That Nagging, Empty Feeling – Part One: Fear

Do you know the feeling I'm talking about? That emptiness inside – the feeling that something important is missing? Maybe as you've gotten older, you've developed a nagging suspicion that the emptiness might be getting bigger, or at the very least, less easy to ignore?

If you're like me and many others, you've had moments when you've felt that emptiness quite sharply. It's a difficult experience and it's common to go to great lengths to distract yourself from having to acknowledge it.  The fact of the matter is that it takes courage and bravery to face the emptiness head on. You know on an intuitive level that exploring the roots of this feeling could become overwhelming. It has the power to either paralyze you or shake up your life, catapulting you toward big changes – and change, for many of us, can be quite frightening. 

The goal of this series is to offer insight into what is missing and how to cultivate it in your life. But before I do that, I think it is extremely important (and all too frequently overlooked) to give voice to the fears and underlying causes behind the emptiness I've described.  With this first part of my series, I invite you to step gently out of your comfort zone and begin to explore the fears buried beneath that feeling of emptiness. It isn't always easy, but it is such an important first step on your journey!

Spoiler alert: Growth happens outside of your comfort zone. I want to encourage you to challenge yourself to become more comfortable with discomfort. One of the most important pieces of insight I could ever offer you is that there is power in getting to know your fears. There is power in acknowledging the emptiness and taking the time to learn about it. And since I am fully aware of how hard it is to do just that, it seems only fair to me that I offer you the best tools and support I know along the way.​

So let's take the plunge and get a little uncomfortable together! As you step into your discomfort, set the intention to be compassionate toward yourself and your fears. Set the intention to be patient and hold off on the judgements as much as you can. This journey isn't easy, but it is necessary in order to fill up the emptiness with meaning. By choosing to listen to and learn from your fears, you are exercising your most brave and most courageous emotional muscles.

First thing's first. Where does the feeling that something important is missing come from? If you've had that empty feeling for a while now, chances are good you will recognize yourself in one (or more) of these scenarios:​
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The Upstanding Citizen
Many people are taught from a young age that there is a set path to follow in order to find happiness: go to school, get good grades, get a good job, work hard, have a family, participate in the community, and you'll be set. This idea is heavily reinforced through film, television, and social media. People who follow this formula can often be quite successful. At first and even second glance, all the components for happiness and fulfillment appear to be present in full force. Yet, despite all of that, something is missing. 

Unfortunately, this formula for a happy life can set you up with false expectations. When you start to feel as though all of your efforts to find the happiness you were tacitly promised aren't paying off, (and, indeed, are unlikely to ever pay off in the way you expected), you are confronted with a very challenging and unpleasant emotional landscape. 

You may feel betrayed, as though you have been sold a lie.  You may feel confusion as you try to pinpoint the key component of the formula you missed. Confusion sometimes tragically turns into shame as you come to believe that your failure to find happiness doesn't rest in the flawed path, but instead, rests in you – as such, you must be fundamentally flawed. And finally. people in this scenario also tend to experience a profound sense of guilt. You become keenly aware of how enviable your circumstances may appear to others, especially the less fortunate, and yet you can't shake the nagging, empty feeling.

​The Free Spirit
Perhaps you're the type of person who has always been able and willing to follow your bliss. You've broken with tradition, chased after your dreams, and lived unapologetically according to your own rules. You've felt the thrill of adventure and filled your life with unique experiences. This approach is an engaging one, and is likely to have kept you satisfied with rewarding pursuits for a long time. Eventually, however, depending upon the nature of the dreams you've been chasing, you may have begun to discover that your lifestyle isn't delivering the results it used to. You may have felt that chasing after your dreams was 'you being you', but when you ask yourself 'who am I?', you realize that you're struggling with the answer. You know you are more than your experiences, but you don't know what that 'more' is.

People in this scenario may feel restless and disillusioned. You've embraced the idea of being true to yourself, living freely from one notion to the next and while it may have worked beautifully in the past, it isn't filling up your soul the way it once did. You feel an urgency to reconnect with the novelty and bliss you've come to expect, but without really knowing what has changed, you don't know how to fix it. Sadly, this urgency can become desperation and lead to thrill seeking behaviors that confuse a sense of excitement with a sense of fulfillment.

The Survivor
Sadly, most people will suffer emotional hardship at some time or another. Perhaps you have suffered a major life crisis such as the sudden loss of a loved one, a terrible physical injury, the death of a child, or the like. Emotional traumas like these can suddenly and drastically change the way you view both your day to day and long-term existence. What once mattered can suddenly feel hollow, leaving you with an intolerable emptiness.

This sense of loss or tragedy is enough to wake you up from your reverie, but can leave you at a loss for how to proceed. You have a clear understanding that your former priorities may not have been in order and, while you may have an intuitive sense of what is really important now, the challenge comes in reconstructing your life to align with this new understanding.

People who find themselves in these circumstances often feel angry or bitter. After all, you didn't ask for tragedy. The terrible emptiness you are experiencing was brought about by something external which also leads to a sense of helplessness. If something so terrible can happen for seemingly no reason, how can you be sure of preventing something similar from happening again? There is often a great deal of shame and guilt in this scenario as well. You may blame yourself for not having been better prepared, for not protecting those you love, for not having seen the tragedy coming or having done more to prevent it in the first place. It feels like tremendous, heart-breaking defeat.

​The Seeker
This last scenario is reserved for those people who have always had a sense that something is missing. For as long as you can remember, you've known that there was something more to your existence than your day to day routines might suggest. You have long been on the lookout for the solution to the mystery of the emptiness. You may have searched for an answer in various religious or spiritual practices or you may have looked to the guidance of a respected teacher or mentor. Others often look for meaning and connection with another person, a kindred spirit to help fill the emptiness inside. And there are those who seek answers in nature or artistic expression. This quest can indeed be meaningful in that it is likely to uncover key elements of wisdom along the way. Even so, these flashes of insight don't necessarily add up to the deep connection and fulfillment that drives the quest in the first place.  

People who have carried this life-long emptiness inside of them often fall prey to feelings of despondency and sadness. You have put energy into your quest, but without the result you were longing for, you may have become resigned to the fact that emptiness will always be a part of life. That resignation can in the best cases become apathy, and in the worst cases, cynicism. You are also subject to a weariness, a deep fatigue at the soul level. ​​
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Does one of these scenarios resonate with you? If I'm honest, I see parts of myself in all four of them. Maybe you do, too. So what is the common denominator here? While there are some similarities on the surface – things like feelings of guilt, dissatisfaction, disillusionment, unmet expectations, and frustration – it is actually what lies underneath these feelings that powerfully connects these different life stories. Effectively, each scenario looks outward for what's missing (a path, an answer, an experience, a person, etc.) when in fact the emptiness can only be filled from the inside out. The scary truth is that when you've tried these other paths, you eventually come to the realization that the only option remaining is filling up the emptiness with You. And ... are you enough? With all of your flaws and mistakes and lacks, you come face to face with a terrible sense of shame and inadequacy. How can you possibly be enough? And if you aren't enough, if you just don't have what it takes to fill up the emptiness, doesn't that mean that the emptiness will ultimately be permanent? That's a heavy, profound fear to face! No wonder we go to such great lengths to avoid acknowledging it! 

​So let's be clear about the vicious cycle that can develop around these fears. Brace yourself. It is one hell of a merry-go-round!

At some point, you start to notice that something essential is missing from your life. You feel dissatisfied because the life you've been living isn't as fulfilling as you would like. You can't help but think about why that's the case, which leads to a second layer of dissatisfaction – those deeper feelings of betrayal, helplessness, confusion, guilt, frustration, or disillusionment. If you muster up the nerve to look even deeper, you start to experience a sense of hopelessness because you're painfully afraid that you aren't enough to change things for the better.  So then you can't help but feel miserable about being resigned to the possibility of being unfulfilled for the rest of your life.  You try hard to ignore it altogether and live as best you can, but eventually that nagging feeling starts coming back - something's missing. And the cycle repeats. 

Wow. That's unbearably depressing, right? This isn't any way to live a life! And yet this is exactly what so many of us are doing day in and day out because we don't know how to release ourselves from the cycle. Instead, we try to push those difficult feelings way down below the surface or go to other great (and sometimes destructive) lengths to avoid having to feel them. Part Two of this series explores the unhealthy, but understandable ways in which we try to cope with this cycle.

But there is hope, counterintuitive as it might be. The way to assuage these fears and start filling the emptiness from the inside out is by turning toward your fear rather than running from it. If you set a goal of slowly becoming more comfortable with discomfort, you become able to sit still long enough to learn more about the source of your fears and how to ease them. Working one day at a time to become more compassionate and less reactive to your fear strengthens your wisest mental muscles and allows you to start questioning the voice inside that says 'You are not enough". 

A significant part of the coaching experience is helping people work through their limiting beliefs. That process is ultimately a life-long journey, one that I attend to in my own life every day. This blog series isn't designed to outline that journey in detail, but I can't in good conscience simply suggest what you need to do without also offering you some assistance on how to do it. With that in mind, I've included a YouTube video at the bottom of this post featuring and important talk on freeing yourself from fear. It is presented by world-renowned psychologist, mindfulness leader, and author Tara Brach. It is my hope her words and insights resonate with you as much as they do with me and others across the globe. 

In conclusion, it is essential to form a healthy relationship with fear so that it doesn't paralyze you, send you into a destructive tail-spin or control you by forcing you to live a life of hugely risk-averse limitation. Fear is asking each of us to acknowledge it, accept it, and hear it, and we must learn to do so  as lovingly and compassionately as we can. There's no denying that being able to do this is a long-term process and requires intention and discipline. But when we come to appreciate that the emptiness and fear is actually a catalyst for some seriously positive change, when we slowly begin to live from a place of "I am enough", we experience less of "the void". We start to fill up the emptiness with self- knowledge and self-acceptance. These are big parts of what has been missing all along.

The next time you become aware of that nagging empty feeling inside, resist the temptation to ignore it or suppress the feelings and thoughts that come with it. Instead, use it as an opportunity to be still and explore the discomfort. Notice where the discomfort is in your body. Gently question the message of unworthiness your discomfort may be sending you. Trust yourself to be strong enough to handle your fear, and most of all, trust that you ARE enough to fill up the emptiness. 

P.S.  Keep your eyes open over the next few weeks for Part Two of this series: The Unhealthy Ways We Try To Cope.