Self Sabotage and the Unconscious Attraction to Fear

There are seemingly a million things in life to be afraid of. We're afraid that we're not going to have enough money, we're afraid that our relationships won't be fulfilling, we're afraid that we're not going to be as good as other people. Really all this fear comes down to the belief that we're not going to be okay at some time in the future. With all of this anxiety and this fear that comes up, it repairs consideration to really just think about why this is so. All the work that we do on ourselves. We do meditation, we do psychotherapy, and a million other things that we try. We try and change our lifestyles. Why is it then that fear is so prevalent? Why is it so persistent? Why does nothing work? Or at least why does nothing work permanently? Why does this fear keep resurfacing over and over again? That's what I'm going to talk about here. There's a quote from Plato where he says we can easily forgive a child for being afraid of the dark, but the real tragedy of life is when a man is afraid of the light. What he's driving at here is that a part of us is afraid of the light. Another way of saying light is just a happy life, peace of mind. If we begin to think about it in these terms, one of the things that we can come to consider is that perhaps the biggest fear we have, or one of the biggest fears we have, is that we fear living a life without fear. We fear the fearless life. Now you might be thinking that this is simply because we live in a fearful world. It's always changing, it's pretty chaotic, so fear is just an inevitable part of living here. Well that might be the case, but maybe there's something deeper than that going on too. Let's look at some evidence. The first piece of evidence that we fear being without fear is that we constantly engage in behaviors that we know will bring about the condition of fear. What type of behaviors am I talking about? Well, we put off opening the letter that we've been dreading, which really just prolongs that anxiety and that fear. We fail to exercise, take care of our bodies, maybe we eat certain types of foods that we know predictably will lead to fear at some point in the future. It's guaranteed. We procrastinate on things. We don't have that difficult, challenging conversation with our partner that we know is important. We know on some level that this is going to make things worse, this will increase fear, yet we continue to do them. So if we're continually doing these things, at a certain point it at least repays consideration to think, am I getting some sort of a reward from this? Am I doing this for a purpose rather than just simply doing it? Another piece of evidence that we value fear, or at least we have it as a priority, is our seemingly incorrigible tendency to interpret things in life, situations or events, which in truth are just neutral, to interpret them in a negative way, a fearful way. You know, your boss might come to work one day and they don't salute you. What is the interpretation? Generally, it's going to be a fearful one. It's going to be an interpretation of, they don't like me, I'm going to be fired. You know, your partner might come home, they might forget to ask you how your presentation went. Interpretation, going to be fearful, they don't care about me at all. We have a huge tendency to lean towards the fear-based interpretation. The question here that we're discussing is, why does that happen? Why else might we value fear? Well, here's another reason. Let's say, a little bit morbid perhaps, but just bear with me here. Let's say a dear loved one you have, someone that you really care about in your life, comes to you and they tell you that they have a terminal illness. Horrific story. What is our reaction to that story? Imagine if our reaction in that situation was that we had absolutely no fear whatsoever, not even a twinge of anxiety or fear. Now, that seems pretty unrealistic, but imagine that scenario. What would that mean? How would we interpret that? Would we start to think, I feel a little bit uneasy about this because I care about this person. Why am I not afraid? Why am I not anxious? So there's this thing that, if I'm not afraid, it shows that I'm not very loving. We sort of associate the fear we have with love. Now, notice in that scenario, I didn't say anything about not helping your friend or being there for them. In fact, I'm assuming in this scenario that you would just continue and do things as you normally would. You'd give your friend support and you'd help them in every single way you could, but you just don't feel afraid. How would you feel about yourself and your relationship to that person? I think a lot of us would feel kind of uneasy about this. Why am I not more afraid of this? So that's another indication that fear is actually something we see as valuable or at least it's a way to measure our commitment to another person or the love we have for another person. Now, here I'm not talking about the type of fear that would make you run away from a saber tooth tiger attack. That's biological instinctive fear and that's actually very, very helpful and something to be grateful for. But what I'm talking about here is psychological fear. Notice how much we rely or we think it's useful to be psychologically afraid. A lot of us have this assumption that unless I have this fear, nothing of importance will be done in my life. I won't pay my taxes. I won't be there for the people in my life that need me. I won't do the important things that are high on my list of priorities. We really seem to value this form of psychological fear and it's interesting that we never ever question the hypothesis that psychological fear is helpful. What if the psychological fear we're talking about is absolutely no help to us in our daily lives and in fact it's a huge, huge hindrance to us in our daily lives? What if by just letting go of the psychological fear, we're every bit as productive and effective in our daily lives as we ever were? The truth is that we feel that if we were to live without fear, without anxiety, we would become completely defenseless against the chaotic, ever-changing world that we live in. We'd be defenseless against not only the external world but also our own internal tendencies to not provide for ourselves and not to take care of business. Now perhaps the biggest reason or indicator that we actually value psychological fear is that there is an underlying awareness that without that fear, without the sad stories, without the emotional pain, the troubles, without those things, there would really be not much left to hang our sense of identity on. We associate ourselves with our fear-based thoughts. It's one thing that's common to all fear-based thoughts. Early on, you know, I talked about the types of fear-based thoughts that we have. Let's say a person has a thought like, I am afraid because I'm going to lose my job. You can't have that thought without the words, I am, at the beginning. I am fear is really what Without the I am, it's just a thought and the I am, whoever the I am is, is not implicated in anything. So is there a point to any of this that I'm saying here? Is there a way out? Is there a way to avoid living a life of unconscious attraction to fear? Well, there is a way out and it involves some input and it involves increasing an awareness of what's actually taking place and being honest that a part of me must be attracted to the fear. Otherwise, it wouldn't be this prevalent in my life. I wouldn't be anxious all the time or I wouldn't be afraid of multiple things in my life if it wasn't giving me something, if I didn't value it. So we start by increasing an awareness of that unconscious attraction to fear. After this, what we can do is we can start to realize that fear itself is an entity. We can start to understand fear as a separate thing from ourselves. The more we understand what's happening when I feel afraid or I feel anxiety, that will be a huge, huge help understanding what that is. Really what that is, is a conditioned response that your body, your nervous system is having because it's been having these fear-based thoughts for years and years based on some external stimulus. We can start to reinterpret gradually, consistently, external situations and events in our lives. Reinterpret them in a completely different way to the habitual way we've been conditioned to do so in the past. The more we do this and we practice this, the less and less reinforcement we're giving to the fear-based thoughts that lead to the anxiety in the body and the more peace of mind will gradually come about from these new interpretations. So we begin by looking at the fear-based thoughts, the anxiety-based thoughts and we start asking, is it true? Do I absolutely know it's true? What is the cost-benefit ratio of having this thought and believing this thought and carrying it around with me in my daily life? We begin to make a big revelation. We discover something that whatever the thought is, whatever the situation is really, I can choose to see it differently. That is our superpower here as human beings. We can interpret things differently. We can make different choices. Now the trick to all that is to remember that we have that superpower. So it involves practice and practice and practice. Now for a while when we're practicing this, it can seem and feel sometimes like we're fighting against just an avalanche of negative thoughts and negative beliefs and it seems sometimes like it's never ending. But the more we challenge it, the more we challenge those old beliefs, those thought patterns, at the very minimum we're not reinforcing them any longer. We're breaking associations with the past and after some time this becomes more of an emotional reality for us. The past is no longer in charge of how we interpret things in here and now in our present daily lives and emotionally this becomes more of a peaceful state of mind. Gradually after that it becomes even more powerful. It becomes optimism. It becomes hope and trust and faith and a sense of purpose in your life which is the thing that's missing for so many people nowadays. So this inquiry is a big big help and the prize at the end is enormous. What we're talking about here again is to become a chooser. In fact that's not even accurate. You are already a chooser. You are making choices about what's true and not true already. It's just that those choices that you currently make are default choices. They just happen automatically and they're based on past experiences when your needs were not being met or your point of view for instance was not being considered which it should have been. So we can become conscious deliberate choosers of what we believe is true. We're already doing it. We just need to become aware and choose differently. You may also have a sense for a while that these new interpretations or these new choices that you're experiencing seem a little bit fake or they seem a little bit unrealistic. But notice how you rarely question the validity of the fear-based thoughts or ever question into the truth of those thoughts. Why are we so skeptical about the self-empowering beliefs or reinterpretations and never skeptical of our fear-based thoughts? Interesting. Again it's that unconscious attraction we have to fear itself. We've associated fear really with safety and it's not true. Psychological fear is very very unhelpful and it is not productive. It doesn't help us in any practical sense in our daily lives. Now if you're interested in starting this it's very simple. There's a million books. You can CBT courses on this. You can go down the spiritual route with this with some Byron Cady's work. But really all they're teaching is the same thing. It's choose differently. Start to see things differently and notice how those choices make you feel in your life. The end results of those choices over time will be greater peace of mind and emotional stability. Now it does require work. It requires a willingness. A willingness really to accept the fact that you know what I have actually been valuing fear and anxiety. Maybe unconsciously but I'm beginning to become aware of my unconscious attraction to fear and anxiety and now I want to try something different. How do I know I've been unconsciously attracted to fear? Well I've just looked at some of the I've noticed that nobody who doesn't value fear would make those choices. It just would not happen unless fear was the desired end goal. So if you want to do this there's trained facilitators you can work with or you can do some background research yourself and you can start to question those fear based thoughts as they come up. I'll leave you guys with a reminder for why we would do this. The goal of this is to feel more self-empowerment. To feel good about ourselves and to realize I'm not a victim. I'm not a victim of my past. Maybe I've had difficult circumstances in the past. Maybe my needs were not met in the past. Sure I'll bring a great understanding to my nervous system and why I feel the way I do right now but to remember the goal here is to be self-empowered. To start seeing opportunity. To start feeling optimistic. To start feeling safe again in ourselves and our ability to go about our daily lives without the need for fear because it really really is not helpful. So putting the work you owe it to yourself. Another of the big reasons we don't bother putting in effort is that we just have this conditioned belief that we're not worth the effort. Believe me it's easier than you think to do this and you are worth the effort. Take care of yourself and I'll talk with you again soon.