Conquering Your Fears - How to Release Fear & Create Freedom
Fear is the opposite of freedom and success. It drives a knife into the heart of many of our deepest dreams and desires. From anxiety disorders, panic attacks, obsessive-compulsive disorders, post-traumatic stress disorders, to fear of heights, fear of public speaking, fear of failure, fear of death, you name it, we all have fears in one form of another. Even hard-bitten Navy Seals experience fear. So, reasonable fear is nothing to be ashamed of. But that doesn’t mean you should stay in your comfort zone and refuse to do something about irrational fears and panic attacks if they happen to you.
Generational Legacy
What we don’t realize is that we all have the fear antidote right in our family system. Because most often the fears we experience and feel are just “ours,” really belong to the family system itself. Many of our deepest anxious feelings are tied to our history. In fact, some of our deepest unhappiness, anger, sadness, and fear comes from living our family history as though it were happening to us in the present moment.
By now you understand that what I call emotional DNA—thoughts, emotions, actions, choices—experienced by family members facing dangerous situations and scary experiences in the past get passed down to future generations. Experiences like famine and economic collapse may have been responded to by your ancestors with practical choices such as overeating when food was available, saving string, and penny pinching. But three generations later those practical solutions to emergency situations have turned into obesity, hoarding, and terror around spending money—toxic behaviors and dysfunctional ways that no longer serve.
Irrational fear is always disproportionate to the situation at hand and may well indicate that something is going on in your family system that has not been resolved. For example, let’s say your whole family freaks out during the holidays. In fact, every time there is a reason for the family to celebrate, people become anxious.
It sounds strange that this should happen in what is usually the happiest of social situations. And then you discover that great-grandmother dropped dead Christmas day. From then on celebrating never felt quite right. In fact, many in the family experienced fear of death at holidays. Now it’s obvious why celebrations are filled with imagined threats and are something to be avoided.
Dangerous Situations In Daily Life
Sometimes feelings of fear, anxiety disorders and full-blown panic attacks aren’t inherited but rather they start with us. Many of us have been raised to believe that we are incapable and broken, that we have done something wrong and need to fix it. We thus live in the grip of fear. Some of us come from homes in which a healthy fear response enabled us to survive (and run away from) abuse.
However, instead of the fear stopping once the abuse is a thing of the past, ongoing symptoms of anxiety and fear travel with us. The thoughts, language, and actions we created around those events are still loud and prevalent, as though the situation was happening present time. And these fear patterns can last for generations. So, how about stopping those anxious feelings in their tracks instead of passing them on?
Meeting Fears Head On
Dealing with fear is a matter of choice. On a scale of 1-10, how dominant are your symptoms of anxiety and how much do they affect your life? Hopefully, it has you at a point where you are sick and tired of being sick and tired and feel thoroughly stuck. Because getting that bad is just about the only way 90 percent of humanity finally dare to climb out of the box of imagined threat and limitation!
There are a lot of helpful tools mental healthcare professionals use to deal with feelings of anxiety, feelings of fear, and perceived threat, such as exposure therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy. These therapies can help us handle issues related to certain social situations like fear of public speaking and irrational feelings of anxiety in daily life. However, genuine long-term healing can only happen when we address the roots of our fears. If we don’t do this, we may find symptoms of fear resurfacing in either our lives or the lives of our children.
Action Plan
The journey to change and healing begins with a willingness to look at the problem. But most people are too afraid to look at their fear. We dodge the subject or push it under the rug. Which only serves to heighten our fears because now we have monsters under the carpet!
So, take a deep breath, and tell yourself to approach change in small doses and then simply take the first step. Which is: Tell your nervous system that the traumatic event was over a long time ago. The war is over. The fire is out. The dog that bit you died decades ago. The teacher who ridiculed your class speech is long retired.
Step two, keep telling yourself the event is over and that you are totally safe until your body can relax. (Pro Tip: See if you can evoke an elevated emotion like peace, joy, and gratitude in order to shift the fear by imagining a pleasurable experience to replace the trauma event. This may take a while, but keep practicing.)
Step three. This may seem counterintuitive, but bear with me. Even if it seems like a totally irrational fear, acknowledge your fear exactly the way that it is. While that may seem out of your comfort zone, it’s a pivotal part of conquering your fear. Until you’ve acknowledged it, you can’t move it.
Step four. Once you have acknowledged your fear, the next small step is to ask yourself a simple set of questions:
- When did these fearful feelings begin for me?
- What was happening in my life at the time?
- Are these anxious feelings interfering with social situations in my daily life?
- What would my life be like in the absence of these fears?
- What joyful replacement(s) would I like to see?
Can you see what a quick journey you can make from intense fear around an imagined threat to positive associations that, at the very least, decrease your symptoms of anxiety? When you do this exercise, notice how your feelings shift. And then realize this: You are the one who did that!
As silly as it seems—unless you’re in truly dangerous situations where fear is your ally keeping you safe from genuine harm—fear really is a matter of choice. And choice governs physical sensations and stress cycles. When we work at understanding the difference between inherited irrational fear and perceived threat versus genuine danger, we begin to reduce our stress levels caused by overly emotional responses until we stop irrational fear altogether.
Driving Force For Change
The fear antidote begins with the realization that the initial trauma happened a long time ago—perhaps more than a hundred years ago! Now is the time to focus on creating new healthy emotional patterns and new traditions that bring back the joy. And sometimes the driving force for genuine change isn’t to save ourselves the pain and suffering that anxiety problems create, but rather the desire to stop our anxiety disorders from being passed on to our children, leaving it for them to deal with and heal.
And here’s one more thought to consider. When we conquer and change something, it always means that something else better will come into our lives to take its place. Once you look fear in the face and then turn around to look at what you really want to experience instead, you replace fear with a sense of adventure.
Congratulations! Just like those Navy Seals, you too can overcome fear and become remarkable!
For information about my November 2024 event “Vault from Fear to Freedom,” please check click here.
