What is fear? How do we control our fears?

We always have fears about something. When I was a young child, I feared monsters, I feared ghosts. How many of you were afraid of monsters and ghosts when you were a young child?

Have you ever thought about what makes you scared? Is it the uncertainties of a given situation?

When I was a young child, I often lay in my bed and thought about ghosts and monsters; I kept imagining them in my mind, what they would look like, even though I have never seen any.

As we grow older, there are so many other things that we fear. We fear about our health, we fear about our jobs, we fear just about anything that we can imagine. What I’m saying is that much of these fears are created by us in our own minds. We need to take control of our own minds, we need to take each fear into our hands and digest it and analyze it and learn why we have these fears.

In our life time, fears often come and go. We meet each fear head on, and having fear is normal. We should allow ourselves to fear, but then again – we also should analyze each fear for rationale.

The monsters and ghosts in our childhoods went away as we grew, for we have analyzed them and realized that they don’t really exist.

The best way to eliminate our fear is to determine why we have these fears in the first place. I want to add that the emotion of fear is a lifetime thing. We should accept fear, yet, we should also understand where the fears come from in order to heal ourselves. Once we’ve accepted the source of our fears then the healing is up to ourselves. We are in our own hands; we are the ones who hold our own destinies. There is no one to turn to who can help ourselves to heal; the healing comes to us only when we, ourselves, allow it to come to us.

Some years ago, my husband had encountered what the doctors had called it “The Anxiety Attacks.” At first we did not understand what it was about. He would wake up in the morning, go to work and would be fine all morning, but at sometime around two o’clock in the afternoon, the attacks would come on. He would be feeling dizzy, nauseated, and begin to sweat. His heart would be beating fast, racing. He checked into the hospital, and the hospital could not find anything wrong with him. It was the most frustrating period of our lives, as we did not know where all these anxieties had come from. I cannot remember to count how many times I had accompanied my hubby to the hospital emergency room, waited there for several hours each time, only to be told by the doctors that there was nothing wrong with him.

“How can there be nothing wrong with me when I’m feeling like this everyday?” I can still remember my hubby, being frustrated, asked the doctors this same question each time he visited, to which the doctors offered neither explanation nor solution. We went home disappointed each time, knowing the attacks would happen again the following day.

I felt powerless over this. I remember sitting down and asking myself, what was it that my husband had the anxiety about? Everything seemed to be okay, our children were the best behaved children, both of us had our jobs and were getting paid regularly, our bills were manageable, and so what was it that he had the anxiety about?

Yet everyday, around 2:00 p.m. my husband would have these attacks, and it was becoming more and more frequent. Finally I had to sit him down and let him know that perhaps much of these attacks occur because perhaps he expects it to happen at 2:00 p.m., that perhaps he was making himself anxious about these attacks; that perhaps he had become a clock watcher. By 1:00 p.m. everyday he dreaded. He became nervous, because in his mind he was expecting the attacks by 2:00 p.m. His fears would overcome him, and it would take total control of his mind, beads of sweat would pour out from his forehead, and he would once more become anxious, and the anxiety attacks would kick in full gear. So, you see, he had finally scared himself into having these attacks. The reason why he had not had those attacks in the morning was because he did not anticipate them in the morning.

My husband was soon prescribed some Prosac® by his doctor, and he became calm. The only way he had healed himself was that he reversed his own thinking. He had to tell himself that he was cured and it would not surface again if he could control his mind and convince himself not to anticipate a 2:00 p.m. attack. In the beginning it was very difficult to reverse his thinking. It took about a year for those attacks to finally fade away.

The first thing he did was to kick his own habit of being a clock watcher. During the first few days he concentrated on his work and did not look at the clock, and had let 2:00 p.m. slipped by. However, by 3:00 p.m. when he looked at the clock, he was both happy and nervous, he was happy that the attacks didn’t come around at 2:00 p.m., but then again he was expecting it to happen again and it did, but after 3:00 p.m.; so we came to the conclusion that the attacks don’t necessary happen around 2:00 p.m. everyday, it could happen around 3:00 p.m. – but only when he had expected it to happen and allowed himself to once again let the fears control him!

My husband now is clear of these attacks. He healings did not happen overnight; but through his own understanding of how these attacks had occurred, and how he himself manipulated his own mind to fight off his own fears that he had cured himself.

We must not allow the feeling of fears overcomes us in life. To fear of something is only because that ”something” is unknown to us. We must meet each fear as a challenge, digest it and analyze it, and then finally to control it and overcome it. This is the way to live a healthy life.

Copyright © Sandier May Angel
This article was published in Angel’s News
December, 2004

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