One of the turning points on my road to recovery was facing my fears. First, I gathered the courage, strength and energy to face them. The ancient knowledge of where fears come from helped me.
With the help of the fears explanation, I have greatly reduced feelings of shame, guilt, helplessness and the like, because I realised that I simply had no choice about them – I had picked up the fears, along with other beliefs, from my family environment.
Of course, this is no excuse for my current thinking and actions. I have all the possibilities and conditions to change my own beliefs. I just have to decide and act.
Where fears come from
Deep down, most of us are looking for the following:
- love (in the sense of being accepted by those around us),
- a sense of security,
- knowing that we are cared for.
This search is driven by deep-seated fears.
At the bottom, there is always the fear of death, manifested through the desire to survive, or the fear of lack, of failure. We believe that we need specific things, attitudes and activities in order to survive. We don’t usually get to the fear of death because it is covered by other layers. But we can perceive that it is hidden underneath through the other fears that come from it.
Thus, the fear of scarcity manifests itself in two forms, passive and active:
- Passive form: creating social ties. Fearing abandonment or ostracism, we seek security through belonging to a community. We forge bonds through which we secure our belonging to a group.
Often we think it’s about relaxed socialising, perhaps about finding an identity, a business opportunity, satisfying mutual interests and so on, but in reality we are setting up safety nets. The more we associate with influential, successful and respected people, the greater the sense of security we experience deep down.
The plan is clear. If there are serious problems, the “tribe” will take care of me. That is why we try to please people, to smooth things over, not to say unpleasant things to the interlocutor’s face and so on.
- Active form: raking and stockpiling. We do not rely on others, but seek security through our own engagement. In crucial situations, we take care of ourselves first – for example, making provisions for our family first, then being generous to others – or we unconsciously grab things for ourselves. (Very often feeling that we are being fair to everyone.)
This includes stock-building, the desire to control situations and manipulating people. Not in the sense of deliberate exploitation, but driven by a deep-seated fear of scarcity. Of course, we also always find a suitable explanation or justification for our actions, and we continue to feel that we are acting optimally or for the good of all. Since this is an unconscious process, we are usually not even aware that we are doing it.
(Both forms then develop into more tangible and familiar emotions: guilt, shame, helplessness, anxiety, anger, impatience, greed… Failure to satisfy the desire for security can lead to sadness, depression, numbness and so on.)
I could find myself in both forms. Many times I wanted to force a bond through people and then maintain it, because “You never know when a person is going to come through”. In the business world in general, there is this well-known form of collaboration called networking.
The second form was close to my heart. I was a master of “communicating” with people. I was always able to win them over without thinking about what they were experiencing or what they wanted. I was able to convince them to strive for exactly what I thought was best for them.
I have always been able to present the story to people in a way that they support my idea. I was able to detect a key moment in the communication and focus on the interlocutor’s weak point. Then I potentiated it and turned it to my advantage. Surprisingly, I felt great about it, because I actually felt that I was doing people a favour.
I also remembered every little thing or promise made by each person. Later, if necessary, I would hang on to it or wave it under the interlocutor’s nose, saying, “Look, this is our deal”. (I was basically judging myself or judging others by themselves. What I promised, I kept. I expected the same from my interlocutor.)
In short, the deep-seated fear of failure was a very good acquaintance of mine …
How I tackled my fears
I have chosen some specific techniques to address fears. Some of them I knew from before, and some I invented myself.
I started with a simple approach, dividing the fears into two meaningful clusters. On the left-hand side of the sheet, I wrote down everything that I have influence over, and on the right-hand side, everything that I don’t have influence over.
Everything on the right side was taking up my energy unnecessarily. And there was quite a lot of it… I made an affirmation that reminded me every time I thought of something on the right side that, on the one hand, I can’t do anything, and on the other hand, by directing my energy to the unnecessary, I am reinforcing stress.
Sometimes it was enough to remind myself how, by thinking these highly charged thoughts, I was at that moment depriving my body of precious energy that it could otherwise use for healing.
The second technique I used to address the concerns in the list on the right was the following. As a film unfolded in my mind related to the development of the event I was worried about, I drew a big red X over it in my mind. I said to myself “I’m erasing” or something like that and thought of another, more pleasant film that took place in the same place or in such a way that it covered that X.
(This second film, which I called in on command, was already prepared in my head. Actually, three: one was a holiday and a relaxed environment, one was a nice event with the family, and the third was enjoying life in the everyday situation and knowing that everything is perfect and going in the right direction. I have anchored the films deeply in my subconscious with the help of meditation.)
I used another similar technique. I imagined that the film that was in my mind, showing an unpleasant event, was being shown on a big screen in a cinema. Suddenly the projector stops and the screen goes blank. With some practice I actually managed to stop these images in my head. That’s how I realised that the thought or idea of something is not part of me, but just something I have artificially created. Therefore, I can also abolish or cancel it out.
Innovative techniques
I have resolved many things by crossing my thoughts and emotions. If I felt fear, I struggled to find an equally strong positive emotion to outweigh it. So I preferred to find a valid logical reason that supported the counterfactual. I found that cold, logical facts that spoke in favour of a positive outcome had great power over unpleasant emotions.
I’ve also used this technique to tackle things on the left side of the list. When I felt the fear and realised I could take action, I took my calendar and wrote down which activity I was going to do and when. I never just threw myself into the work, but gave my subconscious time to prepare.
The easiest way for me was to sleep it off. In the evening, I read the next day’s tasks and decided to do them at a specific time. Then I imagined the next day’s events as if I were moving along a timeline. As I approached the time I had set for an activity, I just imagined getting it done.
I repeated this in the evenings until I actually accepted the task as inevitable, i.e. without feeling reluctant. Once I had done that, I went to bed and woke up the next day determined to get the job done.
Another effective technique that worked very well for me was the paradoxical technique of elimination by addition. When I found myself thinking about a problem, I didn’t try to solve it or deal with it in any way. On the contrary, I recalled a few other problems, which I then kept in mind at the same time.
In the end, I was juggling three to five problems in my head that I was focused on. In my mind, I moved from the first to the second, to the third, and then back and forth a bit …
I have thus divided attention on five fronts, with the first, basic problem completely losing its charge.
Immediately afterwards, I imagined a pleasant situation in which I felt – or would feel – great. Or I used one of the positive “on command” films mentioned earlier, which I had previously reinforced through meditation. Sometimes I also thought of a short-term goal that I was looking forward to. Usually, after only a few seconds of doing this, the original problem was so decimated that the charge of the pleasant event easily outweighed the unpleasant feelings of the first one.
Later, I adapted the technique a little and, in addition to the added problems, I also thought of the final best-case scenario I wanted the problem to be solved from the start. So I had in mind a basic problem, two to four “added problems” and this ideal scenario.
Then my mind moved from one situation to another, and in between I thought of this ideal scenario or solution. I have found that the more I divide my attention between the problems, the less negative charge I feel when I think of the original problem. At the same time, the positive charge of the ideal solution remains the same all the time, which gives the feeling that, depending on the charges of the problems, the positive charge is getting stronger.
I repeated this process until the positive charge so outweighed the negative charge that the trace faded.
If the emotional charge was too strong, I used the “outside observer” technique that I always do when I think of a friend: imagine that the same situation that happened to me happened to him. What advice would I give him? How would I comfort him? How would I comfort him?
In addition to seeing the situation I am projecting onto my friend in a more logical and less emotional way, and being able to detach myself from it more easily, I can also see a much more realistic picture.
Over time, I refined this approach so much that I was able to get out of the grip of a strong unpleasant emotion literally in seconds.
The simplest but very effective technique I used in different situations was to ask the following questions:
- What am I doing right now that I know is not good for me?
- What do I know I should be doing that I am not doing?
- What can I do first, or at this moment, to help the situation to a better outcome?
The answers have always given me very clear and direct instructions on how to proceed. Even if the answer was just “There’s nothing you can do”, I felt good because it made it clear to me that I was not wasting valuable time.
Obviously, everything I had a chance to influence was going optimally.
This article is based on the book “The Big Ugly Crisis”, by Boris Vene and Nikola Grubiša.