My Journey Working through the Fear of Man

Do you struggle with the fear of other peoples’ opinions, not getting their approval or being rejected? Are you finding that your perspective and your decisions are being clouded by a fear of what other people think? You may be wrestling with the influence of the fear of man.

If recognize you struggle with the feaar of man, first, let me first say, welcome to being a human being. But let me also say, you may realize that this fear is getting in the way of you making firm and powerful decisions. It can have a paralyzing impact.

But freedom is found not through pure grit and force, but by getting to the root system and heart that drives the fear of man. Healing and freedom is possible to walk through this obstacle. I will be very honest in sharing my journey. This teaching is built from Scripture, my personal experience and decades of helping others–all what I’ve learned about how to work through the fear of man in effective ways.

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Breaking Through the Fear of Man

Personal confession: I found myself struggling with this over and over in my life and journey. And if you find yourself up against this, you are not alone.

Many people throughout Scripture had to face this issue.

I think everyone has to deal with it. So if this struggle rings true with you, you are not alone.

Defining the Fear of Man

A fear that

magnifies the opinions, approval, reactions, and possible rejection of people with intimidation
in a way that It governs and dictates your sense of identity, thought patterns and decisions, overriding what is healthy, needed and based on God’s truth.

The fear of man gives people power over your inner world that they were not meant to have.

The fear of man shows up in many forms:

The fear of man doesn’t always look like obvious and overt cowardice.
It can show up in people-pleasing, appeasing, avoidance, double-mindedness and passivity.

NOTE: It is important to know that the fear of man is not the same thing as people pleasing or social anxiety. The fear of man specifically attacks your perspective and ultimately how you make decisions.

What the Fear of Man Produces:

Chronic anxiety and hypervigilance — constantly reading the room, monitoring others’ moods, and bracing for disapproval.
A rejection mindset and preoccupation with what people think — magnifying, anticipating and projecting disappointment and rejection that may not even be there, then treating the projection as reality
Indecisiveness and passivity — losing confidence in your own judgment and decision making because you’re waiting for others to signal it’s safe to move
Compulsive people-pleasing — saying yes when you mean no, diluting the truth to manage reactions, performing to maintain approval
Avoidance — of conflict, confrontation, hard conversations, and any situation where disapproval is possible
Loss of voice and identity disconnect — shrinking your opinions, purpose and values to fit what others will accept . . . losing a sense of who you are.
Disorientation, discouragement, and depression — the cumulative weight of living for others’ approval rather than from God’s truth
Resentment and self-pity — angry toward the very people you’re trying to please; you give them power over you and then quietly resent them for having it, then fall into self-pity and self-loathing over your circumstances or lot.
Exhaustion and burnout — the energy cost of constant self-monitoring is enormous and largely invisible until it collapses
Spiritual stagnation — your growth gets stuck, because avoidance of needed steps is not taken, and fear grows . . . growth calls for us to walk through our fears and at times, working through disapproval or people not liking you.

Mental Health and the Fear of Man

The fear of man operates as a threat-detection system for our nervous system. When we’ve experienced rejection, shame, or disapproval (especially in formative relationships) our nervous system learns to treat social disapproval as the greatest danger. What begins as a relational wound becomes a full-body alarm system that fires whenever we anticipate someone being upset with us.

It’s like a surveillance system kicks in, where we are trying to monitor what people are thinking. Those who have deep fear of man struggles can go into predicting and anticipating potential rejection or disapproval. Their mind maps out a dreaded outcome, as though:

It will definitely happen
That the impact of experiencing it will be catastrophic

Everyone experiences the influence of the fear of man. It’s not about whether it comes against you, it is more about, “Does it dictate your perspective and your decisions?”

What Makes Us Vulnerable to the Fear of Man?

While we all deal with fear of man in a variety of ways, these kinds of “setups” can make us more vulnerable to its impact:

Early Childhood Wounds and Family Dysfunction
- Growing up in a home where a parent’s mood was unpredictable — you learned to read the room and manage emotions to stay safe
- Having a parent whose love felt conditional on performance, behavior, or achievement
  - Note: A strong bond, unconditional love and affirmation in the home fills the tank to combat the fear of man’s influence.
  - JESUS Himself experienced the Father’s approval – “this is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased”
- Being raised by a highly critical or perfectionistic parent where disapproval was frequent and stinging
- Growing up with a parent who was emotionally volatile — their anger or disappointment felt threatening to the whole atmosphere of the home
- Being the child who was responsible for keeping the peace in a chaotic or conflicted family system
- Having a parent who was themselves deeply people-pleasing, modeling that others’ opinions are what determine your worth
- Complex Trauma/Neglect
Peer pressure
- Teenage years: if you don’t have a strong bond and family system at home, it can make you even more vulnerable to the pressures at school or community to violate healthy values.
- The fear of man will teach us to compromise our core beliefs under pressure.
Unhealthy Cultural Values
- Disapproval as a main driving force in the organization.
- Disagreement automatically means removal of relationship.
- That submission and humility means you never speak.
Painful Relationship Experiences
- Humiliating experiences — being called out, mocked, or embarrassed in front of others, especially during formative years
- Significant rejection — a friendship, romantic relationship, or community that abandoned or excluded you.
- Harsh and painful criticism (Mark example: Making a Music CD)
- Betrayal by someone you trusted
- Abuse
Painful Church and Ministry Experiences
- Performance-based faith culture where God’s approval tracked with everyone else’s approval
- Culture of intimidation
- Spiritual abuse — where leadership used shame, control, or fear to maintain compliance
Challenging Leadership Experiences
- Being in visible public ministry where criticism is constant and public
- Leading people who are themselves highly reactive or demanding
- Church decisions can easily bring out people who disagree and stop serving, stop giving or even leave. (So this puts a lot of added pressure on leaders to overthink decisions and feed this fear.)
- Being falsely accused
- Having gone through a ministry conflict, church split, or public accusation — even if unjust — that made disapproval feel catastrophic
- A position where your livelihood, platform, or community depends on approval.
Personality and Temperament Factors
- Highly empathic or sensitive temperament — you feel other people’s emotional states intensely, making disapproval physically uncomfortable
- A strong desire toward harmony and relational peace that gets hijacked by fear. (Become a people pleaser, appeaser or peace keeper)
- Over-Conscientious: caring so much about doing things right, but it gets tied into everyone approving.
- Caring deeply about doing things right, which makes criticism feel like a core identity threat
- Anxious attachment style — developed in early relationships, producing a chronic fear of abandonment or rejection
Personal flaws and limitations
- Imposter syndrome
- Not feeling educated enough or feeling qualified enough
- Mistakes of the past
- Personal health limitations or flaws (how your voice sounds, how you look, etc)
Patterns That Developed Over Time
- A pattern of being the one in the room that “holds back” . (in meetings, I would often ask the ones who didn’t say much to speak, but many times they had a lot to offer)
- A long history of avoiding conflict — which compounds because each avoidance reinforces the belief that you cannot handle disapproval
- People-pleasing that “worked” — meaning it actually reduced tension and kept relationships stable, which rewarded the behavior and made it harder to stop
- Living in close proximity to a chronically angry, critical, manipulative or controlling person over a long period of time
- Never having a safe relationship where you could disagree and still be loved, so conflict always carried the threat of total loss
Lack of experience or practice with tough decisions
- Truth is, we can easily fear what we don’t have experience with. So we become vulnerable to projecting dread and the thought that we cannot handle someone disliking us or disapproving of us.

Key in mind, despite all that we carry in our lives and history, GOD STILL USES US!

Two Main Wounds:

Wounds that taught us disapproval is dangerous
Environments that trained us to manage others’ emotions as a survival strategy.

Most people struggling with fear of man have both running simultaneously.

OCD and the Fear of Man:

For those with OCD and scrupulosity — the fear of man doesn’t just influence behavior. It becomes fuel for the obsessive cycle itself.

The OCD mind is anxiously hijacked for threat detection and worst-case projection. So the fear of man hands it a constant supply of material:

What did they think of what I just said?
Did I offend them? Did I come across wrong?
What if they’re upset with me and I don’t know it?

Reassurance-seeking, one of OCD’s most common compulsions. is often the fear of man in disguise. The person isn’t just seeking certainty; they are seeking approval, and they need it repeatedly because it never fully satisfies.

Fear of man can sneak into the compulsive ways OCDers seek to make sure they are “ok” with other people, through compulsive forgiveness requests, apologizing or overtalking obsessions. OCD engages social interactions with a heavy weight or moral pressure, fueling compulsive interaction review and temptations for compulsive fixing.

The intrusive thought for someone with OCD and fear of man is not just that someone might not like me, it becomes “I may have done something wrong, hurt someone, or failed them,” which triggers toxic guilt, shame, rumination and compulsive attempts to fix or undo.Avoidance is already a major aspect of OCD, but it gets reinforced by the fear of man, fueling anxious overthinking and dread-filled projection. It can drive the world of an OCD struggler to make their world smaller as more and more situations carry the threat of disapproval.

What I Am NOT Going to Tell You:

Freedom is a light switch experience.
That the solution is a militant one to psyche yourself up.
That breaking through the fear of man means becoming a steam roller.
That you have to be a loud and boisterous person.
That breaking through the fear of man means you ignore healthy council or correction.

My Personal Journey

In the video and podcast, I share a bit of my journey working through the fear of man in various stages.

Two Phases of Working through the Fear of Man:

Phase 1: THE SNOW PLOW APPROACH: I spent many years plowing against the fear of man like a giant slow plow, burrowing its way through everything with brut force, often with a deliverance emphasis, but also with a focus on trying to make these feelings go away.

Phase 2: THE COMPASSIONATE GRACE APPROACH: allowing God’s love and approval to have a deeper work and learning to ACCEPT the reality that people will not like me, understand me or agree with everything I say.

What the Scriptures Say About the Fear of Man:

Proverbs 29:25 The fear of man brings a snare, But whoever trusts in the LORD shall be safe.

Jeremiah 1:8 Do not be afraid of their faces, For I am with you to deliver you,” says the LORD.

2 Timothy 1:7 For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power, love, and a sound mind.

Isaiah 51:7-8
7 “Listen to Me, you who know righteousness,
You people in whose heart is My law:
Do not fear the reproach of men,
Nor be afraid of their insults.
8 For the moth will eat them up like a garment,
And the worm will eat them like wool;
But My righteousness will be forever,
And My salvation from generation to generation.”

Isaiah 51:12-13 (NKJV)
12 “I, even I, am He who comforts you.
Who are you that you should be afraid
Of a man who will die,
And of the son of a man who will be made like grass?
13 And you forget the LORD your Maker,
Who stretched out the heavens
And laid the foundations of the earth;
You have feared continually every day
Because of the fury of the oppressor,
When he has prepared to destroy.
And where is the fury of the oppressor?

John 12:42-43
42 Nevertheless even among the rulers many believed in Him, but because of the Pharisees they did not confess Him, lest they should be put out of the synagogue;
43 for they loved the praise of men more than the praise of God.

Galatians 1:10 For do I now persuade men, or God? Or do I seek to please men? For if I still pleased men, I would not be a bondservant of Christ.

Psalm 118:6 / Hebrews 13:6 The LORD is on my side; I will not fear. What can man do to me?

The Jezebel Factor: the Fear of Man Gets Weaponized

(1 Kings 18–19 — The Story of Elijah)

The Setup: Elijah has just called down fire from heaven, executed the false prophets, and broken a three-year drought. He is at the peak of one of the most dramatic spiritual victories in the Old Testament. And then a single threatening message from Jezebel sends him running into the wilderness wanting to die. Sometimes all it takes is one sentence to drive someone to completely lose perspective.

What Jezebel represents: Jezebel is a biblical archetype for a controlling and intimidating presence that uses fear and manipulation to shut down God’s purposes. “She” targets people at their most vulnerable moment — often right after a spiritual ttriumph — and deploys the fear of man as a weapon.

The four effects on Elijah — and on us:
1. We become manipulated
2. We become disoriented
3. We become passive.
4. We become depressed

What Helps the Journey of Freedom:

Get honest about recognizing where the fear of man has held you back.
Get out of shaming yourself for this.
Get to the heart of the issue.
- 1 John 4:16 NIV And so we know and rely on the love God has for us.
- 1 John 4:17-19 (NKJV) 17 Love has been perfected among us in this: that we may have boldness in the day of judgment; because as He is, so are we in this world. 18 There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves torment. But he who fears has not been made perfect in love. 19 We love Him because He first loved us.
Recognize the fear of man is a false alarm, not a true threat.
Practice facing your fears one step at a time.
Acceptance: Accepting that not everyone will like you, love you, affirm you or validate you.
Connecting to the value of what is gained when we face our fears
Practice making decisions and acting on them.
Anchor yourself in God’s love and approval.
Encourage others to face their fears and experience growth!

Romans 8:31 — “If God is for us, who can be against us?”

Where in your life do you recognize the fear of man operating most strongly?

What are you currently avoiding because of fear of disapproval?

What might be gained — in your relationships, your calling, or your walk with God — if you faced that fear?

Empowering You to Live Healed and Free