We’re All Cowards

This blog contains two stories of courage. One I know is inspiring because it is Jeremy Renner’s experience of being run over and crushed on asphalt and ice by a 14,000 pound snowcat “grooming” machine, technically dying and then coming back from it all. What Renneer knew, before the event, and what I have learned is that courage would not exist without fear. In an evolutionary sense, then, the title of this blog is far from derogatory. Fear is what kept us alive for 300,000 years and our instincts are all fear-based. In fact all mammals have this at their core — but only humans struggle with it psychologically — and do we ever.  Every psychological affliction, from addiction to dissociative disorders to everything and anything in between starts with fear.  And in the world today with social media and current events, fear is spreading at a rate never seen before. So much angst pushed on us, intentionally crafted to grab our attention. Even in my professional realm, admissions, I have seen fear and anxiety far surpass what was once excitement and optimism. We can read not just about our plights, but with AI’s ascent approaching soon about ourselves at any moment. To quote musician Bo Burnham: "Is it necessary that every single person on this planet expresses every single opinion that they have, on every single thing that occurs, all at the same time?” It’s a horrific perfect storm — we have a negative human bias at the deepest level of our minds and we are now inundated by a world drowning in fearful messages.

But we also have courage, and more to this blog, we have a way out of any psychological pain. I mentioned my place in the realm of admissions, we do not have to be afraid of the admissions process because I have seen people excited by it. And these are most often those that puch above their numbers in admissions success. But to any person out there, we also do not have to be afraid of our own minds. Of our own demons. If, and here is the crux of it all, we are willing to compassionately confront them. I hope the beauty that comes with overcoming hardship is evident in Renner and my stories, and more importantly, I hope that you also see that our psychological maladies, no matter how bad they may feel at times, can be overcome.

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When I was young I went through a period of incredible introversion around others. Classmates would invite me to birthday parties or sleepovers and I would often lie to them and say my parents wouldn’t allow me. Even more to how intense this fear was for me, I once dove into (you’d think survival fear alone would have stopped me from doing that) and hid in bushes just so I wouldn’t have to walk past and say “hello” to a group of kids from my grade I saw approaching. Why? Because I was afraid of the possibility that they would reject me. Or anyone would. The opposite of rejection, of course, is acceptance and I needed acceptance because I believed I was unlovable. This belief system was due to abuse I had suffered from a family member — but the point of this blog isn’t the trauma that abuse causes, in my case what’s known as "complex trauma” as it has lasted a lifetime and attempts of abuse from the same person continue to this day, but that its consequences don’t have to be permanent, but that we can shut it down. At anytime, including right now, between stimulus and response there is choice, said Viktor Frankl in one of the best-selling books of all-time ‘Man’s Search For Meaning.’ And in that choice we can let go of trauma. It has been liberating to me to completely shed this and one of my life missions is to now help others do the same.

Back to my choice to be free from fear. The first came around middle school. Someone new to town asked me just a week into being at our school why I never talked to girls. I fumbled with an answer and felt great shame at having been asked this by a stranger. To this day I can remember the feeling and it is too horrible to find the right words. But within that self-loathing, it planted a seed of introspection. Soon after, someone else moved to town, a friend of mine to this day named Henrik, who within a week girls wanted to hug and who had many more friends than I did. I was taking this all in. Gathering information is what Jeremy Renner aptly calls it (and using fear to take in information saved Remner’s life). 

Call it an inflection point or whatever fits best, but one night I went to bed and made a vow to myself:

I would become outgoing the very next day. 

And  amazingly, even to myself, I did just that. I sat with people at lunch and a bit later, and I will never forget this, I went to the table of “cool kids” and sat with them. They didn’t want me there and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t care. It was horrible, because I wasn’t accepted. But I stayed right there and talked my share. I built up resilience by doing so. I overrode my fear.

What happened? After that lunch I slowly started believing in myself. And everything began to change. I was voted captain of my freshman football team. Then on to captain of varsity football, baseball and track. I made friends. I started dating girls and out of that came my first love, an extraordinary person who is one of my closest friends to this day who inspires me to write blogs like this because of her courage. I was admitted to the vast majority of colleges I applied to and ultimately attended Vanderbilt University. If that sounds not particularly noteworthy consider this. There were many people 10 times more intelligent than me in my grade, in fact probably the majority. There were far more natural leaders. There were much better athletes. But self-confidence is an amazing thing and it perpetuates its own growth. You succeed at one thing and the next becomes much easier. Because I believed in myself, my life unalterably changed for the better.

But the story doesn’t end there. I developed an incredible belief in what’s called “performance-based esteem” because I had finally started performing (before high school I was always last to be picked on sports teams, second to last at most field day events, and below average in all my classes). People who have known me since high school would almost undoubtably say they see this performance-based belief in me. Throw a task at me, e.g. interviewing our nation’s 5th ever CIA Director and former 4 Star General David Petraeus (which I can officially announce I’m about to do on my podcast) and I don’t get an ounce of nervousness, because it is simply a task.

But hardly anyone who knows me could tell you the following. For the first 40+ years of my life I maintained that belief system that I was unlovable. Which I’ve learned now is quite natural. When you have complex trauma it takes many years of growth to overcome, and I needed a lot of growing. More than most. There are five kinds of childhood trauma and two are physical abuse and neglect. What people who know even all five often still don’t know is this; that if you have the first you suffer from the second. If are are chronically abused and your parents aren’t there to stop it (in my case simply because they were at work and only saw it on occasion not on a daily basis) you suffer from neglect. The two always, and I mean every single time, go hand in hand. As your subconscious mind says “If my parents aren’t stopping this I must be unlovable.”

So the incapability of feeling as if I deserved love remained. Which is no way to live life. So, after a breakup with someone who I deeply loved (and do to this day) I asked myself "where is the information in this?” And the answer was that she had loved me off the charts too, and if she did, then I must be lovable and something oxymoronic was going on inside me. How can I objectively know this to be true but my subconscious mind does not believe it? I didn’t know a thing about complex trauma but I knew I needed help. So I turned to therapy and in therapy I was able to undo 40+ years of complex trauma. I was able to see myself as capable of being loved.

I have an entire book coming out “We’re All A Bit Messy” that tells how much good this did and has done for me, suffice to say it’s much better than being voted captain of a sport team. When you love yourself you become nearly incapable of feeling rejected; you just see rejection as information. I’ll sum up how life feels in one word: “liberation.” Not always. Not every minute of the day. But it’s as if I spent 40 plus years gasping for every breath hardly able to take a single one in, and now it’s almost all pure oxygen. Which brings me to Renner and his "next breath.’

In many respects Renner had a normal childhood, but he had an extraordinary feature for a child: He was introspective at an early age (for most people this doesn’t occur until their mid twenties or 30, if ever.) He recorded in writing, for decades, his every fear. Because he saw fear — be it of rejection or of snakes or whatever — as giving him information. And he wanted to take it all in so that it would never stifle him.

At a young age he was in the passenger seat of his family car unbuckled and his mother, driving, was hit by another vehicle. Renner smashed the windshield head straight into the hard glass with full force and his mother, quite understably, went into fear-based hysterics. On seeing this Renner said to himself in so many words, “the accident and injury have already happened. No amount of emoting and looking backward will help me. So if I am to be okay, I need to stay calm going forward.” And he did.

Over many years, Jeremy Renner became so adept at turning fear into moments of courage that he finally stopped writing his fears down. But he retained the skill. Which brings us to the miraculous inspiration of his book “My Next Breath.” On January 1, 2023 in a freak accident Renner was run over by a 14,000 pound PistonBully. How big is that? Larger than 3 cars running over you at the same time, and with galvanized treads. Think tank-like. Here’s a picture.

In essence it ran over him not once, but six times. As there are six wheels that attach to the treads. So he was crushed one after another — six times in all. As he lay dying, he was mostly conscious (until he technically died). Yet despite the pain of over 32 extensive injuries and the fact he could not breathe, he remained calm. He had information and that was all he needed: “I need to find a way to breath.” Somehow he was able to turn a few angles to a position that may have opened up the tiniest of breath, after which he used some of his vocal training and acting skills to form near words. Not really words but enough to form gasps of air. I won’t tell the full story it is, of course, infinitely better coming from him in his book I’ll simply plug his book (full disclaimer: I do not know Jeremy Renner and can’t imagine I ever will).

Life offers blessings disguised as pain, and if any of this sounds like victimization to you, it is not. It is the opposite. I am not a victim. Jeremy Renner, run over by a snowcat, is not a victim. We both feel blessed. Somehow my childhood, so incredibly beautiful at times and yet also with exposure to unpredictable physical abuse (and because life is so complex, some of the beautiful memories comes from the same person who abused me), had me always wanting to ask “why?” To look inward. When I finally did I discovered that what is true about you is true about me and everyone else. We may all be born wired to hate rejection (we hate rejection for the aforementioned fear-based evolutionary reasons that kept us alive, we just don’t need it now that we don’t travel in packs of which being kicked out of meant death. Rejection is an evolutionary echo that is a false positive. It isn’t real) but we are more importantly all worthy of love. Renner, when he was technically “dead” puts it in these words, his book which is an amazingly inspiring read can be found here:

“Anybody could have gone through what I went through—perhaps not the exact incident I had, as I will always believe it was a complete one-off, a cosmic fluke—but people have catastrophic accidents all the time. The exact coordinates of the disaster matter not, it's what one does with the information that comes with the experience that matters. And if, like me, someone has faced their death head-on, what's learned in those moments should cajole us into living our time more fruitfully on this planet. And that's a lesson for all of us, not just those of us lucky enough to have come back from the dead

Dying I learned the futility and temporary nature of hatred, ranged as it is against the permanence of love. Though fear and hatred are the flashiest and sometimes the most powerful human emotions, they are merely the hare facing off against the tortoise of love. Love slowly, quietly, and patiently waits for hate to simply burn out. It requires so much more energy to hate than to love, and love has all the time in the world.

The only way love wins is across a span of time—-it’s not an instant fix to anything, but it always wins. Let's imagine that you've hated somebody in your life-we all have at some point. Years later, do you still burn with that hatred? Probably not. It's pretty much impossible to hate so passionately across a span of many years; hate burns hot and fast, it’s flashy, and it can seem like the purest answer to injustice…but hate and fear burn out—they can't win in the end. And after death…hate won't outlive anyone-only love can do that.”

So my message is this. Love will win. Near death after near death accounts say the following all the time. Many people, across many cultures who have had no chance of ever hearing of one another report being asked two simple questions: “How Much Did You Love? What Did You Learn?” If you want to see someone who hates for their entire lifetime, including sadly themselves, you can spot these people a mile away; they always play the victim and are incapable of seeing the miracle of love in life. But if you are reading this story, odds are you have grown a ton and/or are seeking growth. Which means you are going to find the love Renner alludes to. And love starts with love of self, this is what any self-help book you pick up will always get to. You are going to love yourself, you may already have discovered this, and if not it can start today. Yes we are “all born cowards” per se — so often too fearful to look deeply inward at our past. But try this. Just breath, deeply, and make a vow to yourself to work at it. Renner is an extraordinary person, for certain, but know that if I can do it, anyone can. Which means so can you.

Mike Spivey

We are our own griefs. We are our own happinesses. We are our own remedies.