Can I Get Rid of Fear?
hi, I’m Anne Warner. I am an affordable therapist in Orange County.
As a person that grew up in a Christian faith tradition, I am very familiar with the quote, “there is no fear in love,” which gets misused and leads to self-criticism, confusion, and despair. I’ve heard sincere people wanting to “get rid of fear” or “cast it out” or “kill it.” While I deeply understand the desire to get rid of fear for the sake of love, I want to offer a different approach.
What Do I Do with Fear?
Instead of casting fear out, I believe in turning toward it—with kindness, with curiosity, and with a willingness to feel. Fear is not the enemy of love, but often its companion. In the model of Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy (ISTDP) that I am being training in, fear and anxiety are understood not as signs of weakness or spiritual failure, but as signals that something meaningful is being activated inside us—often painful feelings we’ve learned to avoid.
How Does This Happen?
This avoidance isn’t a flaw; it’s a defense. As children, we learn to shut down or manage overwhelming feelings—grief, anger, sadness, longing—when they threaten our sense of connection, safety, or love. Over time, we may stop even realizing those feelings are there. What we do experience, however, is anxiety. When we are afraid under the surface, we experience anxiety. Think of it as a signal that lets us know something important is happening underneath, even if we can’t quite name it.
Why Am I Anxious?
As I understand it, there are two types of anxiety: one that helps us feel and move toward truth, and another that overwhelms us and shuts us down. The work in therapy is to distinguish between the two. If anxiety becomes too high—if it overwhelms the body, causing tension, dizziness, nausea, or emotional flooding—it means the nervous system is overloaded, and we need to slow down. This is not failure; it’s information. It tells us we’re near something valuable, but the body needs to feel safe enough to go there.
Therapy isn’t just about insight or trick and tips to “manage”—it’s about helping your body tolerate the feelings that once felt intolerable. It’s about learning to stay present with what comes up, rather than managing or pushing it away. Casting it out won’t get you anywhere, and especially not closer to love. When we can stay with our emotions, something shifts. We stop being afraid of ourselves. We stop running from the parts of us that long to be known. And that’s where healing starts.
Free to Feel
The goal is not to be free from fear, but to be free to feel. To love. To live. It’s the opposite of the spiritual pressure to “get rid of” fear—it’s about understanding that fear is a sign that love might be close, that truth might be near, and that we might be about to touch something sacred.
So when someone tells me they feel afraid, I don’t see that as a problem to fix. I see it as a door. The question becomes: what feeling is waiting on the other side of that fear? And what might become possible if we walked through it—together?
Ultimately, I believe that there is not fear in love. Using fear as a pathway opens us up to love. Think of fear as a goblin at the gates of love protecting something precious. In therapy, together we will plan to arrive at love as we journey.
