Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway

“I can do this.” When going through a transition, a change in your life or dealing with difficult situations, post “I can do this” as many places as possible: the car, the bathroom mirror, refrigerator door. Repeat hundreds of times as a silent mantra: “I can do this.”

Few of us embrace change wholeheartedly. We all can become immobilized, frozen to the spot and then actively go out of our way to avoid whatever it is that is frightening us.
 
We can become quite skilled at rearranging our lives to accommodate this avoidance.

The problem with avoiding is that the fear does not really go away. It actually grows in strength because we have just said to ourselves, “I can’t face this.” Turning away may feel like relief at first, but it’s like food poisoning, undetectable as it goes in, but capable of emptying us soon enough.

The feeling of anxiety that fear produces goes away only after we have shown ourselves over and over that we can move through it. As we learn to face the fear, when anxiety appears and it tells us that we must run or we will die or split apart, we refuse to be convinced of this.
 
We remember that anxiety is a feeling, not a prediction.  We become the perfect host. We open the door and usher in the anxiety so that we might practice new skills. The simple act of greeting the feeling sets in motion a different response set.

The crucial thing to keep in mind is that the real threat to our well being is avoidance. Each time we are able to think of that first feeling of panic as worthy of our interest, we have started down a different path. This may take time and practice, but after new psychological “muscle” has developed, we will happily continue down the path of personal freedom and self-acceptance without a look back.

You can do this.

Stress, Exercise and Meditation

Stress is familiar to most of us. It exists on a continuum from mild to extreme, 0 to 10.

The good news is that although we can’t control all the triggers of stress, we can make ourselves more resilient through exercise and meditation.  Even better, we can train ourselves to think of exercise as a form of meditation.  By combining exercise and meditation, we have joined the two most effective stress management tools into one.  What a deal!

Here’s how to do this.

Instead of secluding ourselves in a quiet room with soft music and space to focus on the breath, we get ourselves to an exercise class.  The meditation space becomes a studio with sweat, loud music, lots of bodies and probably plenty of mirrors. We take a deep breath and focus on the instructor’s cues.

(Hint for beginners: Give yourself at least six consecutive classes before either quitting or going more often.  Also, be prepared to feel a little silly. Learning something new makes us – all of us – feel awkward and unsure. Tell yourself, “I survived junior high, this is a piece of cake.”)

As we listen to the sound of the instructor’s cues, we go inside our own bodies to the muscles we are engaging. We imagine them as sets of pulleys and focus our internal eye on the awareness of the contraction and lengthening that is happening within us.

We stay with this and return to it if our mind wanders. We do this for longer and longer periods of time.

Each breath-to-movement coordination is a form of meditation.  Each one counts. They add up.

We make deposits into our stress resiliency account. Soon (in about 4 to 8 weeks) we have created a new habit.

We feel better about ourselves and are well on our way to that wonderful relief that comes when something we have been putting off turns into a natural part of our daily routine.

Fear, Anxiety, Emotional Pain: Where’s It Coming From?

A teenager’s drinking and drug use had reached crisis levels. His mother was understandably upset. As he went through treatment and some tough decisions about where and how to live his life, his mother’s anxiety did not ease.

Addiction is a years-long, even a life-long process. The son was doing well. He finished high school and college, started a career. His recovery was going well. He was safe. His mother knew that.

But his mother was still dealing with fears, depression and emotional pain that just would not go away.

With the help of others, she began to realize her reactions were far beyond rational considering her son’s recovery. Her relationship with her son and her husband was threatened by her fears. After years of suffering, she started looking inside herself to find where the unending emotional pain was coming from.

It took a lot of work to find the cause. Her son’s addiction crisis as a teenager reopened her own crisis as a teenager.  She had left a bad family situation at age 17. There was no healthy transition from childhood to adulthood. It was abrupt – and no one seemed to care that she had left
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She got on with the business of living, leaving the past behind. But her son’s crisis had triggered memories of her own crisis. When she saw that the pain was coming from inside herself, she was able to start the process of healing.

Often, a diagnosis may seem obvious – an immediate family crisis, for example.  But when the crisis is over and the pain is still there, it is time to seek the real diagnosis and begin the work of recovery.