Don’t go into the woods
Instantly Unpleasant
Let’s face it. If you could choose not to feel fear, you would skip it. The most ardent believers in positive affirmations would argue that most fears can also help us understand how to feel without fear. I would rather eat kale. My experience with fear ranges from the delusional to the highest desire to stay safe. You can pick your own range. I am not a huge user of affirmations unless they include the recitation of the words not now, oh no or a version of how come this is happening. My fears, when I take the time to examine them, can be mitigated a little but the examination does not usually occur until well after the knot in my stomach has already formed. I am afraid of fear.
Fear Not
Give me a break. As soon as someone tells me not to be afraid, I am. Just because some foolish endeavor doesn’t give a pal goosebumps, they think everyone is a weenie for not trying something frightening. I understand the universality of this feeling. It is instinctive. It is designed to keep us away from predators that might be looking for a light lunch, foods that might be tainted or people and situations that might cause us psychological harm. In light of those aspects, it is alarming that we trapse off to the houses of relatives for family celebrations. Your instinct kicked in to find an excuse not to go as soon as you remembered you had to go. For many of us post-pandemic babies, making up excuses to stay home includes a well-developed list kept on a doc on our computers.
The Alternative
This takes time to really sink in. You can craft an outer skin that can be used to fight some fears. First you must grab that journal and make a great list of all the crappy things that you have feared in the past. They didn’t all have to occur. They just had to pop into your mind as a fear thought. Remember that time you didn’t pay the electric bill on time and every time you saw the company trucks drive around your block you thought they were coming for you? When they didn’t stop at your house, you thought the crisis was averted. But you played the fear game. And then you quickly checked that you paid the bill. Parents live in fear even if their offspring are grown up. There is some kind of protective fear that gets installed at birth that continues to hum along at a low level throughout life just waiting to go off. You might call it a sixth sense. The outer skin will thicken when you read through that journal list and remember that time that somehow the angels were looking out for you and the worst did not happen.
Frighten Yourself
Sometimes adverse therapy works. Grab the journal again and write down all of the fearful stuff that you expect to happen in your future. This is way harder because that little vault of self-love inside of you knows that you haven’t fallen apart so badly to not be able to still breathe. Momentary fears are often repositioned as setbacks and later on become data on why you didn’t go through with something. Life is such a mystery. When you really define your fears, they seem tame. Black and white shots of fear inside your head are great for not making them seem real. We all know fear is very colorful. This month, try and frighten yourself. If you can decide what would rationally scare you, you can place a filter on it and create a way around it or devise a gameplan to eliminate it. This helps later on when you rewind the tape and reconsider what you could have done to get to a better result. Fear can actually make you less fearful. That seems like a good lesson to learn.
Do you know your first natural reaction when you face a fear? If you really consider your fears, what can you change to make them less likely?
