Overcoming the Fear of Commitment.

Whether its fear of commitment in relationships, committing to your creative expression, or committing to becoming your best self, commitment is a sacred responsibility.

all photos courtesy of Equator Journal.

Understanding the culture behind the Fear of Commitment

We are experiencing a culture that reward the façade of an individual’s accomplishment’s rather than the true integrity of the individual within the process. We have exchanged growth for glamour, and devotion to the process for whatever the gets the job done in a Instagram worthy fashion.

 Nothing wrong should you choose to lead one route or the other.

 The issue at hand is where did commitment go?

There seems to be a sense of “ I will commit to the thing that looks like it will make me happy,” only to commit to the next thing, the next idea, the very next day.

 In a culture that hyper focuses on the outcome of what you have done and what you currently have, we seem to have developed a misunderstanding of what we are actually after in life, and how to create the process to actually get there. 

In this article I want to dive into the conditions that create our now culture that incentivizes distraction rather devotion, dissect the elements that we need to understand in order to escape the matrix of sorts, and to learn the processes of transcending past the distractions to commit meaningfully to YOUR life so you can live your best life that you know is possible.

First things first.

Where does the fear of commitment come from?

We know that we live in a day age where our attention is the most valuable commodity.

Everything is designed within the media and most technology is to capture your attention, direct it to the places that will not necessarily better your life, so as to keep you in a state of seeking something outside of yourself where naturally you will perpetuate the desire to seek something that is ill-fated because everything you need you already have! 

This is the common projection of our day and age: 

Show you something that somebody else has that makes you want to have that as well, or rather to live that type of life. Then moments later, another image appears that redirects your focus again even further away from yourself, your true nature. 

I don’t mean to be cynical; in fact what I want to shine light upon is actually the beautiful reciprocal of that notion, the space of awakening to OUR potential and creating a committed lifestyle to OUR life; however, it is critically important to accept and understand what is going on all around us. 

Social Media influences us to unconsciously fear Commitment.

Anytime you engage with media, you are participating a war. This need not create a negative perception, media and social media are not good nor bad entities, they are simply tools that over time we have demonized and idolized.

Tools like social media reflect the energy and attention you put into them. The only caveat is that these tools are all fighting for you attention and engagement,. Another way of saying this is,

 “Social media is stealing your commitment from yourself with your consent.”

 The wisdom that lives inside of this is brings us to the first major understanding.

 “I choose to devote my energy to everything that I devote my energy to.”

The choice to commit to your best self confronts us at every moment

Commitment is a choice, and on a daily basis we are choosing to channel our commitment to our day, our self, our passions, our desire, all to something.

Often we choose to channel the power of our commitment outward. Again, nothing bad about this approach, simply this idea is to help us understand that on some level there is a conscious choice to give consent for something to take our energy nad potential of commitment.

Next,

What we see in the outer world in a constant stream of what other people have accomplished, or the types of lives that other people live.

For sake of this article, I will mostly be addressing what we see in social media separate from news, world politics, etc… because that is a complete other set of variable. Nonetheless, we see what everybody else has and we are inspired by that.

The trickiness of the scenario is that there is so much to be inspired by that we can actually become overwhelmed which leads us to dispersing our energy in a not-so-articulated kind of way. 

We get these Dopamine spikes that get us all jazzed to do something, then inevitably it just boils over and we lose drive.

 To drive this conversation specifically to the fear of commitment I will articulate a few real world examples that discourage us from committing to something meaningful.

Culture lacks the discipline of commitment.

In the space of creating lasting success through business, and helping others for example, most of what is projected is a sort of Get rich quick scheme where the literal marketing strategy is to convince you that this is foolproof and you don’t need to commit yourself to it to see results, a monkey can do it type of approach! 

From this story, we begin to believe that to become successful I don’t have to actually do anything noteworthy, or help other people, or even do anything at all.

The story that is created is that you don’t have to commit yourself to something meaningful to find success and to get rich.

This is a huge distortion that whether you consciously buy into the narrative or not is ancillary.

On some level, the existence and popularity of this projection and story seeps into our subconscious that informs us that we don’t need to anything worthwhile to achieve the results, “who cares about the process, its all about the end goal!”

Why do we have a Fear of Relationships and become scared of Commitment in Relationships?

A second example that aligns with this idea is through the sexualization of our culture especially in regards to things like social media and to the extremes of pornography 

The way that we have sexualized culture now makes it appropriate for us to engage extremely intimately with sexuality in a way that need not be backed by integrity and commitment.

Once more, there is nothing wrong with the idea in and of itself, this can be mutually liberated just as it can be deconstructive to one’s nature.

What I will elaborate however is the aspect of how this ties back to our relationship with the process as opposed to the end goal.  

Since now something like pornography is readily available to use, we no longer need to embody a sense of integrity, honor, and commitment to another human in order to express ourselves sexually.

We can just skip straight to the end goal of “sex” and experience that element immediately and then get back to our lives immediately thereafter, often feeling less fulfilled than before.

The case of the matter is that we have short-cutted the process to go straight to the end goal. 

Blend the distortions of pornography that seep into everyday culture and a new phenomenon occurs. The same jump straight to the outcome approach is more widely accepted, and at the same time that this can be a wildly transformative experience for many, it also poses some complications to our psychology and to our energetic selves. 

Primarily, since we can get results without much commitment to the process we can begin to focus less on the subtleties and emotions that are embodying in the details of creating relationships, and begin to focus more heavily on the physicality of our relationships.

This creates an imbalance to how we create meaningful relationships, so when, “things get tough,” or ,”things get weird,” we just move on to the next. 

IN this light, we are only allowing ourselves to experience the depth of life at a very shallow level. The second things may get too deep, we quickly jump to another spot and dig in just a little as well. This cycle can go and on and on. 

What these Result based conditions have created is a disincentivized structure wherein commitment to something deeper is not as readily rewarded culturally and psychologically. This creates a generation of men and women that are not encouraged to commit to lasting processes, but rather to chase something temporal to then only chase the next thing and the next. 

Now the fear of commitment aspect itself comes in.

Results Based thinking does not align with Commitment.

Due to the results based culture and economy, if we don’t see immediate results, we jump to the next thing and the next thing and the thing. We all do this, but that doesn’t mean you have to keep doing it.

When you commit to an approach more deeply, you are met with the awareness that “this commitment is narrowing the wide range of possible approaches in life down to this one approach.” 

That Realization is a daunting realization. However, that realization is also the portal to dimensions of life that you are actually seeking, you’ve just arrived at the scary moment where you have to go all in.  

And we are never taught to go all in.

We are taught that the second things get hard, we can just try something else, find another lover, or just quit. What these aspects are pointing to are the limiting beliefs that you are carrying that touch upon your desire for freedom. 

We often equate the commitment to a romantic partner as a, “loss of freedom,” or a commitment to live in a particular place as , “constricting,” and so on and so forth.

These are big examples but we can reduce them down to the way each individual uniquely perceives each situation. In a nutshell,

Why do we avoid commitment?

The commitment to one thing, eliminates the possibilities of many things.

 However, the commitment to one thing opens up doors you couldn’t see prior to your commitment.

Your commitment to one woman narrows the amount of women you will love romantically, but your commitment to that one woman will open a new door that amplifies that connection and the intensity of the romance.

Commitment amplifies your life.  

It expands your life, rather than constricts it.

The false narrative is that by committing to something, to someone, to yourself in a certain way, is limiting you and your potential. On the very surface level this is correct; however, one step deeper and we can begin to observe a wildly different perception.

Commitment is a process within your system of being that actually helps you become the type of person that lives to a deeper potential and can then therefore experience more of what you want to experience in life.

Commit narrows your focus down to a few key points, that you can then devote more intimate and articulate energy into these points which will then amplify those areas and correspondingly amplify other parts of your life.

Starting to see the social media example?

When we reclaim our energy and attention, we hold the power of choosing where to funnel it and where to make the most out of it.

Without commitment to channeling that energy in a certain way, it will likely never create something meaningful, even less likely that it will create the life that you know you want to life.

Commitment is your vessel to meaningful channel the energy of who you are in a system that will build the life you want to build.

Without clear direction, how will you ever live the life you desire and deserve? An archer cannot hit the target if the archer does not even know what the target is.

Overcoming the Fear of Commitment is your first step to finding deeper clarity in life.

This is why commitment is so important in today’s and age and also why it is so uncommon to see commitment glamorized.

Only the results are glamorized, but the true nature of all the process of being that goes into the end result is looked over.

When we begin to drop the desire of immediate gratification and focus on the delayed gratification of committing ourselves meaningfully to something deeper, then and only then we will experience new dimensions of what we though was possible.

So remember, that commitment is your doorway to amplifying your life. Any story that we associate with commitment as a loss of freedom, is merely a surface level story, told to us by our ego.

We always have agency to choose the story to identify with that will ultimately become who we are.

So if we begin to align with the story that commitment is for the embodiment of my best self, you will see how powerful commitment actually is, and how it will be the process to take you from where you are now to where you want to go.

Commitment is where you will find clarity on “the HOW” within your life, not, “the WHAT.”

Commitment will shine light on the process you need to take in order to create the life you know is possible, and it will teach you that the life you know is possible is not a result, nor a place it is a way of being.

love

_kev