FEAR AND FEAR-OF-FEAR

Once you learn the Neuro-Semantic approach to Emotional Mastery, you know that all emotions are just emotions and are important. As a result, it leads us to accept our emotions and use them to deepen our understanding of ourselves. You also learn to distinguish the level of emotions, that emotions occur at multiple levels and how you approach meta-level emotions differently from primary level emotions.

Let’s take fear as an example. Primary fear is a healthy and informative emotion, if there is a true danger or threat, then it facilitates your survival and safety as it warns you to slow down, look, listen, and think. This is fear1. It is in reference to the outside world where there may be something that could be dangerous— a wild animal, traffic, a storm, icy conditions, a car-jacker, etc.

If fear1 is at the primary level, then fear2 is at the first meta-level. Fear2 is not about the outside world, it is about your inside world. Using your self-reflexivity, you are now bringing your fear to your experience of fear. This is fear of fear. What are you fearing in fear2? All kinds of things! You could be fear the experience of fear, the feelings of fear, the idea of fear, the memory of fear, the imagination of fear, the identity of fear, etc. Yet whatever it is, it operates in a very different way from primary fear (fear1).

Fear1 tells you that there is, or could be, danger and infuses you with the energy to stop, look, and listen. With the energy generated by fear1 you can exercise it by backing off, fleeing, or fighting. Fear2 also produces energy and sends energy into your mind-body system, but now it is assuming you are the danger, so you are attacking yourself in some way. At the meta-level, the fear has no where to go except against your mind, your emotions, and your body. No wonder then that fear 2 is destructive in that it harms the person and sets up a vicious cycle so that the more you fear, the more you have to fear.

Fear-of-fear (fear2), as an attack on yourself (your thoughts, ideas, concepts, beliefs, memories, etc.) generates a second-level of sensations. We call these by such names as discomfort, tension, stress, unpleasantness, etc. The symptoms that results then show up in the body as you may feel dizzy, having sweating hands, feel, arm pits, etc., experience heart palpitations, choking feelings in the throat, etc. While these may be uncomfortable, they are not dangerous. Yet by fearing discomfort and falsely thinking, “I’m having a heart attack,” “I will faint and die,” “My lungs are going to explode,” you turn even more of your psychological energy against yourself.

In this way, we humans can multiple our troubles and create all sorts of new ways to fill our minds

and bodies with fear. We could, for example, fear the discomfort of sleeplessness as we fear of not sleeping and therefore create a good dose of insomnia. We can torture ourselves, “I’ve got to go to sleep.” “I’ll not have enough energy for tomorrow.” Then we command ourselves, “Sleep. Try harder to go to sleep.” But this is a false fear and, paradoxically, the more we would accept non- sleep and not concern ourselves about it, the more likely we are to fall asleep.

Because the great majority of our fears are about potential dangers rather than actual dangers, the fear-response is inappropriate as it invites us to create a second-level problem—fear 2. We fail to distinguish if the object of our fear is actual or potential. Could an airplane crash? Yes, but it is not very likely. Could a car crash? Yes. And in fact you have 7 times more of a chance of dying in a car crash than a plane crash. Could you die of the lack of oxygen in a closet or a small space? Yes, but it is not very likely.

Fear, as an emotion and as a state is drive by fear-thinking. The problem with that is that if you are looking for dangers—your mind will find them! What you are actually doing is weaponizing your fear-emotion against yourself.

Once you begin to fear-your-fear, your fear2 will then qualify any (and all) of your experiences with a tinge of fear. Do that you you will become increasingly fearful. From the emotion, fear will become a mood, and then an attitude. You will become more and more negative, pessimistic, and paranoid. And it will seem real to you. You will live more and more in an unfriendly universe which is out to get you.