17 Oct GET TO KNOW YOUR FEARS
GET TO KNOW YOUR FEARS.
LET’S TALK FEARS: GET TO KNOW YOUR FEARS.
I would like to discuss fears. What causes a fear? We know that we’re born with two fears: fears of loud noises and fears of falling. And how we see that is how we journey through life.
WHEN FEARS TURN UP
We create more fears as we progress through different stages of our life. Why is it that someone who drives normally today may fear driving in three years. Or someone who has journeyed all their life up and down elevators, and then all of a sudden have a panic attack in one. This then leads to fears and he or she can never travel in an elevator again (or for at least some time). Get to know your fears.
AIRPLANES
What about the person who constantly travels interstate on an airplane. All of a sudden realizes that they haven’t gone on an aeroplane for 10 years. And at all costs they have avoided getting on an airplane. When I say all costs. This means anything that involves flying. No holidays with family or children interstate. You would have to ensure that your job doesn’t require you to travel on an airplane. So there’s a lot of costs involved.
LEARNING AND UNLEARNING FEARS: GET TO KNOW YOUR FEARS.
It becomes interesting to know that a harmless cockroach that does not bite and does not kill, can actually cause an extreme fear response. And so I wonder what it is that sends that message to the brain. That we need to panic. I wonder what it is that we learn to fear. I also wonder what it is that helps us unlearn this fear. Get to know your fears.
What helps us unlearn? Do we really become so sensitive to something that we are afraid of, that, we teach ourselves to avoid it at all costs. And then we get used to living our life around our fear. We make huge renovations in our living so that we can avoid our fears. How inconvenient.
DON’T LET YOUR FEARS BOSS YOU AROUND
And our fear will govern if we are going to have a good day or not. Our fear will govern where we go and where we do not go. Why is it that some people are ready to face their fears? Get to know your fears. What happens when we tackle our fears.
We still feel afraid. We still feel anxious. But we still participate in the exposure so much that our body also learns to find its own calm whilst experiencing a fear response. And perhaps next time that you experience the fear response, it will take the body a shorter amount of time to reach calm. And this is how the pattern goes.
EXPOSURE
And in fact. That in itself is an improvement. So doesn’t it make sense, if you see elevators, and you are always taking this stairs, doesn’t it make sense to go in the elevator. Not just once. But 50 times in that one day. Believe me I know its not easy. In fact you may be thinking, its not POSSIBLE. But say you can, then you do.
And then go back to the next day and do the same thing again 50 times. Maybe the whole process will cost an hour. But that entire exercise is therapy. Therapy does not necessarily happen ‘in’ the therapists room.
HAVE A PLAN. FEEL THE FEAR AND DO IT ANYWAY
I’m going to say that the real therapy happens when you walk out and you have a plan. A plan to go up and down the elevator so many times per day that it becomes automatic and that fear response fades into the distance. I’m quite confident that there are many people that travel on airplanes with some fear, with some level of anxiety. And yet they still travel. They still have scary thoughts. And they still travel.
PREPARING YOURSELF
Some of them take something like a remedy beforehand, or do some hypnosis, or meditate or whatever works for them. But they still face their fear. I remember when my children were so small like 2 and 3 years of age, that I went on an airplane without them.
And that was my very first experience fearing flying. Logic tells me that I was afraid something would happen to me and my children were not going to have their mum. They were the scary thoughts for me. And that’s when I began to travel very frequently.
CHANGE YOUR PERCEPTION ON HOW YOU FEEL: GET TO KNOW YOUR FEARS
I feel I almost did this deliberately. You see, I wanted to change the feeling that I was flying with. I don’t think I knew this at the time. But I know it now. I’ve done that before too, with other things in my life. For example, my first ultra marathon was a horrible emotional experience so I knew I was going back to do it again the following year, so that I can have a different experience. Get to know your fears.
I began to see that a flying experience as a great opportunity to sit down relax, unwind, and have permission to do nothing. So I turned that into a luxury. I hear other people call it a waste of time because they’re just up in the air doing nothing.
FIND WHAT SUITS YOU
I don’t just sit and do nothing I actually take work that I can’t do on the ground because I always put it on the back of the pile. I take work with me that I need to read, the type that I never want to read. So I get it over and done with during the flight so that when I walk out of the plane I could just throw it away.
I remember one year on a long flight I took my whole course with me and I re-did it all. I used that time as revision. I’m so glad I did that.
So in some respect I make it productive. Further to this, I have enough education to know that flying is safe. I also allow a little bit of imagination because of all the horror stories I’ve seen in movies that I’ve watched with airplane crashes. I do what I need to do and I keep traveling.
GET TO KNOW YOUR FEARS: AND TAKE YOUR FEAR WITH YOU
Take on your anxiety. Whether I’m going to take some fear with me or not, I’m still going on my journey. I’ve watched kids come to me with fears, and all these fears have been created by imagination and stories.
KIDS AND FEARS
The most common one I must say, if I was to bundle them all up it’s mostly YouTube. Kids have a tendency to find the worst and fear provoking YouTube. So bad to their imagination that they become extremely afraid. And they take what they see as real and then they have discussions amongst themselves to make it even more real.
So I know that kids have a great imagination. This mostly can work against them. How do I help them overcome this? I use their great imagination of course.
THE RIDICULOUS FEAR
And help them turn their fear into something absolutely ridiculous. I watch the child giggle while they take charge of the fear. So they start to dismantle it. The greatest weapon quite often is a pen and paper.
I give them plenty of options /material that they need. They can use crayons, textas or pencils. They control how ridiculous they create it. And I watch the connection and the relationship they make as they giggle and laugh and they use their own inner resources.
What shook their voice as they told me their fear, now entertains their own thoughts with laughter. And they walk out telling me that they no longer feel that old fear.
WHAT FEAR? GET TO KNOW YOUR FEARS
They find themselves in a position where they can barely remember how fearful it was because they were so busy making it so ridiculously funny. Adults can do the same thing.
Except sometimes adults forget what it’s like to be a kid and act like one and therefore use the resources like they used once upon a time as a kid.
KIDS ARE TEACHERS
I’ve learnt a lot from kids.
Kids have amazing abilities. It’s just like the saying that we don’t need to complicate things, but rather make things simpler and we get the answer.
TAKE OUT THE CONTAMINANTS
It’s like when we have a complex diet and we have all these reactions; rashes, bloating, redness etc, we don’t complicate our diet even more, rather we take things out of our diet. Then we work on a solution.
Take out your scary thoughts and then you get rid of our unrealistic fears. NLP and hypnotherapy can help overcome fears and use courage to expose oneself to necessary tasking.
Amanda Dounis
Positive Thinking Clinic
1/7 Magdalene Terrace
Wolli Creek, 2205
0458 850 850
amanda@positivethinkingclinic.com.au