeated my life.