There Are Only TWO Fears

That’s it.  

Every other fear is LEARNED.  Therefore, every other fear can be UNLEARNED.  

The truth is that our neurology is set up to recognize patterns, generalize, predict, and protect us from harm. We’d be in a world of trouble if we could not generalize from one speeding object (car) to another (baseball) and predict the consequences of stepping into that object’s path.  The problem arises when we experience a fear response and unconsciously generalize it to an unrelated condition or circumstance.  

The good news is that it’s a relatively EASY matter to unlink those over-generalized fear responses.  What we have to understand is not HOW you came to link them, but how you are presently experiencing them.  In the present moment, we can create NEW pathways from stimulus to response in a matter of minutes.  

In 95% of cases, I’m not really interested in WHY you have a panic attack at the sight of a koosh ball.  It could literally happen to ANYONE.  But the truth of the matter is that every story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. There’s a time when you’re not scared, and then a time when something happens that provokes a fear response, and then a time when everything is fine again and you’re not scared anymore. When the fear response is so powerful that it stops us in the middle, where the fear is, we never reach the end where we’re safe again.  

That’s the first thing to understand about fearful stories: keep going to the end.  

The second thing to understand is that HOW you experience that fear internally is crucial to dismantling it. When we understand the internal drivers that keep that response in place, we can quickly and easily unlink them from the triggering agent.