Fear is an odd thing. Often maligned. And with often good reason. But fear can be healthy. It's the thing that stops us putting our hand into the fire because we know it will get burned. It's the thing that stops us walking into the middle of a busy road, because we know it's highly likely we'll be hit by something.
It's a defense mechanism designed to protect our lives from danger. Ever since the large, furry, toothy things threatened people living in caves. It's not something to be conquered, but I think more something to be understood.
I have often thought that our fears are inversely proportional to our self belief. The more we feel we can't deal with something, the more scared we are of it. And I don't think that's a result of the fear itself, but more the result of our resilience. It's a knee jerk reaction by the mind to try and protect us in our vulnerable state. A sort of last resort "emergency button" when the mind doesn't know what else to do.
This is no more evident than in the fear of the unknown. That blanket term for anything we can't yet have any sort of control over. This is often the most paralysing fear because we make everything seem the worst it can possibly be. And again I think this is more as a result of our mental state than any sort of insight about the thing in question. Low self esteem, low feelings of self worth, low belief in our own capabilities all collaborate to show a lovely little in-flight movie of the plane crashing. And because of that, the fear button is pressed. Hard and repeatedly.
While I agree that we are responsible for the fears we have, ultimately, I do not think it's intentional. In fact I think most of the time it's entirely subconscious. An emotional reflex action, if you like. I used to believe it was a case of someone's will being stronger than the fear in question but now I don't think I do. That turns it into a battle with your own mind. And it doesn't need to be that.
I think the first step to overcoming fear is understanding why it's there. What it is that your mind is deciding to be all Kevin Costner to. In my opinion it's better to think of oneself. Not as fear as some objective entity. And to think about why we feel we need fear there. This is hard. We do enough soul searching as it is. But I do believe that the key lies within us, and how we feel about ourselves. Speaking personally, doing this helped me deal with all fears, not specific ones. It didn't turn into a war with a series of battles to be overcome. But something where the other side stopped showing up.
In my opinion, fear isn't an obstacle. It's a scab. It's protecting a wound we suffered at some point. A part of ourselves which is extremely fragile. But sometimes those wounds don't heal. And the fear never goes away. To remove these scabs, we have to heal the wounds they're covering. I think a lot of that comes from looking at one's self esteem and self worth.
I'll give you a hypothetical example: Suppose at some point in your life you tried to do something. You tried to express yourself. The way you looked maybe. You tried to change your clothing style, or your hairstyle. Or you tried to express your emotions to someone. Maybe you instinctively cried at a movie. Or did something very "out-of-character". And the response you got was hurtful. Or angry. Or people ridiculing you for being someone they didn't think you should be. It hurt you, made you feel like if you tried to do something to express yourself and be the real you... people in your life would react negatively to it. So you began to believe that it just wasn't worth it to try and be yourself. That you should never deviate from the life path everyone around you had set out for you. That people around you would hate the real you.
The fear you build up is the fear of being hurt again. It's the fear of being right back in that memory. That single snapshot of your life is what everything from here on out is based on. Like a cascade reaction you think back to all the emotions associated with that memory. How it made you feel. And your mind is like "Nope.com. Where's that big red fear button?!"
See fear is taken, imo, from frozen singular points in time. Points where the wounds were created. The mind sometimes doesn't get that as individuals we've grown, and learned. Or that other people may have grown and learned. It's always "Do this and it's just going to be like it was before."
What I would say to people dealing with fear is this: Look how far you've come. Look at how much strength you've already shown. Done things you maybe never thought you can do. See the positive inside yourself, and how much you can actually deal with. You've taken hard steps. All of you. Even just admitting to yourselves who you are is an incredibly hard thing to do. Overcoming the barriers thrown up by your own psyche is, in a lot of ways, harder than anything anyone else can do to you. And in that, you have strength and resilience, because you're still here. The one person you have to live with, and deal with twenty four hours a day is yourself. When you make peace with that, and resolve to be yourself, then that is probably a bigger barrier than anyone else can put in front of you.
Then ask yourself... if you can overcome the fear of facing yourself... then do you really need to be scared of the steps you want to take to make yourself a reality? We are harsher critics of ourselves than anyone else can ever be... and if we've gotten to a place where we accept who we are, then do we really have to be scared of whether someone else does?
Is that fear really necessary? Or can we finally allow the scab to fall off and walk unblemished into a new life?
