An Anxious Life - Your Fears and Your Family By Erika Krull, MS, LMHP

No, you don’t have an anxiety problem. You don’t feel jittery or get sweaty palms every day. How could that be true? Well, a life lived from a base of anxiety and fear might look different than you’d expect. And you might be surprised by the impact your fears have on your family.

When you operate out of your anxieties and fears, you may not see the whole picture. Since you don’t seem to have obvious symptoms of anxiety, you might very likely brush this off. But here’s the key to understanding this viewpoint. People with a perspective largely influenced by fear and anxiety often live life in a tiny “box”. They cut themselves off from most things that could provoke their anxiety. And if they successfully avoid these opportunities, they may not feel classic anxiety symptoms all that often.

They have missed the whole point that their life is lived to avoid feeling anxious whenever possible. They trade interest and excitement for feeling comfortable and safe. If this person’s true anxiety problem isn’t addressed and treated, they may live many years before they understand the bigger impact of their behaviors and choices.

When you have a family, everything you do could potentially impact someone besides yourself. Life is no longer just about you and your absolute comfort level. Marriage pushes you to go beyond yourself and think of your spouses needs and happiness. Having kids presses your boundaries of patience, learning, and maturity. And these are good things, things that can help you develop into a more well-rounded fulfilled human being.

If you regularly refuse to visit family, turn down your kids’ invitation to visit them at school, avoid going to social events, and say no to travel opportunities with your family, start thinking hat that’s about. You know your own life better than I do, so I’m not accusing everyone of having an anxiety problem if they really don’t like their mother in law! No, I’m asking you to consider the bigger pattern. And if you think this might describe your spouse, think about how they generally approach life.

Living life to avoid anxiety is like playing not to lose. You try to keep yourself so safe, you might really cut yourself out of real life. Your kids start getting used to you not being involved in family activities. Your spouse might start assuming you are MIA when it comes to holidays and social gatherings. Your withdrawal creates exactly what you hoped for - distance and low expectations.

Your attempts to make yourself feel safe and unthreatened may actually be the moves that further cut you off from everyone. And when you realize how lonely you are, it may be hard to reconnect. Your spouse and kids may become very frustrated with their hopes to connect with you and your continued efforts to stay safe. And when you do try to connect, they may or may not have much hope it will last.

By withdrawing into a tiny box, you pull away a piece of each family member’s soul with you. This is what untreated anxiety can be like. And without very many obvious symptoms of anxiety - silently pulling the family apart.

Erika Krull, MS, LMHP is a practicing licensed mental health counselor in Nebraska.

FEAR AND REASON.

"In civilized life it has at last become possible for large numbers of people to pass from the cradle to the grave without ever having had a pang of genuine fear. Many of us need an attack of mental disease to teach us the meaning of the word." William James.

We have all heard the seemingly discriminating remarks that fear is normal and abnormal, and that normal fear is to be regarded as a friend, while abnormal fear should be destroyed as an enemy.

The fact is that no so called normal fear can be named which has not been clearly absent in some people who have had every cause therefor. If you will run over human history in your mind, or look about yea in the present life, you will find here and there persons who, in situations or before objects which ought, as any fearful soul will insist, to inspire the feeling of at least normal self-protecting fear, are nevertheless wholly without the feeling. They possess every feeling and thought demanded except fear. The idea of self-preservation is as strongly present as with the most abjectly timid or terrified, but fear they do not know. This fearless awareness of fear suggesting conditions may be due to several causes. It may result from constitutional make-up, or from long continued training or habituation, or from religious ecstasy, or from a perfectly calm sense of spiritual selfhood which is unhurtable, or from the action of very exalted reason. Whatever the explanation, the fact remains: the very causes which excite fear in most of us, merely appeal, with such people, if at all. to the instinct of self-preservation and to reason, the thought-element of the soul which makes for personal peace and wholeness.

Banish all fear.

It is on such considerations that I have come to hold that all real fear-feeling should and may be banished from our life, and that what we call "normal fear" should be substituted in our language by "instinct" or by "reason," the element of fear being dropped altogether.

"Everyone can testify that the psychical state called fear consists of mental representations of certain painful results" (James). The mental representations may be very faint as such, but the idea of hurt to self is surely present. If, then, it can be profoundly believed that the real self cannot be hurt; if the reason can be brought to consider vividly and believingly all quieting considerations; if the self can be held consciously in the assurance that the White Life surrounds the true self, and is surely within that self, and will suffer "no evil to come nigh," while all the instincts of self preservation may be perfectly active, fear itself must be removed "as far as the east is from the west."

These are the ways, then, in which any occasion for fear may be divided:

As a warning and as a maker of panic. But let us say that the warning should be understood as given to reason, that fear need not appear at all, and that the panic is perfectly useless pain. With these discriminations in mind, we may now go on to a preliminary study of fear.

preliminary study of fear.

Fear is (a) an impulse, (b) a habit, (c) a disease.

Fear, as it exists in man, is a make-believe of sanity, a creature of the imagination, a state of insanity.

Furthermore, fear is, now of the nerves, now of the mind, now of the moral consciousness.

The division depends upon the point of view. What is commonly called normal fear should give place to reason, using the word to cover instinct as well as thought. From the correct point of view all fear is an evil so long as entertained.

Whatever its manifestations, wherever its apparent location, fear is a psychic state, of course, reacting upon the individual in several ways: as, in the nerves, in mental moods, in a single impulse, in a chronic habit, in a totally unbalanced condition. The reaction has always a good intention, meaning, in each case, "Take care! Danger!" You will see that this is so if you will look for a moment at three comprehensive kinds of fear fear of self, fear for self, fear for others. Fear of self is indirectly fear for self danger. Fear for others signifies foresensed or forepictured distress to self because of anticipated misfortune to others. I often wonder whether, when we fear for others, it is distress to self or hurt to them that is most emphatically in our thought.

Fear, then, is usually regarded as the soul's danger signal. But the true signal is instinctive and thoughtful reason.

Even instinct and reason, acting as warning, may perform their duty abnormally, or assume abnormal proportions. And then we have the feeling of fear. The normal warning is induced by actual danger apprehended by mind in a state of balance and self-control. Normal mind is always capable of such warning. There are but two ways in which so-called normal fear, acting in the guise of reason, may be annihilated: by the substitution of reason for fear, and by the assurance of the white life.

Let it be understood, now, that by normal fear is here meant normal reason real fear being denied place and function altogether. Then we may say that such action of reason is a benefactor to man. It is, with pain and weariness, the philanthropy of the nature of things within us.

One person said: "Tired? No such word in my house!" Now this cannot be a sound and healthy attitude. Weariness, at a certain stage of effort, is a signal to stop work. When one becomes so absorbed in labor as to lose consciousness of the feeling of weariness, he has issued a "hurry call" on death. I do not deny that the soul may cultivate a sublime sense of buoyancy and power; rather do I urge you to seek that beautiful condition; but I hold that when a belief or a hallucination refuses to permit you to hear the warning of nerves and muscles, Nature will work disaster inevitably. Let us stand for the larger liberty which is joyously free to take advantage of everything Nature may offer for true well-being. There is a partial liberty which tries to realize itself by denying various realities as real; there is a higher liberty which really realizes itself by conceding such realities as real and by using or disusing them as occasion may require in the interest of the self at its best. I hold this to be true wisdom: to take advantage of everything which evidently promises good to the self, without regard to this or that theory, and freely to use all things, material or immaterial, reasonable or spiritual. I embrace your science or your method; but I beg to ignore your bondage to philosophy or to consistency. So I say that to normal health the weary-sense is a rational command to replenish exhausted nerves and muscles.

It is not liberty, it is not healthful, to declare, "There is no pain!" Pain does exist, whatever you affirm, and your affirmation that it does not is proof that it does exist, for why (and how) declare the non-existence of that which actually is non-existent? But if you say, "As a matter of fact I have pain, but I am earnestly striving to ignore it, and to cultivate thought-health so that the cause of pain may be removed," that is sane and beautiful. This is the commendable attitude of the Bible character who cried: "Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief." To undertake swamping pain with a cloud of psychological fog that is to turn anarchist against the good government of Nature. By pain Nature informs the individual that he is somewhere out of order. This warning is normal. The feeling becomes abnormal in the mind when imagination twangs the nerves with reiterated irritation, and Will, confused by the discord and the psychic chaos, cowers and shivers with fear.

I do not say there is no such thing as fear. Fear does exist. But it exists in your life by your permission only, not because it is needful as a warning against "evil."

Fear is induced by unduly magnifying actual danger, or by conjuring up fictitious dangers through excessive and misdirected psychical reactions. This also may be taken as a signal of danger, but it is a falsely-intentioned witness, for it is not needed, is hostile to the individual because it threatens self-control and it absorbs life's forces in useless and destructive work when they ought to be engaged in creating values.

You Must Change the 148,000 No's In Your Subconscious to Yes's

What does it take to succeed? How can you move forward - no, take
a quantum leap forward - in your achievements, in realizing your
dreams?

According to some research, a person who grows up in an average,
reasonably positive home is told "no" or told what he or she
cannot do over 148,000 times before they hit their 18th birthday!
The number of "yes'" or encouragement on what they can do is far
smaller than the "no's", "shoulds" and "shouldn'ts" (which are
all "no's").

So what?

Well, think about it. The results you achieve in your life are a
result of the actions you take. So what determines the actions
you will take?

Let us first discuss the power of practice and repetition. We all
know that repetition creates habit. Our brains and physiology
learns through repetition. We are pattern-making and pattern-
following creatures. Practice makes perfect. Whether you like it
or not, the more you repeat something, the more it becomes part
of you.

Repetition is programming. Repetition is programming. And 148,000
"no's" is a lot of programming!

Repetition creates programming, which in turn creates beliefs,
which in turn determine your thoughts and emotions, which in turn
determine your actions, which in turn determine your results.

Have you noticed how you tend to think the same kind of thoughts
over and over again? Studies show that we have about 50,000
thoughts per day, and a whooping 90% of them are repetitive! Like
an old, tired record. And remember, repetition creates patterns,
habits. You are literally hypnotizing yourself with your repeated
thoughts.

Other research shows that 77% of everything that most people
think about is negative, self-damaging, hindering, and
counterproductive. Now, remember, your results come from your
actions, and your actions come from your thoughts, and your
thoughts come from your beliefs, and beliefs come from your
programming (what you repeatedly tell yourself or get told).

It goes even further than that. Your subconscious mind controls
almost everything about you. For example, it controls your
autonomic nervous system. What is that? Here is what the
Microsoft Encarta encyclopedia says: "Autonomic Nervous System,
in vertebrate anatomy, one of the two main divisions of the
nervous system, supplying impulses to the body's heart muscles,
smooth muscles, and glands. The autonomic system controls the
action of the glands; the functions of the respiratory,
circulatory, digestive, and urogenital systems; and the
involuntary muscles in these systems and in the skin. Controlled
by nerve centers in the lower part of the brain, the system also
has a reciprocal effect on the internal secretions, being
controlled to some degree by the hormones and exercising some
control, in turn, on hormone production." Which all means that
your hormones, energy levels, actions and so forth are controlled
by the subconscious mind. If you have told yourself that you are
clumsy, the subconscious will work with your hormones, motor
skills, and so on and make you act, move and talk stupid. If you
have told yourself that you don't fit in social situations, you
will find yourself standing in the corner not fitting. Whatever
you say, boss. Your subconscious is like a computer. Whatever you
program into it, it makes happen. No questions asked. You are the
boss, and whatever you say, happens.

Your imagination, your thoughts, what you perceive, what you
don't perceive, what you see and what you miss, how you act, what
you feel... these are all determined by one thing: your
programming, what you repetitively tell yourself (and what you
repetitively got told or observed during your youthful formation
years).

So how do you take the quantum leap, how do you step out of the
box of your own thoughts and see beyond it. How do you program
yourself for success? Well, the same way you create all
programming: practice. Repetition. You have to not only find what
works positively for you, but you have to practice that new
positive way over and over until it becomes part of you. Positive
thinking and self-help advice will not work unless you make it
permanent for you by practicing it over and over. Your entire
physiology has to be rewired; your neural pathways (which create
pattern and memory) have to be redrawn. All this happens by
practice. Repetition. Repetition. Repetition. Practice. Then one
day, like with everything else you ever learnt through practice,
you just find yourself automatically doing it! It becomes you!

Ok, now how fast and to what extent can you grow your
consciousness within one lifetime? The quick and dirty answer is
that there is an average rate of growth, but there are no limits.
According to Dr. David R. Hawkins, M.D., Ph.D., in his
bestselling book Power vs. Force, people on average tend to
increase their consciousness by 5 points in a lifetime (on a
scale of 0 to 1000). So if you were born at a consciousness level
of 300, you tend to get to 305 by the time you die. But that is
an average that includes billions of people. There is nothing to
limit anyone except their own choices. Many are on record for
having achieved 100% or even 2000% increases or more, where they
are literally renewed and are different in just about everyway. A
transformation happens.

So if you wish to leap forward, know that nothing stops you. But
also know that you have to leap forward in your mind first. You
have to re-write the negative programming that is keeping you
where you are. And re=programming is done best through acting in
the new way and practicing that over and over until it becomes
part of you. The more you open up, let go, allow, trust and not
resist or defend your old ways, the faster you will move forward.
Practice. Whatever you do, practice until it becomes you. And it
will happen automatically, you will find yourself anew.



Article written by David Cameron Gikandi. For even greater
insights into your quest for wealth and financial liberty and
ability, go here:

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