Free Yourself from Fears (5 page)

For example, hypochondriacs worry about their health, even though repeated doctors’ visits tell them there is nothing wrong.

Parents worry about their children being out late, although nothing has happened. Parental worry comes from love—parents love their children and do not want anything to happen to them—but worry is not useful. It does not help to keep the children safe, and it makes the parents feel bad. It also makes the children feel bad. They want to go out and have a good time, they take every sensible precaution, and if parental worry becomes too strong it can strangle the child’s freedom too.

We also talk about a dog “worrying” a bone, meaning biting it again and again. Worry has this repetitive quality. It is a form of self-harassment.

We will deal with worry in more detail in Part II of the book.

The key points about worry

Worry is usually fear of the future, like anxiety, but less intense.

Worry has a repetitive, circular quality; it goes over the same situation without resolving it.

You do not learn anything from worrying.

There is a lot of thinking, but no action.

Worry focuses on avoiding bad situations.

Social fears

Most unreal fears are specific and have specific remedies. Others are more general and pervasive. They come as part of the culture we live in. They are fed by the stories we read every day in the newspapers and see on television. These are “social fears.” There are many examples.

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FEAR—FRIEND OR FOE?

We live in a society that values performance and achievement, therefore many people are anxious about their performance and whether they are able to achieve what they want. Competition is more intense; there are more people for fewer opportunities, so the price of failure is much higher. This makes many people fear for their job and increases their performance anxiety. Many people are afraid of failing, especially when there is so much help in the way of ther-apy and training. This can make them feel worse: to fail in spite of all the available help seems inexcusable and ungrateful.

Many people, especially young women, are anxious about their appearance. Surveys report children as young as five who are dissatisfied with their bodies. Diet and nutrition books are bestsellers. Plastic surgery is becoming accepted and, in some professions, essential.

Fear of authority is another general social fear. Regardless of our personal experience with authority figures, the power of the state increased in most European countries after September 11th. There is much more public surveillance, so people are afraid of being observed simply going about their everyday business.

There is now a huge amount of information on every topic and knowledge seems to have grown exponentially. Enter a query in an internet search engine and you will get millions of helpful (?) responses. The sheer amount of information makes many people anxious. Is there something important they need to know? Are they missing something? The knowledge must be out there. This can lead to a general anxiety that permeates everyday life. We will deal with these more diffuse types of social fears in Part II of the book.

The key points about social anxiety

Social anxiety is unspecific, it is part of the culture.

It tends to focus on:

Performance.

Appearance.

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FREE YOURSELF FROM FEARS

Authority.

Achievement.

Time pressure.

Threats to national security.

Social reactions to fears

The response to fear has two dimensions—the individual and the social. The
individual
dimension is what you feel about your fear. You may be ashamed of it. You may think it is normal.

The
social
dimension is how other people perceive the fear. Many fears are socially acceptable. People are sympathetic about fear of heights, doctors, dentists, and air travel (they may share the same anxiety). In English culture at least, there is little social stigma attached to phobias or anxiety. Sufferers are thought to be unfortunate, but not to blame. A phobia does not inconvenience other people, and is not infectious. Other conditions like depression, mood swings, or obsessive-compulsive behavior have much more social stigma attached, perhaps because they can affect the lives not only of the sufferer, but of others who know them.

How not to deal with fear

In this book we will give many strategies to free yourself from fear.

There are other ways to deal with fear, which do not free you but instead enslave you more, until the cure is worse than the disease.

Authentic fear

First, what are bad reactions to authentic fear? Authentic fear can make you freeze completely, like an animal caught in the headlights.

This is caused by the fear reaction controlled by the amygdala. The 30

FEAR—FRIEND OR FOE?

positive intention is to stop you doing what you are doing so you can better attend to the danger. If you freeze and stay frozen, the result is the opposite of the intention. While you are frozen you can’t do anything, you are helpless. You have to
move
!

It is equally bad to panic. Panic is mindless action without a purpose. If you panic you may jump out of the frying pan, into the fire—you can get into even greater danger. You need your critical faculties.

You may need to
stop
and think once the immediate danger is past.

Anger is another possible reaction. I remember driving through a housing estate several months ago when suddenly three children aged about 12 shot across the road in front of me on their bicycles.

This was the popular game of “chicken”—wait for a car and let it get as close as possible before riding across the front of it on your bicycle. I put the brakes on hard, but I would have been too late, if my reactions were all that stood between them and the Accident and Emergency department of the local hospital. However, they had judged it nicely. They were across to the other side of the road as I screeched to a halt a few yards further on. I was very relieved I had not injured them; at the same time, I was very angry that they had put me in that position. I shouted at them, but they just laughed and rode off. I was shaking with anger. They were in more danger of violence from me than they had been of being hit by my car.

The same chemical substances are released in fear and anger.

However, anger needs to be controlled or it can lead to more trouble.

The best reaction to authentic fear is immediate action to get out of immediate danger, followed by critical evaluation and thought about the situation and what to do next—a balance of body and mind.

Unreal fear

There are similar bad reactions to unreal fear. You can freeze. This often comes out as “choking.” You feel helpless, a bad result seems inevitable, there is nothing you can do. Some people learn to react to anxiety with this kind of helplessness: they become passive, and do nothing to help themselves directly. Medical research has shown that this type of reaction can make you ill (see References).

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FREE YOURSELF FROM FEARS

Unreal fear can also make you panic. One of the worst things about fear is that it can wipe your critical thinking. Not only do you feel bad, but your state makes it hard to think rationally to deal with the situation. This is why you need to change your emotional state and feel better, regardless of the situation. We will be exploring ways to do this in Part II.

Anger is another possible reaction to unreal fear. It can be useful if it gives you energy to take action against the fear, or you refuse to tolerate the situation any more. Most of the time, however, anger clouds your judgment when you need to think clearly.

Guilt is a potential reaction. Guilt is the feeling that you are responsible for some wrong, real or imagined. It can also come up as a feeling of obligation for not pleasing or helping others, or having negative thoughts about them. It is usually associated with harming others, but it can be about harming yourself. Guilt is a form of self-punishment and is one of the most destructive emotions. Its positive intention is to force you to make reparation for the wrong.

Closely associated with guilt is shame. Shame comes from being aware of your own inadequacy, bad actions, or stupidity. Feeling guilty or ashamed of your fear is useless. It puts another layer of bad feeling on top of the fear. This is called a “meta state” in NLP, in other words a feeling you have about another feeling. It adds another layer of feeling on top of what you have and it makes you feel worse.

Never feel ashamed or guilty about being afraid, even if other people say you should be or try to make you so. Work instead to deal with the fear. There is a good reason for it once you understand it and with NLP you can resolve it. Shame and guilt are the opposite of understanding and never help you deal with fear.

Finally, some people react to unreal fear by projection. Projection means that you attribute your own feelings to someone else to defend yourself from the feeling. For example, a man who is afraid of going out and meeting new people may project the fear onto his wife. He does not go out because he says his wife does not want to go out. In reality his wife has no such fear. When you project fear, you cannot deal with it because you think it belongs to someone else. A very 32

FEAR—FRIEND OR FOE?

good rule is when you think that someone is afraid of something, look in your own heart to see if you are as well.

Bad ways to deal with fear

Authentic fear

Unreal fear

Freeze

Feel helpless (choke)

Panic

Panic

Anger

Anger

Guilt

Shame

Projection

Measure your fears

Here is a skill you can practice now. Below are some events or things that can be frightening, but do not threaten your health or wellbeing directly. Check which ones you are frightened of.

Skill for freedom

What are you afraid of?

Rate any of these that you are afraid of on a scale of 0–10.

A score of 0 means you are not afraid at all.

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FREE YOURSELF FROM FEARS

A score of 10 means you have a strong fear and will do your utmost to avoid the situation.

If the fear makes you avoid that situation, add another 10 points to your score at the end.

Darkness

Air travel

Meeting new people

Open spaces

Small animals

Spiders

Snakes

Blood

Elevators

Water

Confined spaces

Making mistakes

Heights

Being underground

Being on a boat

Driving a car or being a passenger

Thunderstorms

Nightmares

Losing a friend or loved one

Losing money

Not having enough money

Being caught up in a terrorist attack

Not achieving what you want

Change

Deadlines

Commitment

Public performance

Not looking your best

Others not mentioned

Score

_______

Unreal fear limits our lives. Later we will be exploring many ways to be rid of unreal fear. Without it, you will have a life of emotional freedom that is joyful and fulfilling.

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Fear

There is nothing more fearful than ignorance in action.

JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

WE DO NOT LEARN AUTHENTIC FEAR, but unreal fear
is
learned. This means that it can be unlearned. You entered this world with only three built-in, hard-wired fears: fear of falling, fear of abandonment, and fear of sudden loud noises. That’s all. You didn’t think about them at the time when you were an infant, but all are reasonable.

Falling and abandonment can be fatal for a baby. Few people remember their infancy—nature seems to erase the memories while keeping the learning—but for babies, fear is an intensely uncomfortable and painful experience. There are no words, just feelings, and they use the robust defenses that nature has given them. A newborn has a gripping reflex that will support their body weight. And babies cry, a sound that is almost impossible for an adult to ignore; it is uniquely compelling to make adults answer with love and comfort.

We hear in it the possibility of our own abandonment as it speaks to that basic fear buried in every adult and we hurry to quiet it.

Thunder or any loud noise retains the power to make us jump even as adults—we never lose the startle reflex (sudden tension in the shoulders, head pushed forward)—but then the feeling subsides.

Some adults are afraid of thunder, but usually we do not fear loud sounds when we get older.

Anything you were not born with, you must have learned.

FREE YOURSELF FROM FEARS

The seventh law of fear:

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

We learn all other fears by:

—Example.

—Trauma.

—Repetition.

—Information.

If you doubt this, remember how we teach young children road safety. They are not afraid of cars. Adults respect cars, but are not usually afraid of them when the cars are sitting lifeless in driveways or parked at the side of the road. However, we are very careful of them when they hurtle toward us at speed. Half a ton of heavy metal can kill you even when it is traveling slowly. Cars have killed more people than lifts, spiders, flying, and snakes put together. How is it that we are able to be reasonable about cars, yet may be afraid or phobic of lifts, spiders, flying, open spaces, and many other things that pose far less danger than cars? It has something to do with familiarity and control, but this does not completely explain it.

We learn to fear many more things in our lives than abandonment and falling. Show a baby a spider and he will probably try to eat it rather than start crying. However, if his mother or other adults around him react with fear to the spider, then so will the baby. Babies and children watch adults carefully and learn most things from them without being told.