It was 2am on a Monday, and while I should have been sleeping, I was scrolling through my phone in an apparent attempt to reach the end of the internet, which felt easier to do than getting the rest I needed.
While swiping through posts on social media, my phone started to buzz, and Caleb's name popped up. It was rare to get a text at that time from Caleb, but a phone call was alarming. I answered and immediately could hear quick, stuttered speech and laboured breathing on the other end of the phone. Trying to figure out what was wrong, I asked him to slow down and give me a quick rundown of what was going on. Was he OK? Was he in danger? Did he need help?
Caleb was an incredibly bright student whom I had the pleasure of coaching throughout his senior year at New York University. His therapist had recommended he start to work on bringing mindfulness and meditation into his life to help with school-related stress, so I was brought in to help.
Throughout our time together, we worked to find ways for him to use the tenets of mindfulness to find a space of calm during the busyness of his senior year. His meditation practice became an important part of his routine, and he was able to find a balance between his perfectionist tendencies that led him to overwork and miss out on his social life and the enjoyment of his final year with his friends.
During our last session, Caleb had opened up about his recent acceptance letter to Yale grad school and his parents' excitement when he had told them. His mother had already alerted the family group text, and messages of congrats were flooding in. It was what they had dreamed of for him since he was little: graduating with honours and heading off to Yale to pursue his Master's.
I could sense Caleb's understandable feeling of being overwhelmed as he talked about it. There was a lot of pressure being the "golden boy" of the family, and we worked through ways to plan for inevitable stress as he headed into a huge shift in his life.
I knew that, given everything going on in his life, there would be challenges as graduation came closer, but as I listened to him try to form the words to express what was happening for him, I knew that he was trapped in fear. That protective part of him was trying to prevent him from moving forward, and he didn't yet have the tools to recognise what was happening.
Eventually I was able to start walking him through a process of mindfully approaching fear. We began recognising what was going on for him. What feelings were there? Where was the fear showing up in his body? The goal was for him to get out of his thinking mind for a moment and direct his attention back to the physical and emotional experience.
He was able to start to express that, in that moment, he felt a tightening of his throat, a constricting of his chest, a racing heart, and his entire body felt flush with heat. He felt anxious, nervous, a sense of dread, and beneath all of that was fear. The act of stating that he was feeling fear allowed him to begin to recognise what was happening and let it be there.
Next we started to explore the thoughts that were present for him. They were coming in so fast and ranged from a hyperfocus on his body and concern for his physical safety to the replaying of past memories, thinking about times he felt embarrassed and filled with regret. But the thought that continued to spiral the loudest was that he wasn't going to be able to make it at Yale. His mind was trying to convince him that he had been fooling everyone by trying to appear smarter than he actually was and that, surrounded by brilliant minds, he would be seen as a fraud and disappoint his family.
When examining his thoughts, we identified the source of the fear: He thought he was not good enough. With all of the attention and expectations placed on him, he would fail, and the world would finally see that his deepest fear was a reality. When Caleb was able to say those words out loud and identify where this feeling was coming from, he almost sighed with relief. Recognising that all of the signals and reactions his body and mind were experiencing were connected to this fear brought a sense of peace.
From an outside perspective, it would be easy to say this was a wildly irrational thought and he had nothing to be afraid of. His track record at school was stellar, and he was consistently praised for his hard work and talents. But to Caleb, this deep-seated fear had been with him for years. He had pushed it aside and buried it, but it had always been with him.
In working toward acceptance and non-judgement, I pulled out my favourite question: "Why does it make perfect sense?" In this case, "it" refers to the intense emotional reaction he had experienced that night. Why did it make perfect sense that, given everything he had experienced in his life and everything going on, he would have such an intense reaction of fear?
With that question, Caleb was able to start to speak about the pressure he was under, the expectations he placed on himself, the fact that his family's approval meant everything to him, and the thought of letting them down was crushing. He recognised that Yale had not only been their dream for him, but it really was his dream. It was meaningful and important, and the fear of losing out on the opportunity was too much to handle. When he started to see things from that perspective, he was able to feel a sense of empathy for himself, to remove the judgment, and to fully accept that it made sense that he'd be reacting this way.
