Fear Based Thinking Creates Fear Based Results
By Bart Sharp
For some, they live in a series of thoughts and stories of fears, that the worst will happen to them. Most likely, it was something they learned very early in life was to use fear as a way to protect themselves. In their childhood, there was probably someone they needed to fear such as a parent who was abusive.
As adults, fear is not in the same reality as what was experienced in childhood yet the adult person who was abused is likely to react in the same patterns. They may go to their job with a internal radar watching out for the particular person who potentially will betray them and they spend much of their energy trying to figure out how they will be hurt. In the job situation the fear of abuse is likely not to be the same as the childhood abuse itself but a fear related to a typical challenges of the day such as being fired unfairly or humiliated by a co-worker will be where the adult’s thoughts will gravitate to.
The mind works in a mechanical way, when it sees a certain behavior that was once experienced as abusive it will associate aspects of that behavior with abuse or betrayal. Therefore the person who is in fear of abuse will be on the lookout and spend much of their energy and this fear-based state of mind. The mind will trick the person into thinking the worst will happen.
There comes a point that we cannot trust our thoughts completely. We have to separate ourselves from the situation and see it from an objective or logical point of view. The fearful person needs to step back and think how another “neutral” person would interact in that situation. From that form of detachment, the fearing person may see that a negative reaction is unnecessary.
Even the person who has explored how they were hurt or abused understands why they created the fear may still continue to have some of the same old reactions. The wound is deep within and they have practiced using fear as a way to interact with the world for a long time therefore is so easy to continue to see everything from that point of view.
The first step is really learning how comprehensive we have incorporated fear-based thinking into our lives and go beyond the thinking we need to feel it inside of ourselves when those thoughts arise. To perceive how it feels inside of us when we are in those situations we can learn to fear but it can become comfortable with it. We have to see the multiple ways we have done it over the years therefore this process takes time. Then once we have done this tedious introspection fear begins to lose its grip.
Still even after years of fearing it does not exactly go away, however, we become so comfortable with it that we no longer react to it or fear it. It is simply there no longer is a stress in our life.
One of the important things of this type of process is to realize how we are always on the look out for situations that confirm our fear. The fear based person will unconsciously find or run into the people to be fearful of and then they can confirm and create more defenses to “supposed persecutor” in the belief that these people will hurt them.
The more likely reality is that this person that they fear only has some of the behaviors or energies that are similar to the ones the fear-based person experienced as a child. It takes a conscious willpower from this fear person not to react but begin to see there’s nothing to be afraid of.
The mind will trick them many times in this process but with each relationship they resolve they step forward into seeing their life in a new way. Finding freedom from fear takes practice learning a new way to see life.
It is important to remember we can always see the worst in people and when we do our reactions to them are more likely to stimulate the worst in them, just as we can evoke the best in them. The more likely truth is everyone has good and bad or strengths and weaknesses within them and we have the power to rouse and cultivate either quality. This concept applies to our own personal life as well.
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