When Your Own Fears Scare You
Fears are necessary emotions that have helped the human race to survive adversity throughout history. This includes both individual setbacks and the type that has framed the species’ path through history. A fear is an important ally and friend. It is the alarm that helps us identify possible dangers of survival.
But this alleged friend can also stop being all of these things and instead become an enemy. But fear does not try to do this; it just wants to help us. It is we who make it the enemy, an adversary we must destroy in order to live in peace.
When we face danger, fear starts a series of mechanisms that are meant to take us out of this trance with grace. These mechanisms include sweating so that the skin becomes slippery, in order to let us slip away more easily if a predator puts its claws in us; to send blood from the stomach to the feet and hands so that we can run faster or have more strength to fight; dilation of the pupils; hyperventilation etc.
All of this is there to help us and get us to safety, because that is man’s goal: to survive in the world. Nature is wise and has given us the resources to do so.
Sure, we can harden them, but we tell ourselves we can not, and that is the problem. Fear wants to be your friend and warn you that a car is driving at you, that that dog will bite you or that you will be robbed. To give these warnings, it must use the mechanisms we mentioned – the only ones it knows.
You interpret these mechanisms as horrific, unbearable, horrible… so you call again for fear of saving yourself. This time, the danger is precisely the symptoms that are trying to save you.
What a contradiction! But even if it is paradoxical, this is exactly what happens to many people. In panic disorders, for example, the person begins to feel manifestations of their own fear and interprets them as dangerous, thinking things like “I will have a heart attack!” or “I will die now!”.
Obviously, this produces even more fear, which increases the heartbeat, sweating and shaking even more, which confirms the person’s catastrophic interpretations. This results in an unbearable, vicious circle that strengthens the fear of fear itself, which is extremely disabling because the shadow we are afraid of is really our own.
There is a way to break the vicious circle of fear, although in order to do so you must accept that you will be a little scared. Yes, another contradiction! To free yourself from your own fears, you must accept and integrate them as part of yourself.
To arrive at this acceptance, the first step is not to judge the fear and to just let it be. Feel it, embrace it and talk to it as a friend you are trying to reconcile with.
The second step, once you have accepted your fear, is to debate with it, but always from a place of acceptance. You want to interpret it as dangerous, but you know it is not. You know that if it feels dangerous, it’s just because you think it is, even though this is false.
Ask yourself these anxiety-inducing questions: How do I know this is a heart attack? Is it not more likely that these are symptoms of anxiety? If this has already hit me many times without me fainting, why would it be any different now?
When you answer these questions honestly, you will realize that your interpretations are responsible for your fears working with higher intensity than necessary, or that they persist even though you have already proven that they are not justified.
