How can we respond to difficult issues when fear makes us want to step away?

I feared becoming a therapist. A client's story during graduate school shook me so much that I convinced myself I wasn't cut out for direct care and that I could only do "real work" at the systems level. However, someone close to me saw through it. The parts that lit me up were the individual stories, the direct conversations, and the evidence, which I can channel through this newsletter and through therapy work, too.

In many ways, I realized my reasoning was fear-based, and I'm learning that fear-based decision-making can often falsely signal safety. I was mainly focused on two fears: Could I avoid becoming an ableist healthcare worker like so many of the stories I heard about? Could I handle tough stories without taking them home?

So this week's challenge is: How can we respond to difficult issues when fear makes us want to step away?

Honest Story

Lester Bennett was 19 when a gunshot wound injured his spinal cord after someone attempted to rob him at the South Hills Junction station in 1994. During his rehabilitation, healthcare providers taught him life skills, including how to cook and how to navigate the world in his wheelchair. But there was one conversation they avoided entirely: relationships. The stigmatizing assumption that people with disabilities cannot be in relationships significantly impacted his rehabilitation. "That discussion was delayed, so it delayed my growth," Bennett said. "I had to learn it myself … learn from the streets." Fear made providers step back from a difficult conversation, and in stepping back, Bennett was left to figure out one of life's most fundamental experiences alone, which had layered consequences.

Yet Bennett didn't let that gap define him or stop him from leaning into the conversation. Using his degree in rehabilitation science and lived experience, he now works as a patient care coordinator to make sure "no one else goes down the same path." He says: "As an advocate, I want people to recognize that you don't know everything … [and] as a clinician, you have to listen to your patient." What can we learn? Healthcare providers cannot grow without risking the uncomfortable conversation. And the disability community cannot be strengthened if we stay silent about the gaps.

Rigorous Learning

Most people hold negative implicit stereotypes of people with disabilities as incompetent and cold, yet people often don't realize they hold these beliefs (Antonopoulos, 2025). These biases are subconscious. When we stay silent about disability, or we conflate "listening" with "responding without action", we can send a message through that distance: that disability is uncomfortable, that it's something we don't need to prioritize understanding or discussing (Antonopoulos, 2025).

Implicit biases are so deeply embedded that we don't realize we're enacting them. Researcher Tessa Charlesworth noticed this only after studying disability bias for six years. "For a long time, I took that for granted and didn't think it was a problem. That's how implicit bias becomes baked into our environments and can create these associations of who seems to be welcomed or valued." Our biases don't just live in our heads; they're constructed into the spaces we build, the conversations we avoid, and the people we exclude subconsciously (NSLS, 2022).

These biases, while difficult to break, are not unchangeable. What changes them is awareness and the willingness to step into the discomfort. Sometimes that discomfort comes from confronting our own mortality when we encounter disability. Sometimes it's simply the unfamiliarity of a conversation we've never had. Either way, awareness of how bias gets baked into our environments is the first step toward building something different.

Work of Art

Frida Kahlo's The Broken Column (1944) depicts her disabled body with nails piercing her face and body and a broken column replacing her spine. Yet Kahlo paints herself looking straight ahead at the viewer, inviting us to look at her and face her disability.

Kahlo could have hidden her chronic pain and disability. Instead, she made it visible and impossible to ignore; she confronted what her audience might have wanted to step away from: the reality of living in a disabled body. Frida chose to express her own pain and suffering through art even if it was heavy to observe.

This is what happens when we stop choosing distance: it becomes less heavy to observe because we recognize that pain is a part of life. We are all temporarily non-disabled. When Lester Bennett speaks up about the conversations healthcare providers avoided and when Frida paints her broken column, they're refusing to disappear. They're making their lived experience known by stepping into it, challenging assumptions, embracing what's often avoided, and sharing their stories. They're addressing parts of themselves, including struggle, pain, and mortality, that we can choose to avoid because we may not be disabled, may not be dealing with a condition, or are conditioned to only focus on the good. We may not know how to sit with struggle, so we step away. We're forced to confront not just their reality, but our own fear: what it means to be human and the potential for experiencing disability in our own lives.

Practical Experiment

This week, notice one assumption you hold about disability: an assumption so automatic you rarely question it. It might be: disabled people should be "fixed," people should hide their pain, conversations about disability are unnecessary or sad, or disability means someone can't contribute. Write it down. Then ask yourself: Where did this assumption come from? Who benefits from me believing it? What would change if I let it go?

Here's where I'm challenging assumptions in my own life: I don't identify as ableist, and I know I won't be the perfect therapist or disability advocate. Yet I will do things that are able-bodied in their logic because I'm not conscious of them yet. The only way I learn is by stepping in anyway. By having the conversation, by learning from perspectives different from mine, by asking questions I don't know the answers to. By being willing to get it wrong and adjust. By stepping toward through observation.

You don't need to replace your assumption with something perfect or fully formed. You just need to notice it. Awareness is where the distance begins to close. When we examine our assumptions rather than act on them automatically, we create space for a different response: one that might actually honor someone's lived experience rather than protect ourselves from it.

Reflection

When have you stepped back from a difficult conversation because you were afraid? What were you afraid of for yourself or for the other person? What might have been possible if you'd stayed?

Next Week's Challenge

How can we act when we don't have enough information?