When Terror Takes the Stage: Facing Fallback in a World on Fire
A personal reckoning with fear, responsibility, and the developmental demand to stand up even when falling silent feels safer.
I know what mine looks like now. I circle the wagons. Hunker down. Pull me and mine close. And wait. In silence. This is me in response to collective fallback. The kind where—for reals—the sky is falling in. Global pandemics. Lawless dictators and their oligarch lackeys. (Or maybe it’s oligarchs and their lawless dictator lackeys…it’s hard to tell which from day to day.)
And there I find myself, in the basement of my being. All of my capacities trapped behind the locked doors of my shrinking developmental house, which has come these past several months to feel more like a bunker.
I am scared. So many of us are.
Actually, it’s not just fear. It’s terror. And as I write this, I realize that this is, indeed, who has been on the scenes of my being. Terror.
She’s a character I identified and named maybe seven years ago…though she was born when I was young. She grips me forcefully, causing every fiber of my being to tense. My hands form reflexively into fists, my nails cutting into my palms. My jaw clenches. My senses are on high alert. I want to scream but what seeps out is a nearly imperceptible whimper.
Terror is solid, immovable, determined, enraged…and silent. As her body steels itself against danger, her eyes scan for threats and search for the exits, the hidden tunnels that will deliver those she loves—those she is determined to protect—to safety.
What I’ve come to understand through the lens of fallback is that this is not simply a personal quirk—it’s a deeply human, developmental response. In moments of overwhelming threat, I don’t just feel afraid. I fall back. My sensemaking narrows, my complexity contracts, and my usual capacities for holding nuance and perspective disappear. I retreat to an earlier version of myself whose only goal is survival.
If it were just me, I would not hesitate. I would not look for the escape routes. I would make my voice heard. I would resist, loudly. I would use every modality available to me to fight. But it is not just me. I am responsible to other humans. So many of us are—be they in our families, in our classrooms, in our workplaces, in our communities.
What I do has repercussions for others, now more than ever before, as government infiltrates my data, my personal life, my institutions, my sidewalks, my privacy, my freedoms, my tax dollars, my financial future, my safety. All the while taking a chainsaw to so much that I hold sacred and dear.
Terror commandeers the stage in protection of others.
A clear, rational thought prevails: I’ll protect us by not drawing attention to us.
And in so doing, I have been unrecognizable to myself, at least the self that I want to be. But the truth is, Terror is a part of me. She is here. And she’s here for a reason. She is protecting so much that I value. My children, my husband, this life that we have built in a country that promised us we could.
So, I have stayed outwardly silent while inwardly, I wail.
But what Terror can’t see on her own, when she is the only actress on my internal stage, is that protection by way of silence is a false truth.
Yes, we could go unnoticed, disguised, wearing the face we keep in a jar by the door. (I’m coming to see now who it is for.) But I decided many years ago that I would not mask myself. And I refuse to be cloaked in fear now.
When I am in fallback, I lose access to the parts of myself that are more spacious, more generative—those that can hold paradox, consider long-range implications, or seek the good of the whole. In the bomb shelter of my fallback, nuance dies. And with it, my leadership potential.
It’s a false promise that I can protect those I love by keeping my head down and my mouth shut. In the light of day, as I peek tentatively out of the bunker that has been holding me, I can see another truth. If I collude with my silence, I will protect no one.
I can see it in the rapidly falling away distance of time, and protocol, and civility, and law, and humanity—glimpses of a future scene. My children turn to me, when all vestiges of safety have been stripped, and ask, “Why didn’t you fight? Why didn’t you stand up for what was right? Why didn’t you protect me, not with your silence but with your voice?”
Indeed, we are not only responsible for protecting those we seek to grow—we are responsible for showing them what growth looks like in the face of fear. Our children, our students, our communities—they take their cues from us. What future will we point them to? What path will we forge for how they might get there?
As we struggle to make sense of ourselves and the way we are showing up (or not) in a world in existential crisis, there has been little that I’ve encountered about how it is affecting us humans in here…how we are showing up to ourselves, now also in existential crisis, and to the humans we grow. I have read and listened to what is happening out there. Yet, I’ve believed for some time that we, individual humans, are the primary units of analysis. The wisdom lies within us.
It is times like these when all the theories we study about leadership, and vertical development, and fallback are put to the test. What will we do with them when the rubber meets the road?
“Fear is a necessary precondition to courage,” proclaimed Senator Cory Booker in his 25-hour marathon speech on the floor of the Senate in protest of the devastation that Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and their sycophants are wreaking on the United States and the rest of the world.
Yes. Yes sir, it is.
Now is the time for Courage to join Terror on my stage. Not to supplant her, but to stand there beside her, holding the microphone when Terror’s hands can’t be steadied. Terror makes plain all that is at risk. Terror refuses to allow me to look away. And Courage…Courage allows Terror to find her voice.
How do we humans live into the place in our development where our fullness, both our bigness and our smallness in all of their wisdom, power, and gifts, can take the stage in protection of the values we hold? And how can we do this as we also tend to the growth of other humans?
Perhaps the first step is to face into the reality that this human journey is painful.
It’s a truth that so many of us have attempted to turn away from. We don’t get through life without fear and loss. The times we are living in right now put this truth on loudspeaker.
Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, “Do not squander the hour of your pain.” Indeed, our pain is so often the source of our transformation, and also the source of our ability to accompany others in theirs.
We must pay attention.
I have long believed that the lynchpin of coming into relationship with the fullness of you, including your fallback, is to notice. But noticing, these past few months, hasn’t felt like enough. We must pay attention.
Pay attention to what is happening in you. I’m not talking about a passing glance. I’m advocating for a full-on sit-in. If you find it too dark to see, be still and let your eyes adjust. If you hear nothing, listen into the silence. Feel the tension in your face, the constriction of your muscles. Pay attention to where your attention is drawn and where you don’t dare look. Bring curiosity to your fear. Listen for the truth that is revealed. Sit tight and wait for the other truths to emerge…there is always more than one.
Yet sometimes we are unable to see ourselves, to hear the truths until we utter them to or hear them from another.
Go to the spaces where you can be seen and held without fear of judgment.
We make meaning in community. We see ourselves through others’ eyes. We become better witnesses of ourselves through our witnessing of other humans.
Not being alone–in my own thoughts, anguish, in my Terror–has served as a balm when all around me feels like barbed wire. To be seen and heard in my pain and fear; to witness another in theirs; to be reminded that this is not humanity’s first rodeo with those who seek to destroy democracy; to have demonstrated to me that joy and hope have for centuries prevailed in the face of cruelty; to be reminded of the human spirit and to witness others’ Courage standing alongside their Terror—has given me strength, compassion, perspective, and a map.
Think about the long game…
…beyond you in this moment, in this year, in the next four, in the next 40. What will your children’s lives be like? And theirs? What legacy will you leave them? What kind of human do you wish to be in this world? What is your intention for meeting this moment?
Do not squander the hour of your pain. Notice who is on your stage. Face into your fallback, not with shame, but with curiosity. And then ask yourself: Who else needs to be here? What character will help you lead—not just others, but yourself—into the world you hope to shape?
Leadership, in this moment, isn’t about titles or platforms or all of those out there who we are looking to to show courage on our behalf. It’s about we the people. It’s about what we choose to do with the truths revealed in our pain. It’s about who we choose to become in front of others—our children, our colleagues, our communities. When we allow both Terror and Courage to take the stage, we model what it means to lead as a full, fallible human, one who chooses to be brave in the face of fear.
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