1686. “I’m terrified of life.” — II

Her Highness Catalinarea at post 1684 also claimed to be terrified of life. I offer the following for her and others similarly inclined. Recovery is a mind game. Hopefully, I will make it easy if not simple to win.

First, however, Catalinarea asked me to define these terms.

• Internalizing: It means to think selfishly, mostly of yourself, of threats to you, of your fears, of your worries, of your conclusions about your incompetence, insignificance, and lack of worth in your world. (As expected, it brings a person to their knees, but so many don’t believe or don’t know to look up for help. They continue to melt in their misery.)
• Externalizing: It means to bypass your selfishness and tackle the world you live in, to think in ways that enable you to learn more and better, generate beneficial effects, and more assertively please yourself with achievements and others with your presence and actions.

You know it, but you’re frozen with fear sustained by inaction. It’s a self-induced helplessness. It takes on its own persona and intensifies if not dealt with directly.

Certain changes in action and thought can turn the game to your advantage. Each new belief and habit of thought devours the pressures of fear. Winning comes from making progress in a determined fashion more than it comes from trying to conquer fears. Action cures fear that even well-intentioned thoughts can’t overcome.

Most fears are comparative. People think they don’t deserve what others have, because they can’t do what others do. They compare and come out short. More comparisons lead to more shortcomings. Frozen with fear, whatever they manage to achieve is devalued in order to sustain the certainty of previous beliefs, aka self-induced misery.

Failure symbolizes the end of something; you walk away from it. Everything else is a mistake, and it enables recovery to revitalize life and displace fears. The only thing wrong with failure is not getting up again to start something else. Successful people come from a long line of failures and even more mistakes. Figure yourself out: Do you fear failure, success, mistakes, or just doing things differently than before?

Watch closely: Failure often comes from fear of success. Success means you deserve self-praise, but beliefs about your unworthiness prevent it. You’re not worthy of praise, which makes you fearful of doing more. After all, you think, I was lucky this time. Unable to believe yourself worthy, you avoid success by not trying and you rationalize threat of failure as the excuse. It’s a mind game you play with yourself.

Success comes from failures and mistakes supressed by one’s devotion to their ambitions, goals, and dreams. Trying to develop the electric light bulb, Edison claimed that he didn’t fail thousands of times, but he found thousands of ways that didn’t work. He didn’t call each attempt a failure, and so he neither quit nor melted into self-inflicted misery. You should drop the word failure from your vocabulary and thoughts. You can defeat your fears by finding something else to do, putting your endless abilities to work, and believing more clearly and deliberately in yourself.

Action cures fear. Get rid of failure and success from your vocabulary and thoughts. You do it by repeatedly taking actions that may lead to either failure or success but you don’t give a hoot which. You’re bound to do something, anything, to escape the miserable frozen wasteland of fear.

Actions overpower thoughts. To change your thoughts, change your actions. To change your actions, take other actions. Your subconscious mind, from which both good and bad habits flow, is programmed by repeated actions. Conscious thoughts matter little in changing habits. You’ll find more in articles that begin with the term “Self-“ in the CONTENTS page at blog top. They cite many ways to figure yourself out in order to help yourself.

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