LEARNING TO COPE WITH FEAR AND ANXIETY

THE WORLD IS NOT ENDING NOW SO YOU HAVE TO LEARN HOW TO COPE

All life threatening events are different but they share a common psychological response. They induce fear, anxiety, and other highly unpleasant affects causing undo suffering. Although it is tempting to lament ones sorry state insisting this is not how the story of their particular life was supposed to have been written, hard nosed reality sticks out its tongue at the protester implicitly saying tough! Thus in the face of such unwanted, often unfair, intrusions there is little choice than to use ones residual energies to do the best one can to keep oneself and ones concerns protected and functioning. In other words – if choosing activity and life instead of surrendering to passivity and death there is no other choice than to learn how to cope.

Fear and anxiety are normal, natural, and healthy responses to the current war in the Middle East, as it was to the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers and America, and the tsunami in Indonesia etc. When a person perceives that the integrity of the self is threatened, the autonomic nervous system – the primary brain – automatically releases adrenaline energizing the human system for fight or flight. These feelings function like air raid alarms urging a person to take cover.

The only difference between fear and anxiety is that fear is the perception of a concrete present danger while anxiety is the perception of an imagined danger. If bombs are blowing up around you the normal reaction is to feel fear. If you obsess about the possibility of being bombed but you are hundreds of miles away from any bombs being dropped then the feeling of dread accompanied by fantasies of obliteration are referred to as anxiety.

While fear is highly valuable, it is equally true that it is often experienced as terrifyingly traumatic, demoralizing and in many eases paralyzing. This is so because most human beings prefer a sense of balance, routine, and relative safety rather than feeling disoriented, uncertain, and vulnerable. Terrorists use these psychological facts as the essence of their calculated attempts to use fear inducing as a potentially highly effective weapon of psychological warfare.

Obviously a negative attitude towards fear is dangerous to each and every individual who succumbs to its negative power. President Roosevelt understood this fact very well, when responding to the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, he asserted: "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself." He implies that the worst response to fear is an understandable but potentially immobilizing fear of fear. Urgently needed then, are defensive and offensive psychological weapons to successfully combat the potentially destructive consequences associated with submitting to a negative attitude towards fear.

Complicating this issue is the fact that a person's reaction to a fear-inducing event is the ripple affect of trauma. It is difficult enough that a person has to cope with containing and surmounting complicated mixed feelings in the present. Worse is the fact that an aversive stimulus in the present has the power to stimulate unresolved traumas from a person's past. This overlapping of the traumatized here and now with the unresolved traumatic there and then converges, resulting in a flooding of negative feelings and fantasies. This flooding threatens and in many cases actually results in overwhelming a person's capacity to keep one's system intact. The net affect is a serious threat of individual and collective psychological breakdown. What then can be done to prevent this calamity from becoming an unthinkable reality?

Ideally, the best solution for helping individuals cope with fear and anxiety would be working with trained professionals on a one to one basis for as long as they need to work through their individual problems. Clearly this is not feasible. There is an urgent need to intervene on a large scope and do so in a way that the interventions will effectively contribute to a restoration of a person's 'normal' capacity to carry on as usual.

In this light the following exercise is offered as a method for effectively coping with the potentially debilitating effects of fear and anxiety:</span>

-Detail the most traumatic experience of your life – Answer what, when, where, and who and detail feelings and thoughts associated with this event.

-Detail whatever dire predictions you made about your precarious state of being such as fantasies of permanent catastrophe.

-Detail what actually happened about six months after first experiencing your trauma.

-Do this same exercise for as many personal traumas as you can recall.

Don't read further until you have completed the exercise.

IfWhen you have thoroughly completed this exercise then you must be impressed with the indisputable good news that no matter how dire the events, and no matter no matter how frightening were the associated fantasies {i.e. the end of the world has finally come, I will soon die, there is no way I can ever be happy again, etc.} the fact is that you have survived to tell your tale. Since you can state your name and count the ten fingers of your hands you know you are conscious. If conscious then you can make choices to help you survive and perhaps even thrive.

The key to successfully coping with fear and anxiety is to adopt the actor's motto applied to the tasks of daily living. This motto of quintessential professionalism indicates that no matter what real or imagined event threatens the integrity of the self - "the show must go on". The exercises above are proof positive that in each survivor's actual experience - no matter how pessimistic about the predicted outcome - the worst fears did not materialize. Thus, utilizing the law of probability - if one endured the worst of the past no matter how catastrophic were ones' "horrible imaginings": then, short of death, one is likely to survive the worst of the present.

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