Free Yourself from Fears (7 page)

They die of lung cancer, emphysema, and heart disease. Smokers hold onto their rights to hurt themselves, and many people have no choice but to breathe smoke from other people’s cigarettes. Yet if you ran 43

FREE YOURSELF FROM FEARS

screaming from these smoldering tubes of dried vegetable strands people would think you had gone crazy.

We are not afraid of these things because they are familiar and we feel we are in control of them. When we believe we are in control, we tolerate the danger. Many people are nervous when someone else is driving, but will take more risks when they drive themselves because they feel in control. When someone else is driving, they spend the time tensing their feet and stamping on imaginary brakes.

Enjoyable fear

Can fear be enjoyable? Yes. The feeling is very like excitement. As long as we believe there is no real danger, we can enjoy being frightened.

Fear makes you feel more alive because of the extra muscle strength, the increased heart rate, and the extra sensitivity you experience. Everything is more vivid, because your senses are more acute.

One of the first games parents play with children is “peek-a-boo”

or hide and seek. The parent hides and then surprises the infant.

Infants love this game—as long as they know it is a game. There is the enjoyable build-up of fear, just long enough before the parent appears suddenly. If the parent leaves it too long, then the infant will get anxious and start crying.

As we get older, we find more sophisticated versions of this basic game. These games have a message: “Ha! It’s only me!” In other words, we love to be frightened as long as we can also feel safe. We seek out fear and reassurance together. Many people want that sensation of fear, because it makes them feel more alive. There are multi-million-dollar industries to cater for our fears, so we can feel the sensation—safely.

Go to a local funfair or amusement park and try the rollercoasters and the spinning rides and the haunted houses. No one complains if the haunted house is too spooky, only if it is not spooky enough.

Best of all, go to Disneyland or Disneyworld. The Walt Disney Corporation has made itself one of the most successful and profitable 44

LEARNING AND UNLEARNING FEAR

brands in the world, because it knows what the child in the adult wants and gives it to them. There are haunted houses, realistic snakes and spiders, and sudden noises, lifts that get jammed, strange and spooky noises—all the things that frighten us normally. We go to a fair or amusement park to escape from the cares of life and have a good time. And what are they full of? Childhood fears—but in safety.

The eighth law of fear:

Fear can be enjoyable if:

—We believe that the situation is safe.

—We feel confident that there is no real danger.

—We know that the situation will end at a definite time.

Rollercoasters

Think about rollercoasters. Every year, different amusement parks vie to open the most extreme rollercoaster. State-of-the-art software calculates just how much centrifugal and centripetal force a human body can tolerate and designs the ride to the limits. Theme parks try to surpass their rivals to deliver the most exciting ride. Design engineering teams spend far more time designing a rollercoaster than designing a skyscraper.

People travel the world seeking the edge of endurance, the ultimate thrill on a rollercoaster. One of the latest at the time of writing is the one at Six Flags Magic Mountain in Los Angeles, California. It is 190 ft high and drops 215 ft at its greatest elevation at an angle of 88.5 degrees. That is just 1.5 degrees off a vertical drop. It has a top speed of 76 mph and a length of over half a mile. Riders are seated in vehicles that spin independently 360 degrees forward and backward.

And what do you experience if you ride this monster? You leave the starting point traveling backward and start to ascend vertically for 190 ft. You can see where you have been, but not where you are 45

FREE YOURSELF FROM FEARS

going. (Perhaps that is just as well.) Then the car begins its near-vertical drop; just as it does so, it flips so there is nothing between you and the ground below. You begin a 215 ft drop at an angle of nearly 90 degrees and just as you reach the top speed of 76 mph, the car flips again. Then you are into an 185 ft turn, called the Raven, because it seems you are flying like a bird… There are more turns and flips before you come back to a halt, shaken and stirred and maybe wondering where you left your stomach.

There are two main reactions to reading that last paragraph. One is: “Wonderful! I’d really like to try that!” The other one (which I share) is: “Are you insane? Wild horses wouldn’t get me on that!”

Fear builds up before the ride (especially if you have not been on it before). In the queue, waiting, hearing the screams of the riders eight stories above you… inching closer to the start… sitting in the car… you can’t back out now… what would your friends say? Your family would tease you for the rest of the day. Anyway there’s someone older/younger/bigger/smaller than you in the queue and they don’t seem to be frightened. Now you are being strapped in… and it’s too late to stop
nowwww
… On the ride itself, you’re so full of adrenaline and into the experience that there is no room for imaginary fears or speculations. Then, after the rush, it feels good when you stop. You survived. You are still alive. These emotions are underneath all the thrills that people seek. The mundane world seems less vivid, less real. So perhaps you join the queue to ride again.

What makes this fear acceptable is the thought that you will be safe in the end. Rollercoasters
are
safe. We want to be frightened, but safely.

When we are not personally in control, we want to know that someone trustworthy and reliable is in control. No one rides a rollercoaster after reading stories of structural weaknesses in rollercoasters and a sum-mary of all the fatal accidents on them for the last few years. After theme park accidents where rides collapse, sometimes hurting or even killing people, visitor numbers to the parks go down.

46

LEARNING AND UNLEARNING FEAR

Horror films

A good horror movie has its effect in a similar way. It draws you in, it must make you sympathize and identify with a character. You have to care. Then suddenly, when something happens, you are frightened. In the movie
The Shining
there is a passage where a man has come to the haunted hotel to help a little boy who is in trouble. This man seems to be the hero, so you might assume he will be safe—then the crazy character played by Jack Nicholson jumps out from behind a pillar and nearly cuts him in half with an axe. It’s on film in front of you, but you still flinch.

In most horror movies, when something scary happens, there is usually a surge of loud music or a sudden metallic sound that goes with it. It adds to your fear by making you jump, tapping into the fear of sudden loud noises from childhood. Also, horror films employ camera tricks to make you think you are closer to the floor than you are. They show everyday objects from below, often in a strange light and from an unusual angle. This is designed to make you feel like a child again, because when you were a child, you were closer to the floor. Objects that are familiar now were not familiar then and there was more to be afraid of.

It feels good to be afraid when watching a horror movie because it’s only a film, and in the end the monster is destroyed, the genie goes back into the bottle. It is like after a bad dream, when we wake up and breathe a sigh of relief that it was only a dream. We like to build tension in the body, even if that tension is not particularly comfortable, so that it feels good when it stops.

With rollercoasters or horror movies we seek out fear. We do this because we look ahead and put the fear into perspective. We believe everything will be all right. Any fear will be caused by uncertainty (are the cars on the rollercoaster safe?). The more we know that the situation is under control, the more we can give ourselves over to the delicious sensation of being frightened.

47

FREE YOURSELF FROM FEARS

Unlearning fear

Freedom comes from unlearning and eliminating unreal fear.

As we have seen, we learn fear from information, repetition, trauma, and example. Nobody forgets to be afraid. How do we remember the lesson? How do the trauma and repetition stay ingrained in our mind to affect us months and years later? What happens?

NLP proposes that one of the main reasons is that the fears are

“anchored” and triggered anew in the present whenever we experience the anchor. An anchor is anything that you see, hear, or feel that triggers a response or an emotional state, in this case fear. Anchors are all around us—whenever we respond without thinking, then we are responding to an anchor.

Fear is a habit

Anchors trigger habits. Think of being afraid as a habit that you can unlearn. Anything we have learned in the past and carry out without thinking in the present is a habit—and fear is no exception. We can learn to be afraid of anything—we make anchors that bring back the fear whenever we see them. Airplanes, authority figures, lifts, spiders: all can make you anxious if they are anchors and if you have learned to be afraid of them. There is nothing inherently fearful about any of these. We were not afraid of them when we were infants. If they evoke fear then it must be because we have learned it. They act as automatic triggers to the fear response.

Emotional freedom comes from being aware of the anchors you have and choosing to respond only to the ones you want.

Unlearning fear: Being aware of anchors
Be aware of the anchors you have that make you fearful. Anchors are timeless—once set up, the habit of fear runs by itself. To overcome a fear that is triggered by an anchor, you first need to become aware of the anchor and then to break it. You break it by consistently using one of the physical or mental strategies against fear that we will 48

LEARNING AND UNLEARNING FEAR

discuss in Part II. You stop your old response and build a new one—one that is more in tune with how you want to be and gives you more emotional freedom.

The second step is to build an anchor for a good feeling that will counteract the fear. These are called resource anchors and we will also deal with them in Part II. A resource anchor is something you see, hear, or feel that associates strongly with a good feeling you need in the situation. It will change your state so that you can think more clearly and decide what to do about the situation. My daughter’s dream catcher is an example of a resource anchor.

Before we move to Part II with its specific techniques to deal with different sorts of fear, we will look at the third aspect of NLP—language, and how our words can be used to build fear as well as relieve it. This involves not just the words we speak, but the internal dialogue we have with ourselves that helps to sustain our reality of how we think the world is.

49

Your immune system is always listening in on your self-talk.

DEEPAK CHOPRA

LANGUAGE IS THE
L
IN NLP. Language, thinking, and physiology are inextricably bound together. When you calm the body, it helps to disperse the mental pictures that are behind the unreal fear and you stop telling yourself and other people you are afraid. When you stop the mental pictures, you calm the body. In both cases, it affects the way you talk about fear.

Talking yourself into fear

How does language contribute to fear? First, internal dialogue can make you fearful. When you talk to yourself about how frightened you are, or how frightening some things will be, then you feel afraid.

People who talk to themselves about how awful a flight will be and how unsafe airplanes are will be frightened before and during the flight. You can use your internal dialogue as a resource against fear (see opposite). That means that it can also be used to
generate
fear. A scared voice tone will make you feel scared. So, when you are fearful, talk to yourself in a calming, reassuring voice tone. Also, use positive phrases, like “I am feeling calm.” Don’t use negative phrases about what you do not want. So for example, do not say to yourself “Don’t be afraid” or “I am not afraid,” because this just draws your attention to your fear. Also use phrases in the present tense. Say “I am feeling calm” and not “I want to feel calm.” Say what you want as if it is happening as you speak.

THE LANGUAGE OF FEAR

The ninth law of fear:

You can talk yourself into feeling afraid.

Skill for freedom

Using internal dialogue to calm fear

When talking to yourself about your fears: J Use a calming, reassuring voice tone.

J Use positive sentences in the present tense. Say “I am feeling calm”

rather than “Don’t be afraid.”

Remember that what you say to yourself is like a hypnotic suggestion, especially if you keep repeating it. Here is a personal example. When I was in my first year of secondary school, the English homework was to prepare a talk to give to the class about a film I had seen. I did the homework at the last minute; it was no more than a set of notes. The next day in the English class, everyone had to go to the front of the room and give their presentation. I hardly listened to my classmates’

presentations (except to note how good they were), but was willing the time to go quickly so the class would end before it was my turn.

Alas, I was not able to freeze time and my turn eventually came. It was an awful experience for me (and no doubt for the class too), as I mumbled through my notes and sat down afterward to an embarrassed silence. I can still remember the Cheshire-cat grin on the face of the English teacher.

This experience convinced me that I could not speak in public.

Whenever I tried, the picture of my English teacher’s grin would rise 51

FREE YOURSELF FROM FEARS

in my mind and I would feel afraid of humiliation. It was years afterward that I eventually gathered the courage and came to enjoy public speaking. It was not as awful as I feared. (And I was not 11 years old any more.)