A gang rape of
a teen girl, took place over several hours at a high school, with onlookers who
did nothing. It happened just last
month in an adjacent county to where I live. Among the many reactions to this horrific incident, here’s
the first that’s positive and proactive for women, albeit an action than can
seem self-serving.
A local author is co-offering a free self-defense class. As
someone who chronicled her recovery from violent abuse in her book, Skinny, Tan
and Rich: Unveiling the Myth, Maryanne Comaroto will teach emotional
self-defense techniques. Her
colleague will teach physical self-defense techniques.
Comaroto’s core message is “TLC: Trust yourself, love yourself and control yourself." Reflecting the insights in security firm founder Gavin DeBecker’s excellent book, The Gift of Fear, Comaroto suggests that, “One of the things we typically don’t do is trust our intuition. It’s the first indicator we maybe in danger.“
That’s the
money quote for me, one I hope each of us has grown into knowing and doing by
this stage in our lives.
Whenever you’ve felt profound fear, it was linked to the presence of danger, imminent pain or death. Said DeBecker in a National Public Radio interview, “When we get a fear signal, our intuition has already made many connections. When you feel fear, try to ‘link’ it back to a past situation where the feeling that was similar to see if your fear is, in fact, justified.”
While the media often portrays human violence as random, de Becker points out that it seldom is random. In fact, you can anticipate the patterns of impending danger in most cases, if you listen to your instinct of genuine fear and take action. DeBecker’s book offers specific criteria for how you can better protect yourself by learning to recognize and act on the intuitive signals you pick up but reject as unfounded.
Worry, on the other hand, is the fear we manufacture. Worry, anxiety, concern and wariness all have a purpose, but they are not fear. Any time your dreaded outcome cannot be reasonably linked to pain or death and it isn’t a signal in the presence of danger, then it really should not be confused with fear.
Worry is a
form of self-harassment.
Worry will not bring solutions. Worry distracts from finding solutions.
To free yourself from worry sooner, understand what it really is. Most people worry because it provides some secondary reward such as:
• Worry is a way to avoid change; when we worry, we don’t do anything about the matter.
• Worry allows us to avoid admitting powerlessness over something, since worry feels like we’re doing something. Prayer also makes us feel like we’re doing something, and even the most committed agnostic will admit that prayer is more productive than worry.
• Worry is a cloying way to have a connection with others. Worry somehow shows love. The other side of this is the beleif that not worrying about someone means you don’t care about that person. As many people who’ve been worried about know well, worry is a poor substitute for love or for taking loving action.
• Worry is a protection against future disappointment. After you complete an important project where the success of your approach won’t be known for some while, for example, you can worry about it.
Ostensibly, if you can feel the experience of failure now, rehearse it, so to speak, by worrying about it, then failing won’t feel as bad when it happens. But how would you want to spend the time while you find out: worrying, playing or initiating another action on another endeavor?
There is a Pay-off for Worry But Not a Healthy One
For some people, worrying is a “magical amulet”, according to Emotional Intelligence author, Daniel Goleman. Some people feel it wards off danger. They truly believe that worrying about something will stop it from happening.
Most of what
people worry about has a low probability of occurring, because we tend to take
action about those things we feel are likely to occur. This means that very often the mere
fact that you are worrying about something is a predictor that it isn’t likely
to happen.
The connection between real fear and worry is similar to the relationship between pain and suffering. Pain and fear are necessary and valuable components of life. Suffering and worry are destructive and unnecessary parts of life. Worry interrupts clear thinking, wastes time, and shortens your life.
When worrying, ask yourself, “How does this serve me?”
To be freer of fear and yet still get its gift, consider these techniques:
1. When you
feel fear, listen.
2. When you don’t feel fear, don’t manufacture it.
3. If you find yourself creating worry, explore and discover why.
We Choke on Anxiety
Anxiety, unlike real fear and like worry, is always caused by uncertainty. it is caused, ultimately, by predictions in which you have little confidence. If you predict you will be fired and you are certain that your prediction is correct, you don’t have anxiety about being fired, but about the ramifications of losing a job.
Predictions in which you have a high confidence free you to respond, adjust, feel sadness, accept, prepare, or to do whatever you need to do. You can reduce your anxiety by improving your predictions, thus increasing your certainty. It’s worth doing, because the word anxiety, like worry, stems from a root that means “to choke,” and that is just what it does to us.
Our imaginations can be fertile soil in which worry and anxiety grow from seeds to weeds, but when we assume the imagined outcome is a sure thing, we are in conflict with what Proust called an inexorable law: “Only that which is absent can be imagined.” In other words, what you imagine -- just like what you fear -- is not happening.
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