FEAR!

June 27, 2007
BE HAPPY ZONE
By Lionel Ketchian

Do you know what the opposite of happiness is? The opposite of happiness is FEAR! No, it's not unhappiness. Unhappiness is not a cause it is the effect of something else. To quote from my book, Food For Thought, written almost 20 years ago. "All fear is of the future. It's the belief in your inability to cope with the next moment. Fear is an emotion. An emotion is a thought, Why fear thoughts?"

Fear is without a doubt one of the worst things anyone can experience. Fear is a perceived inability to cope with life. Unfortunately, if not corrected, that inability becomes a disability. It's certainly true that when we experience fear, we are unhappy. Unhappiness is helplessness and allowing yourself to feel like a victim. This is a devastating way to choose to live one's life. If you are feeling fear, then you are thinking about the next moment or some future moment. Concentrate on right now and you lose your fear immediately.

I was doing some work with a woman that had a 30 year long fear of flying. Her husband had recently passed away and she wanted to visit her family who lived a great distance from her home. I was working with her fears so she could recognize the feelings she experienced. As I guided her through a disassociation exercise, she clenched her hands on the table in front of her till her knuckles got red and she started sweating. Later, when she was able to mentally deal with getting on an airplane, she expressed the following statement. "I feel so much better now. I don't feel afraid and uncomfortable like I did when you were leading me though the first part of the session." She said, "here I am in a safe room and I was acting like I was afraid for my life and I felt terrified. Now that I can cope with the feeling and the images in my mind about flying, I think it was really silly of me to be afraid." She recognized that once she went through the fear in a safe way there was nothing to fear. It was amazing to her that she could be afraid while safe in a room with nothing but her own thoughts to fear.

About seven years ago, while I was giving a class on Happiness at Sacred Heart University, Jane, a woman taking the course, shared a story with the class about her experiencing fear. Jane was divorced for about ten years at the time. She was uncomfortable about being alone, and afraid of being in the house by herself. Late one night she heard a lot of noise coming from the front door. She hoped that whomever it was would just go away. She knew that someone was definitely outside her front door, was terrified, and did not know what to do.

Jane finally decided that she had to do something, so she got a baseball bat from another room. Jane figured she would fling open the front door and scare the burglar away with the baseball bat. If that didn't work, she figured she would run out the back door. So she got the bat and headed in the direction of the front door. Right next to the front door, there was a window with a curtain. She decided to very carefully sneak a look out the window through the curtain to try to see the threat that was waiting for her.

She went to the window and could hear all the noise outside her door. She slowly lifted the curtain and looked outside her front door. She was really surprised at what she saw before her eyes! Instead of seeing some impending doom, Jane saw three baby raccoons playing on her front stairs. One of the young raccoons was jumping on her bushes next to the stairs. The other two little raccoons were frolicking with each other right at her front door.

Instead of being terrified, Jane broke out into a sidesplitting laughter because the baby raccoons were so cute and so much fun to watch. The interesting thing about Jane's story is that she said she was never afraid again. This experience was the catalyst that allowed Jane to overcome her fear of being alone. She said that the adventure taught her not to give in to her fears or her limited thinking about anything. Jane is a regular member of the Happiness Club and still attends meetings.

As John Masefield said: "Best trust the happy moments. What they gave makes man less fearful and gives his work compassion and new eyes, the days that make us happy make us wise."

Happiness is the freedom you feel from the release of fear. You might say that happiness is letting go of fear! You may think it impossible to live without fear in this uncertain world. The truth is, it is an uncertain world and you need to embrace that uncertainty but not give in to fear.

Fear is being out of control, while happiness is taking control of yourself. Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "Do the things you fear and the death of fear is certain." The next time something reveals fear within you, go through it instead of running away. Running away only allows your fear to gain ground, while you lose ground. Not facing your fear is much harder than dealing with it. Use happiness for your ammunition and you can shoot through any fear!The only way out of fear is through it.

In the words of Shakespeare: "Our doubts are traitors and make us lose the good we oft might win by fearing to attempt." If you doubt anything, doubt your fears, never doubt yourself.