Are hidden fears holding you back … without you realizing it? Once you’ve brought a fear to light, you can find ways to cope with it, live with it, protect yourself against it …But first you have to find it.
The clues to fear are when you find yourself saying: ‘Oh, I can’t; I do not dare; Should not; I do not owe; I couldn’t do that … I would feel so embarrassed … I wouldn’t know what to say … they’d think I’m stupid … I might not like it … I miss my usual routine too much … the meals … the environment. … ‘ You have many good, rational, and sensible reasons for all these doubts, of course. But most of the time, what lurks underneath is simply fear.
Fear is like pain. Nature developed it as an information system. When you come across a saber-toothed tiger, you don’t need to realize intellectually that those teeth can do quite a bit of damage. Run automatically. Fear prevents you from doing stupid things and mobilizes your energies to get you to safety.
When someone you love is in danger, when you find a bulge, when the plane falls a couple thousand feet … then fear is out in the open, operating the way it is supposed to. It’s horrible, but at least you are able to cope with it and find ways to cope or live with it.
Problematic fears are ones that we don’t face, maybe we don’t recognize or try to hide from ourselves, maybe we don’t even know. They stop us without our knowing why. When we get down to work, most of the barriers in our lives are created by ourselves. And most of the reasons we create these barriers is fear. Very often, those fears will not be sensitive and protective, but silly, artificial, essentially meaningless … based on a childhood hangover or a false assumption. But as long as the fear is hidden, you will never have a chance to find out how realistic it really is and put it in sensitive perspective.
How to find hidden fears
Hear your apologies. It is part of human nature to find good reasons for what we do, even when we are actually acting out of sheer instinct or thoughtless emotion. So fear tends to lurk behind a maze of rationalizations and excuses. This means that your energy is devoted to trying to deal with the excuses, rather than the fear that is causing them.
For example, you say: ‘Well I’m trying to get in shape, I want to lose weight, but …’? You don’t have time, your back hurts, eating well is too complicated, you are so hungry, exercise is so boring, life is not worth living without chips and chocolate …
If you try to deal with these excuses at face value, you probably find yourself playing the ‘Yes, but’ game:
You: ‘I can’t eat a low-fat lunch, everything in the canteen makes you fat.’
Friend: They must make a salad, can’t you eat that?
You: “Yes, but I’m still hungry and I can’t work properly.”Friend: Couldn’t you take something to work?
You: “Yeah, but I just don’t have time in the morning.”
Friend: Couldn’t you cook it the night before?
You: ‘Yes, but I have enough to make the family meal in the evenings …‘
And so on, indefinitely. Getting rid of one excuse only produces another. There is only one way out of this game, and that is to stop playing it. To simply say, okay, so I don’t want to do this. Why?
Let your feelings guide you. The helpful answer to WHY you don’t want to do something, why fear is stopping you, will always be not verbal or intellectual, but emotional. Take a few quiet moments to imagine yourself in the situation you are avoiding and open yourself to the feelings it produces. Allow yourself to react physically. Do you tense up, curl up in yourself, find yourself wincing in pain, feeling sick, clenching your teeth, clenching your fists? Read your own body language, and as often as not, it will tell you that underneath your excuses and reasons why not … is fear.
Be specific. Be VERY specific … scared of what? Don’t settle for a vague and abstract answer, but limit it to the details, so you can confront and plan. “Change is always scary.” Precisely what aspects of this particular change are terrifying, and why, and how could you deal with them? ‘I’m afraid of failing’ Exactly what could happen if you fail? Would it really be that terrible? What emergency plans could you make? ‘It could upset my family.’ What would they do? How would you feel if they did? How could you deal with your feelings and theirs? It would be terrible. Would the discomfort of giving up chocolate, missing your favorite TV show, sitting down and writing that overdue letter really, seriously, more than you can bear?
Fix those and it is. You and it is they are useful pointers to underlying fears. For each, ask yourself exactly what would actually happen. ‘What if … I get confused … I can’t cope … I’m the fattest person in the gym … I can’t maintain a diet … I fail the interview … they laugh at me They don’t like me, they reject me, they discover that I’m not really very good. ‘
So what would really happen, seriously, if …? Are you afraid that people will laugh at you? Will everyone you know really stand up pointing and taunting? It’s more like a nightmare on the playground than a sensitive adult worry. It could have been a valid fear when you were ten, but now? Are you afraid of failing? Everyone has failures and you know it. It’s not fun, but it’s not the end of the world. You cannot be successful without failing, and you certainly cannot learn anything without failing. And so on. Once you start analyzing them, you can convert your and it is within So what is it.
And once you’ve brought a fear to light, you can find ways to cope with it, live with it, and protect yourself from it. You can avoid being stopped without even knowing why.
But first you have to find it.
