#5 Fear of change or loss
Whatever we are afraid of has the ability to back us into a corner that keeps getting smaller the longer we live. For many of us, the older we get, the fewer risk we’re willing to take. You don’t want to lose what you have so you must protect it. This can certainly lead to complacency and stagnation and even, lead to mental conditions such as depression, anxiety and other mental disorders as we become dependent on the external world to meet needs that it cannot.
We don’t always recognize this because of the many forms the world presents as promises of our needs being met; the perfect relationship, wealth and prosperity, great family relationships and it goes on. When we think we have it, whatever it is, and discover it's not what we thought or work the way we imagined it should, we can become dependent on it if we fear letting it go. After years in a relationship, we become dependent on it because we fear the alternative, we stay on that job because we fear letting it go, we maintain an unhappy life style because we fear taking the risk to change it. Life becomes an ongoing challenge to fit a square peg into a round hole, never fully realizing the prison this becomes.
The problem is recognizing which peg is real and which is fear. Remember in most cases that FEAR = False Evidence Appearing Real. How do you recognize this? First understanding the nature and purpose of fear.
Randy Shingler explains.
A primitive part of the brain, the amygdala, is where it is generally agreed that fear originates and causes responses to events and circumstances. Over millions of years nature has assembled into the amygdala memories of harmful and traumatic events. When the amygdala recognizes footprints of events it perceives as threats it responds by triggering
fear within us. It is a conditioned response over which we can have control if we have the will to exercise it. Otherwise, it becomes a construct of fear in our minds (17). (Escape from Insanity, Illusions and Lies pg15).
Fear was necessary to our survival at one time, its meaning has expanded and has become part of our everyday when we think our survival is at stake. Fear of getting our feeling hurt, fear of losing or leaving a job that makes us unhappy, fear of not being good enough so we don’t give the needed effort, of not being accepted because of the risk of rejection, and fear of leaving a painful relationship because we fear the loss.
When we can understand that FEAR = False Evidence Appearing Real, and expressed in its’ two primary derivatives, anger and guilt, you can recognize what you’re dependent on you think you’re losing, or fail to accept something you need to embrace to be free. This means trying new things, seeing things a different way and handling things differently than you have in the past. The risk not to is greater, and can become the bate to another trap.
Follow me to learn about the next trap.