What Are You Afraid Of?

The Human Condition is such that, if we do nothing about it, our lives may be blighted by any number of irrational fears and phobias. (You’ll find literally hundreds listed on the Internet!)

As a child, we may fear the dark. As an adult, we may fear the unknown. As human beings, we appear to have a seemingly endless capacity to find different things to frighten us!

One of life’s ironies is that, as children, we frequently fear danger where there is none and at the same time, show no awareness of dangers which do exist and which may even be life-threatening.

Like stress, fear is not always bad. Frequently, it has a healthy, self-protective aspect to it.

It is all a question of degree, of ‘right-sizing’. Figuratively speaking, this means recognising a mountain as a mountain and a molehill as a molehill and not choosing ever to confuse the two, not even unconsciously.

One key to removing irrational fears and phobias is that they are no longer seen as a source of either guilt or shame. Value judgments like these simply keep the fearful person imprisoned in the problem.

This applies whether the sufferer is making the judgment or a third party.
What brings the solution closer is for the sufferer to take three important steps:

1. To acknowledge its existence - as a problem
2. To become fully willing to confront it
3. To take a series of simple actions to reduce it or remove it.

In my experience, fears and phobias always look a lot less threatening when we are able to bring them out into the light and look at them, together - instead of allowing them to remain lurking in the dark corners of your psyche, doing their damage.

So often in life, as Franklin D. Roosevelt once so wisely said: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”