Confronting fear

[Bill]

I know the most common phrase you'll probably hear to overcome your anxious feelings etc is to "confront your fear".

But how exactly?

I'm not sure people always understand what it actually means so they attempt to confront their fear but go about it the wrong way and wonder then why it didn't work so I thought I'd try writing a thread on it.

I can remember when I first heard the phrase. Confronting sounded like you had to fight your fear. Well, yes you do but again it has to be done in the right way.

Then someone told me that to confront your fear actually meant to NOT fight it and NOT to try and resist it. The penny dropped then and I made sense of it.

Imagine being afraid of SPIDERS! AAArrggh! I can sense your cringing already! Imagine someone saying to you that to overcome your fear you need to confront the spider. You walk up to the spider feeling terrified but you pluck up the courage to touch it!!! Right, you've achieved it, you've overcome your fear.......but have you? You walk away from it trembling, shaking, feeling sick and your breathing is all over the place and you're thinking to yourself why do you feel so ill when you've confronted your fear?

The next time you see a spider, again you attempt to touch it but again you walk away feeling ill. It's not working you think! Why not?

Well, the reason it feels it's not working is because although you're confronting your fear, you're still fighting AGAINST your fear because the spider still represents FEAR to you.

Confronting fear means to be able to walk up to the spider and touch it without fighting your fear. In other words, not allowing yourself to resist the anxious feelings but instead letting them go THROUGH you as if the spider is a cream cake!

The same applies to every fear. When we "think" a frightening thought or are faced with a situation that frightens us, we start trying to resist the fear which means the body tenses up which induces panic.

CBT slowly builds our confidence by gradually confronting our fears to de-sensitise us to the things that frighten us that create our panics. At first we will still feel ill but gradually as our confidence builds and the fear diminishes, the anxious feelings also ease. It's learning not to react to fear by not allowing it to bother us whether it's a frightening thought or a spider!

We need to confront our fears by allowing the fear to go THROUGH us and NOT resisting it. If we try to resist, the thoughts keep coming back. Once the thoughts realise they can't frighten us, the anxious symptoms go away.

[Alisonj]

Thank you for this thread Bill

[Gryphoenix]

I've had so many spiders...

T____T

But this is a brilliant thread Bill, I don't think anyone's put it in such simple and easy-to-relate to terms. It's almost too simple, as if it can really be that easy. Hard to do, possible to do, but easy as a concept.

And it makes sense cause I know I and a lot of other people do feel ill the second time we try the scary thing and being scared of the ill feeling reinforces the 'scary'. It's the negative thinking thing with me I believe--instead of seeing how good I did, I focus on "you still felt bad" instead of "you did it and you really weren't as bad off as yesterday!"