Mountains of Fear

By David Hobbs

Mountains of fear can build up in your life when you fail at something repeatedly in ways that bring pain and humiliation. No matter how many times you try to overcome, each new encounter brings another crushing defeat until the fear of additional failure and pain becomes a greater obstacle than the problem itself.

Take bullying for instance. Being bullied and then humiliated by the bully in front of your friends can bring such crushing self-loathing that when you see the bully coming, all you want to do is run the other way, which adds internal accusations of weakness and cowardice to your already bruised self-esteem. It becomes a self-destructive pattern, a “vicious cycle” that builds the mountain of fear higher and higher. In the end, you become more controlled by the fear than by the bully.

When I was in high school, my mountain of fear was not over bullying, but stuttering. I had always stuttered to an extent, but it didn’t become a major problem until high school. I transferred in from another school, so the cliques were already established and I found myself an outsider. That plus being a self-conscious 14 year-old caused the problem to escalate in an ever-worsening cycle. Each new failure in front of others in class brought added humiliation and added fear for the next time I would be forced to speak. Because I was afraid of stuttering, the fear caused me to “block,” where my throat muscles constricted tighter than a drum and nothing could come out.

Over the high school years, the mountain of fear and misery grew ever greater in spite of my best efforts to overcome. I took speech therapy classes trying to find psychological help; joined the debating club trying to force myself to face my fears—nothing helped. Just talking wasn’t too bad, I could pick my words and if I thought I would block on an upcoming word, I could look for another one easier to say. But reading passages from a book out loud in class was the worse. You could see a difficult word coming up and there was nothing you could do about it! Words that started with a consonant were usually OK, but words that started with an open sound—words like “anything,” or “easy”—they were the tools of the tormentor of my soul!

I was not a pushover. I had resources of the mind and will to work with. In fact, I kept trying to think my way to a solution: “There’s got to be a way to defeat this thing and I’m going to find it,” I would declare to myself. But in spite of the best efforts of my will and mind, the key to success eluded me. I became dominated by a mountain of fear though I had never seen it and had no idea it was there. Yet I suffered from its effects every day.

When I left Ohio for college in Calif. the problem lessened in severity. I was more mature and less vulnerable, and there was no call to read in class any more. It no longer dominated my life though it was by no means solved. Using the Forest Service radios in the summer was the hardest thing, because that was another situation where exact wording was sometimes required.

Then in my second college year, I got into drugs. One of the things with the marijuana we were smoking is that it put things in a different light: it showed the foibles of the social conventions we get used to--like asking someone how they are when you really don’t care, causing them to automatically respond “fine” when they’re usually not. Under the drugs our eyes were opened to see those things going on. You might say they poked holes in the social fabric of our lives.

LSD was even more so. I remember the first time we took it being amazed at the colors of the cars people were driving. “Do they have any idea how ridiculous their car looks!?” I asked Miller more than once as we walked up to the campus. But that only set the stage for what was about to happen.

That evening back at our house, still high, I was sprawled on a bed grooving to music with others. On an impulse, I picked up a magazine, opened it and began to read it out loud. Suddenly it hit me—I wasn’t stuttering! “Hey, I can read!” I exclaimed.

“You can read? Really? Tell me something else I didn’t know,” came the sarcastic response.

“No, I can read without stuttering!” I turned to a different page: same thing; another page: ditto. I tried saying words that usually caused me to stutter, like my Uncle Eslie who lived in Etna. I literally couldn’t make myself stutter. Then for the first time I saw the mountain of fear that had tormented me for so long. But now it had punctured and was collapsing on itself of its own weight. Like everything else as seen on LSD, the idea that my life could be so dominated by one foolish fear looked… well, ridiculous. Its power and hold over me was broken and it crumpled, never to rise again.

Sometimes people wonder if God has a sense of humor. This story proved to me forever that He most certainly does. For Him to use such a politically incorrect method to cure a professed atheist of all people of a life dominating problem was… well, hilarious. He didn’t even mind that for a while I gave all the glory for the cure to the LSD instead of to Him. He was in the process of wooing me and showing me His love even then, though it would be another 7½ years before I accepted Him as my Savior.

(This story based on the book Out of the Fire, A Life Radically Changed, Year 2.