How to Identify and Resolve Your Most Dream Crushing Fear — of the Unfamiliar … the Unknown
Have you ever felt the terror of starting a new job? the gut twisting fear of heading out on a date with an attractive someone you just met?
Do you know the anxiety of just thinking about starting a business, writing a book or giving a speech to upper management?
Have these fears actually stopped you from doing what you want to do?
Do you ever think there are so many fears! They get in our way at every turn!
It can be tempting to give up before we even start heading for goals or making life changes.
The Fake Landscape of Fear
We’ve all been taught we are poor struggling human beings riddled with multiple kinds of fear and anxiety.
How’s that for a recipe for discouragement, for feeling overwhelmed?
But in working with human behaviour for over 30 years I have discovered there is really only one fear, and I will be happy to share with you the clear steps to resolve it.
We have also been taught to give our one fear lots of different labels. This means there can be many experts to help us deal with this imaginary diversity of terrors.
Misnamed Fears that have made Authors a lot of Money
Here are three so called fears that have made experts rich.
- Fear of Success
You have probably heard of the fear of success. The theory is that if someone moves to a higher level of financial or administrative success they will become anxious to the point of incompetency.
In reality, if someone is familiar with success, this won’t happen!
If in early childhood, while happily wetting themselves in the safety of a clean diaper, playing with blocks and dump trucks, baby dolls and colouring books, the little person was encouraged, taught, and given incremental challenges — by the time they are grown up, they will have had lots of success and won’t find it frightening at all.
If they continue on to do well in school, achieving honours and recognition, they will find success normal and not at all to be feared.
2. Fear of Failure
You may have heard or read of “the fear of failure.” It’s really quite famous, and assumed to be very real.
But listen to someone who is used to failure. Even though they don’t appear to like failure, you will hear a strange comfort in their words: “Yeah, I kind of knew it wouldn’t work out,” or “There I go again! It always happens to me like this!”
They are used to failure. It is a familiar piece of their world. In a miserable kind of way, it fits with the identity they have created.
3. Low Self-Esteem
Have you ever thought about finding someone special to be with? The very thought brings all kinds of fear: What if they don’t like me? What if there’s no one there for me? What if I’m going to be alone for the rest of my life?
When we have these painful thoughts, we conclude we must have really low self-esteem to have all these self-doubts.
In reality, these are just words we put on the deep, uncomfortable feelings that lurk around the idea of finding a relationship.
Many of these same people who have self-doubting thoughts actually know they are lovable, and whether they admit it or not, they kind of like who they are. They just don’t know the awful feelings connected to meeting someone are about the unknowns involved when we step into someone else’s world, and let them step into ours.
This feeling is not low self-esteem, it’s fear of the unfamiliar.
The Familiar Isn’t Scary
There are people who are afraid of moving, of picking up and leaving where they have lived for a long time and plunking themselves down somewhere new. I am not one of those people.
My father was a travelling evangelist, not the rich kind like Jerry Falwell. We lived in the back rooms of other people’s houses in rural Nova Scotia, surviving off what other poor people could spare in the offering plates handed round where my father preached. During my early years we made a lot of the 38 moves that have been part of my life experience.
To add to my “moving experience,” my mother believed in the geographical cure. That means she was one of those people who believe “If I move, I will be happy.” For example, at my mother’s persuasion, we moved 7 times in 7 years in the small wheat town of Three Hills, Alberta.
The moves never made my mother happy, but I sure became familiar with moving. Packing up those boxes and moving out was not something I liked doing, but I am not afraid of it, because it is really familiar.
Your Map of the World = Reality! Anything else is Suspiciously Unfamiliar
When we are little, we make a map of the world. We decide how everything works, and we do it without words.
For example, a little person knows that those things with four legs and a platform are for climbing up and sitting on long before they know the word “chair.” It doesn’t matter what colour, size, or texture the chair is, they know what it is.
At that stage of learning, our brain generalizes like crazy so we don’t have to keep learning the same things over and over again.
Another example of this kind of generalization occurs when a child learns to open a door — from then on, they can open all doors.
These early truths remain valid for our whole lives. A chair is still a chair no matter how old we are, and a door opens more or less the same way it always did.
So we assume that everything in our map of the world is true, and as long as we move around in this familiar map, we are not anxious. We might be unhappy, but we are not afraid.
Here’s the Actual Truth: A Lot of your Reality Map is Not True in the Big Wide World. It’s Actually Useless Rubbish!
The trouble is, much of what we learn from early environments is not true.
In amongst the “What is a chair?” and “How do you open a door?” kind of learnings, we are also mapping out “Who am I?” “What is a man?” “What is a woman?” “How much money is there?” “Am I safe?” “Am I smart?” “What is communication?” “How hard should I work?”
All these learnings are based on the small world of our immediate experience, and often they are not true at all in the rest of the world.
Our “Truth” is not Recorded in Language
To add to the confusion, these early learnings are not stored with language; they are stored in a part of our brain that thinks in experience and pictures. This means we don’t consciously know how we think the world works; we just feel really uncomfortable when the actual world doesn’t match our internal map, our internal truth.
This means we don’t know why we are afraid a lot of the time. We are not aware that we have stepped off of our map of the world, so we make up reasons for what is really just our fear of the unfamiliar.
We take those uncomfortable feelings and apply the labels we have been handed like “fear of success,” “fear of failure,” and “low self-esteem.”
What Your Survival Brain Hates and Why it Makes You Afraid
Just to make the idea that everything in your experience is truth even stronger, it so happens that the part of your brain that stores your nonverbal map of the world is also your survival brain!
It’s job is to keep you safe! So it is a place that feels it always has to be right . . . or you could die! This creates an incredible urgency to live by the map of the world you have designed.
Have you ever met someone who is terrified you won’t do something they think you should? yet you know what they want makes no sense?
At that moment, you can count on it. They have some message in their map of the world that is yelling “You have to do it this way! Don’t mess with reality, or you could die!” And even though they may look stupid, they remain convinced that what they think should happen is the only option.
You can know that whenever something happens that is not included in your experiential map, you will feel anxious. You will feel afraid, because the subconscious brain says “I don’t know where you are, and I don’t know how to protect you! Come back to the familiar, to the world of truth where I know how to take care of you. Even if it’s horrible here, at least we know what to do!”
And so, the one fear we have, is of the unfamiliar, the unknown.
Why We are Afraid to Die
This is why death is so ultimately scary; we really don’t know anything about what our experience will be after we do the death thing!
There are lots of theories about the afterlife, but no one really sends postcards, so it is coded as very, very unfamiliar, unknown, and therefore terrifying. The exception is people who have very solid theories that they actually believe about what happens next. They are less afraid of death, or so it seems.
Why We are Afraid of Good Things
There was a young man whose mother had been an anxious controller. She was always fussing about what the people around her should not be doing in case it upset her. She wasn’t someone you could get close to, she was so busy worrying. The young man’s father was virtually absent, so there was no closeness there either.
As an adult, the young man chose partners who were emotionally distant, like his mother, because his brilliant subconscious mind knew he could deal with that kind of relationship.
The Terror of Real Love
Then his world turned upside down. He met a beautiful, kind, affectionate young woman who fell in love with him. She was everything he could ever want, and he went into an absolute panic. He couldn’t sleep. Whenever he was going to see this girl, he felt so anxious he was nauseated!
If he had believed the ruckus going on in his nervous system, he would have decided this was not the relationship for him. Fortunately, as his coach, I knew what was happening: he was in absolutely new territory! His brain had never met feelings and experiences like this. There was no one in his map of the world who was like this woman and the unfamiliarity produced terror.
The Rest of the Story
The young man acted on the advice to distrust the warnings from his nervous system. He told himself that the anxiety just meant the relationship was unfamiliar.
As he kept labeling his anxiety as just a response to the unfamiliar, and as the relationship indeed became more familiar, he became calmer and calmer. The couple has now been married for about ten years and are very happy. The young man’s fear resolved and never returned. His map of the world expanded to include the woman of his dreams.
How do We Resolve this Primary Fear?
Here are four simple steps you can take to remove most fear that holds you back from doing what you want to do, being who you want to be.
- When you feel afraid identify what is happening that is brand new.
Look around your history. Notice where there is nothing in your experience to prepare you for what you are facing.
Think about unspoken rules that your family or community may have had that are being broken by your present reality. We get really anxious when we or someone else breaks family rules, even when those rules have never been consciously recognized or put into words.
This exploration of your history will give you clues as to how you have stepped outside your “reality zone.”
2. Label the fear as a response to the unfamiliar, not as a warning of danger.
It is actually quite comforting to know that even severe anxiety is not a sign of impending doom.
We have some trouble disbelieving these strong messages from our survival brain; however when we question them and give them a different label they lose a lot of their power. Knowing that fear is just a response to the unfamiliar gives a reason for what we are feeling, and it isn’t a scary one.
3. Make the unfamiliar familiar
Fear and the Physiotherapist
I knew a very smart young woman who wanted to be a physiotherapist. She found just the program she wanted in New Zealand, far away from her native Canada.
As it came time for her to go to New Zealand to take this program, the young woman became increasingly anxious. She was about to go and fulfill a dream and realize an important goal, but she was becoming more and more frightened. Not only was this unpleasant, but she also felt stupid for having anxiety about something she really wanted.
In conversation it surfaced that she did not know where she was going to live and had not seen pictures of the university campus.
There was an easy fix for her anxiety.
All she had to do was find pictures of places she might live, begin to make contacts, and give herself a few virtual tours of the university. As she gave her brain visual information about where she was going, she calmed down, made the transition with ease, and has since happily completed the program.
We all have access to a virtual Hollywood in our brains which means we can make any movie we want in order to construct a future reality.
This doesn’t mean you have to make vivid mental pictures; some of us don’t do that. We just imagine to the best of our ability and that is enough.
Fortunately we have unprecedented access to imagery and can find externally generated pictures for just about anything.
If you are going to move, or travel, if you have anxiety about anything in the future or in the realm of the unknown, you can access images of where you want to go. This will create virtual familiarity in advance. How much of this you need to do to achieve calmness varies from person to person.
By making mental movies or accessing relevant pictures of the future you want to create, you can change your reaction from gut-stabbing fear to “O.k. I get it, and I’m going to be alright because now things are familiar.”
4. Write a Neutral Story
When there is something unfamiliar and unknown, write a neutral story about it instead of the automatic scary stories we typically write when we don’t have information or don’t know what is going to happen.
These stories are written without words and are outside our awareness. Our experiential brain makes up scary stories about the worst thing that could possibly happen. We then feel scared, and don’t know why.
When we consciously write a neutral story, it overrides the scary unconscious story.
For example, if you don’t know how a date with a stranger will go, create a neutral story about what might happen. Imagine meeting them, having a nice time, then going home. It isn’t very exciting, but your subconscious mind will believe it is possible. When you write a neutral story, your brain will let go of the anxiety-producing drama that the person will hate you, you will suddenly develop bad breath and be seen talking with spinach in your teeth.
These are steps to resolve the primary fear that we all face, the unconscious fear that so often seems to make us curiously terrified of what we really want.
Here is one more story that beautifully embodies the four steps to resolving our primary fear.
How to Start School Without Fear, Even When You’re Five Years Old
There is a wonderful story in the book “The Answer” by John Assaraf. A little boy was to start kindergarten in the fall. He had a smart father who knew his little guy would need some preparation.
During the summer, the boy and his Dad would go up to the empty school and look in the windows and the father would tell great stories about when he was a little boy in school: all the things he learned, the fun he had, the friends he made. They would go into the playground and kick a ball around and imagine what fun the little boy would have in September when school began.
The big day came, and a horde of children and parents descended on the school. Many children were crying, holding on to parents’ hands, not wanting to go inside, all because they didn’t know what to expect.
Their little survival brains were screaming “I don’t know what’s in there! So I don’t know how to protect you!”
But the little boy whose Dad had made everything familiar raced up the steps, so happy to begin making great memories! All he needed was a hug and a wave and he was off to the next chapter of his experience, happy and unafraid. It was a new world, but it was familiar!
The Opportunity to Move Forward Without Fear
Many of us are tired of being afraid, of stopping when we want to move forward. We are fed up with feeling there is something wrong with us - that we are ‘self sabotaging,’ when really we are just having a normal response to the unknown.
There can be a lot of relief when we realize the unfamiliar is all we are afraid of, and there are ways to overcome that fear.
When you face something new and take steps to resolve the automatic fear that comes with it you can turn your potential into golden reality.
By using these strategies you can have adventures, take on new challenges and move into the future without fear, and with your energy channeled into learning instead of anxiety.
I wish you all the best in figuring out and dissolving the fears that, if you follow these simple steps, can no longer prevent you from comfortably living your dreams!
