Free Yourself from Fears (2 page)

This tells us a lot about fear. Something awful happens and we are afraid of what might happen in the future and afraid of putting ourselves in any similar situation.

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This book is about fear and how to be free from it. Fear comes in two very different flavors, unreal and authentic.

Unreal
fear comes from our creative brain making up frightening scenarios that have not happened and probably will not happen. My first goal for this book is to give you clear and practical patterns to get rid of unreal fears and worry.

There is also an insidious type of unreal fear that I am calling

“social fear.” This is a kind of free-floating anxiety. We are more anxious now; there is more to be anxious about. The world has become a more dangerous place, and the danger is closer to home.

While our popular culture of achievement and goal orientation has many benefits, it has drawbacks as well. We often feel that if we do not succeed, if we do not attain our dreams, if we do not have unlimited power and kick-ass self-esteem, there is something wrong—with us. We have failed. A general feeling of anxiety floats like a ghost in the wind and few escape its cold touch.

My second goal in this book is to get a better perspective on this miasma of cultural anxiety that disturbs our peace of mind, our sleep, and our digestion, and to propose some healthy antidotes.

A
uthentic
fear is a protective emotion. It is always in response to true danger in the present moment. My third goal for this book is for you to use authentic fear as a signal to keep you safe.

This is a practical book. As well as offering some specific antidotes to limiting fears, it will also improve the quality of your life, and this is my fourth goal. When you are free of unnecessary fear you will have an emotional freedom and sense of wellbeing that will resonate throughout your life. You will be able to get your life in focus and brush aside obstacles.

This is a much more
personal
personal development book than any of my previous work. In a book on emotions and personal development, the writer needs to be in the book too. So you will find many of my personal experiences described here, especially about moving from England to Brazil.

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FREE YOURSELF FROM FEARS

NLP

I am using many insights from Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) in this book. NLP was created by John Grinder and Richard Bandler in America in the mid-1970s and it explores subjective experience—what we think and feel from the inside. How do we do what we do?

How is it that some people are exceptionally skillful and talented while others, who seem to have the same knowledge and make the same actions, get only average results? NLP was originally used to model exceptional people to find out what they were doing differently, so that these skills could be taught to others. From modeling excellence, it is a small step to model how we do anything. How do we create fear? How do we learn to be afraid? How is it that some people are afraid and others are not? Because they have
learned
to be.

This does not make fear any the less real or frightening for the person who is feeling it. However, once we know how fear is created, then we have the key to free ourselves from it. NLP will allow you to unlearn your fears and free yourself from them.

You do not need any training in NLP to enjoy and use the book.

You will find the NLP concepts you need explained throughout the book when you need them. More general NLP reference material is at the end.

How the book is structured

Part I deals with fear—the two types of fear, where they come from, how they are generated, how we learn them and talk about them.

Part II gives immediate practical tools to free you from unreal fear.

A fear can be about the future, like the anticipation of a public speaking engagement that makes you feel increasingly uneasy as the fateful day approaches. Or it can be about the past, like a traumatic memory or flashback that makes you feel fearful in the present, restricts your life, and makes it difficult to be spontaneous. There are specific techniques to deal with many such common fears.

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There are two chapters on social fears, how they come about, and what to do about them. These give you ways to deal with the worry, stress, and free-floating anxiety that come from everyday living. There is a chapter on change—how to deal with the fears that can stop you making the changes you want in your life. Many times we want or need to take a step, but are afraid to leave the comfort of the habits we know. This chapter tells you how to start the change and manage the transition—that scary in-between time when you have neither what you had before, nor what you want. You are in the middle of the journey and cannot go back.

Part III deals with authentic fear: fear as a signal to keep you out of danger and take action, and how to distinguish authentic fear from unreal fear. This section will fine-tune your intuition, so that you will know for sure when you are in danger and avoid it. It will help to make fear a reliable friend who gives you fair warning, and not a gar-rulous bore who is forever crying wolf. This part also shows you how to recognize when other people represent a real danger. There is a chapter on how to use trust and intuition to stay safe, and one on how to evaluate risk.

Part IV is a summing-up and an explanation of how you can use the value behind your fear to combat it. There is a chapter on controlling the unpleasant feeling so that you can be more clear-headed and resourceful, whatever happens. There are also more tools for overcoming unreal fears, both individual and social.

This book is not just about getting rid of fear. It is about enjoying the happiness and emotional freedom of a life without unreal fears.

I hope you enjoy the book, I hope it is useful. Some fears deserve to be laughed at, some deserve to be ignored, others deserve to be respected, and you need to know which is which.

The Asian tsunami happened as I was finishing this book. On December 26th, 2004, a few miles beneath the floor of the Indian Ocean, an earthquake measuring 9.3 on the Richter scale, the most powerful for 40 years, spread over 700 miles on the floor of the Indian Ocean. It created a tsunami 10 meters tall moving at 560 miles per hour that flooded huge tracts of Indonesia, Thailand, India, and 5

FREE YOURSELF FROM FEARS

Sri Lanka, killing over 120,000 people and destroying the livelihoods of many thousands more. Once again, scientists will ask whether society should do more to prepare for such rare but catastrophic events.

It was another terrible tragedy for the people caught there, each with an individual story to tell of courage, loss, or destruction. This natural disaster and the manmade tragedy of the twin towers show us that although terrible things can happen, our spirit burns as strongly as ever, and each of us is a candle that can light other candles.

Together we can create a heat and a light that can hold the darkness from the door. We owe it to ourselves to do the best we can, to make our light as bright and as clear as possible. If this book can contribute to that in any way, then I will be happy.

To my partner, Andrea Lages, I owe more than I can say. She has supported me in every way and helped me through difficult transitions and many fears. I also want to pay my usual respects to Richard Bandler and John Grinder as the co-creators of NLP. Also to my edi-tor Nicholas Brealey, who helped me think the book through and improve it right up to the final draft. The music I especially enjoyed and was most likely to be playing while I wrote this book was by Mana (“Mulher de San Blas,” one of the saddest songs ever written), Santana (
Shaman
), Antonio Jobim, Robbie Williams, Damien Rice, and Sarah McLaughlan.

Joseph O’Connor

São Paulo, February 2005

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The nine laws of fear

1 Fear is a basic human emotion that has evolved to protect us.

2 Fear is a reaction to a mixture of a real outside event or trigger and the meaning we make of it in our imagination.

3 Behind all fear is a fear of losing something we value.

4 There are two types of fear: authentic and unreal. Authentic fear is a natural reaction to real and present danger. Unreal fear comes from our imagination.

5 The feeling of fear is always real—whatever provokes it.

6 All fear has a positive intention.

7 We are born with two basic fears: falling and abandonment.

We learn other fears by:

—Example.

—Trauma.

—Repetition.

—Information.

8 Fear can be enjoyable if:

—We believe that the situation is safe.

—We feel confident that there is no real danger.

—We know that the situation will end at a definite time.

9 We can talk ourselves into feeling afraid.

What Is Fear?

Fear is that little darkroom where negatives are developed.

MICHAEL PRITCHARD

WHAT DO WE MEAN BY FEAR? What does it mean to be afraid? Fear is a basic emotion that protects us. Fear is undeniable, that unpleasant sensation that arises when we think we are in danger. The danger may be real or imaginary. The word “fear” comes from the old English root
fer
or
fere
, meaning “danger,” or “coming suddenly upon.” It is interesting that the root of the word suggests there is danger that we are not prepared for. If we are prepared, then we may not feel afraid.

The word “fear” itself is an abstraction. The feeling comes from a process in the body that is triggered by something we see, hear, feel, touch, taste, or smell. And these sights, sounds, and feelings can arise from the outside world or from our imagination. Whatever the origin, fear is not something we have, but something we do.

The first law of fear:

Fear is a basic human emotion that has evolved to protect us.

Fear is not a pleasant emotion. It can range from a mild apprehension to a gut-wrenching, heart-pumping jolt that rises like a fiery volcanic eruption before congealing in the pit of the stomach like cooling lava. It rises immediately when we hear a bump in the night, or see an open window that we didn’t leave open. It can ambush us and make us act without thinking. You may be happily relaxing when you suddenly realize that you left your private FREE YOURSELF FROM FEARS

computer files in plain view at the office—before you know it, you have risen half out of your chair. Fear can also sneak up gradually, for example as that long-deferred visit to the dentist gets closer and closer, or that public speaking engagement that you agreed to in a moment of madness creeps up the calendar toward you like a snake.

As a rule, the more immediate the perceived danger, the more sharp, unpleasant and compelling the fear becomes. We move immediately. We act!

The two elements of fear

All fear has two elements. The first is a stimulus from the outside world. The second is the meaning we make of that stimulus and the imaginings we create about it.

The second law of fear:

The feeling of fear is a reaction to the mixture of: 1 A real outside event that acts as a trigger.

2 The meaning we make of it in our imagination.

These two elements can combine in myriad ways. Here are some examples.

The power of gravity

Imagine for a moment that you are walking alone in the country, thinking about nothing in particular. Dusk is falling and you almost stumble into a deep pit. You pull back just in time, jolted back to the present moment, your heart thumping. It all happens in half a second. The outside stimuli were the pit and your stumble; you feel 10

WHAT IS FEAR?

frightened, you were suddenly in danger of falling, perhaps of hurting yourself badly. Falling is an archetypal fear from infancy.

This is authentic fear. It is about a real, immediate danger and about something in the present moment. It is very useful: it saves you from immediate danger and possible injury.

You know the power of gravity, so you do not think twice: your body makes a decision to pull back before you are consciously aware of it. You do not wait, balancing with your foot poised over the blackness, intellectually debating the possibility of whether it is a good idea to fall down the hole or not—you act immediately. The imaginings come
after
you have taken action to avoid the danger. They usually follow too quickly to dwell on in detail—images of you falling into the blackness and hurting yourself. The meaning is: “Danger!

Take care!” After that come other thoughts: perhaps you resolve to pay more attention to where you are going when you walk in unfamiliar country in the dark. Then you may get angry that someone left a dangerous pit uncovered without a warning sign. Anger and fear are close relatives. In this example you stumble into danger, but you stay safe. The fear comes from the immediate stimulus and only after that from your imaginings of what might have happened.

A deserted alley

Here is another example. You are walking down a dark alley late at night when you hear footsteps behind you. You take a quick look around and see a powerfully built stranger swathed in a large black coat gaining on you with long strides. His face is partially hidden in the shadows.

You quicken your pace. But so, it seems, does he.

Now you start to feel apprehensive, you wonder why you are walking down a dark, deserted alley late at night. The alternative route is longer but better lit and more frequently used.

Thoughts run swiftly through your mind as you briefly debate the possible scenarios.

“I was stupid. How far is the other end of the alley? … If I started running now would I make it? … Suppose I started yelling? … That’s 11

FREE YOURSELF FROM FEARS

stupid. … He’s just someone walking down the alley going home like me. … Then why is he speeding up when I do? … Have I got anything that I could use as a weapon?”