how to face your fears?

[allergyphobia]

Hi all, looking for some wisdom sharing.

Do you, and if so what techniques do you use you to face your fears? When you face them, do you feel like you are on the road to conquering them? Tonight i've been told by someone to just "bite the bullet"... I can understand the advice, I can even see it is the way to prove to myself that I will be okay if i eat certain foods or be in certain situations... but how do you convince yourself to do something...when you are so convinced that something bad will happen when you do it?

:unsure:

[bottleblond]

Hi there

I totaly get what you mean. I have a fear of trying anything new. Food is my main thing. I know it's hard but we have to do this very gradually.

My way of trying to work with this is to break it down.Eg: a few weeks ago, i was in my friends house and she had some chilli bread, it looked and smelled amazing but when offered a piece, i was terrified to try it. Then i started to reason with myself, i knew i wasn't allergic to bread because i eat it every day then i thought, ok i'm not allergic to chillies as i have had them in pizzas too. Then we begin to think, ok what if there is another ingredient in there that i may be allergic to. Outcome, i tried the bread and loved it. This has happened to me hundreds of times with foods and drinks but not been allergic to anything yet apart from Quorne but that just gave me tummy cramps and avoided it from then.

I know how difficult this is but try to reason with yourself and think of other foods you have had that contain one or more of the same ingredient. When you break it down like this, it's easier to be more confident to try new things.

Good luck hun

Lisa
xx

[Bill]

Simple question but very long answer I'm afraid and I'm not sure how much help it will be but these are 3 old threads I wrote that seemed most appropriate in answer to your question.

Confronting fear



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.

The bridge



Picture yourself standing in the middle of a wooden planked bridge over a deep ravine. In front of you there is a fog and behind you natives holding spears.

You're afraid to move. You fear falling if you tread on a rotten plank, you can't go back anyway because of the natives and in front you're afraid of what is hidden within the fog so you stay where you are because that's the only place you feel safe.

However, fear surrounds you - below, in front and behind. You feel panicky and dizzy, and you're trembling with palpitations....but you feel safest where you are.

The natives though start moving towards you. They force you to decide your fate. To jump to certain death or to confront the unknown in the fog. You decide on the fog because at least in there it might not be as bad as you fear.

You walk into the fog and it gradually clears to reveal green pastures around a town where the people are friendly.

Your anxiety disappears.

Moral of the story....

You may feel safe where you exist but if "a fear" surrounds you, your place of safety will be your cage where you will suffer continuous anxious symptoms because your mind will constantly be thinking about your fear, even if you're not aware of exactly the thought that you're afraid of. You will though be aware of the anxious symptoms and the more you think about the symptoms, the more fear will control you and prevent you from moving to freedom.

The natives are your past bad experiences, the ravine is the present where your bad past experiences have caused you to fear falling and the fog represents your fear of an uncertain future.

If we can come to terms with our past, don't dwell on our fears in the present and keep moving forward with determination and hope, we will always have a chance of finding some enjoyment in living to help us move on with our lives.

Our lack of confidence



What happens after we experience a panic attack? We lose confidence and doubt begins to rule by making us think "what if" we suffer another attack. The more we question ourselves, the more panicky we feel, the more the panic attacks occur.

What happens when we make a mistake? We lose confidence and doubt takes over. We become unsure of ourselves fearing we'll make another mistake so we double check ourselves, become more intense and more anxious because we don't allow ourselves to make mistakes.

What happens when we feel ill? We question the symptoms. We worry why we're feeling them and the more we worry, the more we become anxious and end up convincing ourselves we've not just got a cold.

What happens when we feel hurt? We doubt ourselves. We question what we did wrong to upset someone. We question what's wrong with us.

What happens when people have a go at us or belittle us? We end up thinking they're right and that we must be inadequate and worthless. We doubt ourselves and our worthiness.



If there is such a thing as a magic cure then the confidence pill would cure all our anxieties. In all the above examples, if we had more confidence in ourselves, our decisions, opinions and abilities then we wouldn't suffer anxiety as a result.

So how do you build confidence? Through pushing ourselves to overcome what we're afraid of and by building self belief because then we grow more confident and doubt ourselves less.

Think about that one word - "Confidence" - then think of it's power to heal anxiety because Confidence is the Key.

A supremely confident person feels capable of Anything but the only difference between them and us is that one word - Confidence!:hugs:

[allergyphobia]

im so sorry i didnt notice either of the replied here.

Bill, i am at work atm so going to print off your reply and read it properly at home as it all looks very helpful advice.

BB, i had no idea you had suffered from similar problems. Your comments are very motivational to me. I really think the idea of breaking down whats in things, and what i have had before is going to help me...

X

[mumble]

I get very worried trying new foods too, even old foods that I used to love, recently I have been in tears trying to eat them with my partner as support. I've found just having a small amount, for example, I only recently started having ice cream again (dairy free) and started with a scraping, then had a teaspoonful a few hours later. Then next day had a bigger spoonful.

[allergyphobia]

i'm the same mumble...food i used to eat without a thought i am now agonising over... it's ridiculous and disheartening, i can't even attempt new foods. i'm pressured by a deadline of getting back on track by december 11th as i have a works meal that i had to pay upfront for... i feel like it's never going to happen as been this bad since april :'(....i agree with the baby steps though... a tiny amount and waiting a couple of hours for a "reaction"... so hard when i'm working full time to find the time to test myself... but i suppose if i don't i'll never get anywhere...

[mumble]

It is difficult getting over the initial hump - but especially with old foods, we need to remind ourselves we've had them before and it was okay. I try to logicalize (is that a word?) a lot of this stuff, but the logical part of my brain doesn't always win against the other side!

[allergyphobia]

i know you're right. my CBT man tells me to make a record of all the time i eat a food so i can see evidence of how many times i have eaten it and be fine, this helps me quite a bit.

[jillyb]

I am just the same with the food things - but I'm not as brave as you! It started with a phobia about peanuts, then developed into all nuts. It's really hard work having to check every food label! I can eat things that are 'made in a factory that uses nuts' but that's as far as it goes. Never had a nut allergy by the way! It's the same with toothpaste, shampoo and all sorts of everyday things. Too low to try at the moment but when I feel better I am really going to go for it. I got stung by a wasp when I was on holiday (another terror!) and, after the initial panic I managed to calm myself and hey, guess what, I didn't have anaphylactic shock! I think I coped because I felt much more relaxed on holiday. Even managed not to wake up with overwhelming anxiety. Permanent holiday - that's why I need! My mind is really good at fear and anxiety, shame it's rubbish at non-anxiety and calm. x

[allergyphobia]

hi jilly......my phobia covers nuts but also all sorts of foods. do you eat out at the moment? i'm too scared but got to in december. it's a nightmare checking every label... i wont even eat ones made in a factory with nuts, just seeing the word scares me. im scared of wasps....latex.....celery(!!)....shellfish...all the big things people are allergic to. i try and be brave but sometimes you get so tired of trying you just wanna curl up and eat what you know is fine and not have to deal with the constant anxiety. mine recently went onto shampoo and toothpaste...even stopped brushing my teeth at one point (gross i know...) but have recently changed shampoo brands to push myself and am back to regular tooth brushing (hoorah). it's all peaks and troughs and i bet you are doing a lot better than you think. even though you think it was easy to cope on holiday with the wasp i think that's a massive achievement because for me i would find it worse out of my comfort zone.

if ever you wanna chat just pm me x

[Bill]

Sometimes I feel it's not the fear of something that we're actually afraid of but rather the fear of anxious feelings caused by worrying after we've confronted our phobia.

We create daily barriers to avoid these anxious feelings so we end up creating an irrational minefield to get through.

I think our minds face a daily battle between the rational and irrational. Our rational side will say we having nothing to fear but our irrational side will be thinking what if our rational side is wrong!

Then it comes down to proof. Proving to our irratonal side that the rational side is right and the only way to obtain proof is by taking risk by lowering one barrier at a time that our irrational side has created.

For instance, we see a spider. Our rational side will say you have nothing to fear. It won't bite, it can't cause any harm and yet our irrational side will tll us we're terrified to go near it but it's not actually the spider we fear - it's the anxious feelings we know we'll feel if we even attempt to go near it. After all, we all know the spider can't harm so why should we be afraid? I believe it's not the spider but the feelings it creates that we're afraid of.

Our irrational side triggers a reaction causing us to worry creating anxious feelings so we avoid the spider to avoid the feelings it represents.

I think it's the same with any phobia that we're afraid of the feelings we'll feel if we confront our phobia so we create barriers to avoid feeling anxious. In other words, our fear of feeling fear.

In CBT, they believe that to overcome this fear is to "de-sensitise" us to our phobias. Whatever our phobias are, they are a result of "sensitivity" so that whenever we come across our phobia it impacts on us because it immedately triggers an irrational defence mechanism causing us to tense up. When we tense up, we experience anxious feelings and it's those feelings we feel the need to avoid so we end up avoiding our phobia but this means our sensitivity lives on. To de-sensitise means to allow us to feel these anxious feelings to show that they themselves can't do any harm and that they'll gradually subside on their own. In this way, we become relaxed with our phobia because we almost become bored of it but this also means the next time we come across our phobia we don't feel the anxious feelings and therefore it becomes no longer a phobia because we've proved to our irrational side there is nothing to fear but the fear we create for ourselves.

I'll tell you something that will sound really silly!:blush: I've always hated the colour black! At this time of year it always seems dark out, the shops are filled with black clothes and everyone walks around in them melting into the black background. Since I had always connected black with bad things happening, you can imagine how difficult it was to avoid black! Well, years ago I couldn't cross the road behind a black car. I couldn't even touch one! I couldn't look at a crow or rook last without looking for another bird. I couldn't touch black bags without washing my hands immediately afterwards.

My irrational side would be saying "what if" I didn't avoid and I ended up causing harm but my rational side would be saying it's crazy to even think it but my irrational side would win because I wanted to avoid the anxious feelings caused by worry if I didn't avoid. Well, the only way I overcame my "silly" behaviour was to stop avoiding things that I Knew were irrational to prove to myself my rational side was right.

Doesn't stop me still hating black though!...but I'm no longer afraid of going near it!:hugs:(I feel I ought to add that my phobia ONLY applied to black "objects", clothes or birds as I connected the colour with funerals, if you see what I mean).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1l-HHuZNnFc :D

[jillyb]

Hi Allergyphobia - just seen your post. Good to know I am not alone with all this nonsense!!! Like you, I am scared of nearly anything I have ever heard or read that someone had an allergic reaction too! Yes I do eat out, but only when I can be sure there will be things I can eat that are on my 'safe' list. Wouldn't do Indian or Chinese though, far too risky!!!!! All those hidden nuts! It's awful how it controls your life - I am always saying ' I used to love walnut cake, snickers etc' and I laugh, but it's not actually funny because I know how much control it has over me. I used to work for Mars and ate 100's of snicker bars - with no ill efect, other than putting on the pounds! Now, I couldn't touch one even. The thing is, I know that if I don't get a grip of it now my 'safe list' will get longer and longer. One small step at a time I guess, have to accept that this has taken years developing and it isn't go to go away overnight. Take care x

[Bill]

if I don't get a grip of it now my 'safe list' will get longer and longer.

Just a thought - if you have a "safe" list, you can also prepare a "danger" list of all the foods you feel you have to avoid. What you could then do is put the items on the list into order on a scale from 1 to 10. The no.1's being the foods that you avoid which you don't regard as too risky and the no.10's as being the ones you perceive as the most dangerous.

Once your list is prepared, you could then target the first no.1 on your list and try eating it once every couple of days or once weekly until you feel you can cross it off your danger list and then move on to the next no.1 or move up to the no.2's etc.

The plan is that by the time you reach the no.10's, they will no longer feel like no.10's because gradually as you've worked through the list you will have re-built your self-confidence.

As you say, step by step.:hugs:

[jillyb]

Bill, I have been reading lots of your posts and I think you should write a book! Such wise words and sensible solutions. Thank You! x

[Bill]

Thank you for your kind words Jilly.:hugs: I can't promise what I say is always right so I wouldn't want to mislead others. I think therefore that books are better left to qualified professionals! I just enjoy helping anyone who feels I might have something to offer.:hugs: