Self-trust over fear – how to overcome the fear of yourself

Does the way you feel frighten you?

Are you scared you’re a terrible person?

Do you believe there is something about you to be feared?

Becoming scared of yourself – or a part of yourself – occurs when you have feelings you don’t know how to express or process and become fearful of them. It can start in childhood from a very young age, or develop in a later situation when you are surrounded by people who are not nurturing and don’t allow you to express your feelings, or who themselves are scared of expressing their feelings.

Someone might have told you that feeling a particular way was a bad thing and there was something wrong with you. Or when you tried to express upset feelings they reacted as though it was horrifying and you were dangerous.

People respond this way because someone expressing their feelings makes them have to think about their own, and they might not know how to express or speak about their feelings in a healthy way. Either way it creates a trauma for you, which makes you believe that there's something in you to be feared or that is wrong, and you internal the fear, turning it on yourself.

In our society we are taught not to express our emotions from a very young age. We are told anger is bad and being happy all the time is good. We are told not to be scared, not to feel anxious and not to feel sad. This means when we do experience these emotions, we don’t know how to process them, or what to do with them, and end up pushing them down or away.

But bad feelings left unfelt or unprocessed will build up and become overwhelming, and trigger other problems like depression, anxiety, paranoia and other more extreme mental health problems like self harming and OCDs.

“Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.” – Aristotle

Fearing your feelings is based in a lack of self trust or self knowledge. If you don’t spend time with your feelings, you avoid getting to know yourself and learning to trust yourself. It is also based in lack of self worth. If someone externally hasn’t approved of something you have expressed, you have put their opinion above your own. You are not valuing yourself or respecting yourself.

So how do you unravel this and stop being scared of yourself?

You need to start by asking yourself what it is you are scared of? What part of you are you holding in fear? And what do you think will happen if you stop being scared of it?

Remember FEAR means: False Evidence Appearing Real. 

Often our fears are created when our mind has taken over and believed something that isn’t true. Ask yourself, are you dangerous? Is there something scary about you?

We all have our dark sides; we can feel angry and negative about things and sometimes aren’t always feeling in a kind mood. That is allowed. You are allowed those feelings.

“Accept your dark side, understanding it will help you move with the light. Knowing both sides of our souls helps us move forward in life and understand that perfection doesn’t exist.” – M artin R. Lemieux

If those feelings are anger based, are you afraid you will never calm down? Are you afraid you will lash out and say or do something you’ll regret?

I was angry for a long time until I spent time listening to myself, and what it was I was angry about, and working through it. I realised I’d been treating myself badly. I’d mentally been pushing my angry self into a box and shutting it. I didn’t like that piece of myself and called it a monster. I separated from it and pretended it wasn’t there. But it was there for a reason and would keep coming out, because the anger was still there. It hadn’t gone away it was just shut away until it became so big it burst out – usually in a destructive way.

Once I let it out and listened to what it was angry about, I was able to put those feelings into a different perspective, using self-compassion and empathy. By being reassuring and comforting those feelings within myself, not judging them but actually feeling sympathetic towards them, I was able to stop being afraid of them and shutting them away.  

If those feelings are based in deep sadness, are you afraid you won’t be able to stop crying if you let them out? Are you afraid that you will never recover from that sadness?

I felt this way for a long time. My sadness was based in feeling I was never loved, and deeply lonely. But again, once I had listened to those feelings and let them out, I found that although I might have cried for a while initially, it did stop and I felt a lot better. They weren’t trapped inside me anymore. 

But how do you actually ‘listen’ to your feelings and ‘feel’ your feelings?

You literally sit with them. You register that you feel a certain way and sit down and let yourself feel the feeling throughout your body. Don’t think about it, or let your mind get involved. If thoughts come just let them run through your head, don’t argue with them or engage with them. Just be.

You can journal about the feeling too; write out what you are feeling, write down all the things you are afraid of and listen to them that way.

And if you are too scared to do either of those things alone, maybe ask a trusted friend or therapist who can be there with you when you do this. You can also express your feelings verbally too and hear them out loud.

The longer you remain in fear, the longer you stop yourself from living your best life. You limit joy from entering your life. Happiness comes from within. Only once you are fully accepting (and loving) of who you are, can you find true happiness.

“The fears we don’t face become our limits.” – Robin Sharma

Don't doubt - Do! How to crush self-doubt

Do you spend a lot of time doubting your talents?

Do you overthink everything you do, until you are not sure about anything?

Do you not know which step to take, so end up not taking any steps at all?

Overthinking and doubting yourself and your talents can keep you stuck in life. I should know, I have been there, and still find myself back there from time to time. Sometimes it feels like being on a stop and start ride at times. It's difficult to navigate out of repetitive negative thoughts and behaviors, and, as is often the case, what lies behind them is lack of self-confidence. 

"When you doubt your power, you give power to your doubt."- Honore de Balzac

Not believing in yourself, your talents, or your ability to accomplish your dreams, manifests itself in self-doubt, procrastination and self-sabotage, which then leads into further negative thoughts and feelings. 

They are all symptoms of deep seated feelings of lack within yourself: you lack the belief you are worthy, you are good enough, or that you belong.

And although it is worth uncovering where the roots of these feelings begin - what caused them - it's more important to find out how to change them. 

Yes, it is possible to change how you feel about yourself because I've done it.

When I began, I realised that the key thing I was missing in believing in myself was self-trust. I didn't trust myself to do what needed to be done, from small things to big thing. I didn't trust myself to follow-through, be persistent or consistent. I didn't trust myself not to let myself down. 

Trust and believing in yourself walk hand in hand. If you don't trust yourself, you won't believe in yourself.

"Don't believe what your eyes are telling you, all they show is limitation. Look with your understanding, find out what you already know, and you'll see the way to fly."- Richard Bach

So how do you trust yourself? You trust yourself by listening to yourself.

I don't mean the constant stream of thoughts in your head that spin around, asking more questions than they answer, and providing tainted 'evidence' about your self-worth gathered from the outside world. I mean listening to your heart. That means sitting down and just reaching out your conscious mind to your body, feeling every part of it, and settling on the heart. And then asking how it feels about the things you are struggling with, and feel the physical response your body gives. 

Feelings are a physical thing. You feel bad when you feel sick to your stomach, tense your muscles, or feel tired; and you feel good by the opposite: a spark of excitement in your stomach, relaxing your muscles, or feeling energised.

Listening to your heart means tuning into your body, and its response. It is how you connect to yourself. You trust what you know and if you know how you feel about something, you can trust it.

However, it doesn't stop second guessing, or doubting those feelings. The trick to breaking that mental cycle is a simple one: Action.

"An inch of movement will take you closer to your goals that a mile of intention." - Steve Maraboli

If you take action based on your true feelings you start building something that is past the questioning stage, something tangible. You are supporting your feelings by doing something. You are following through. And the more times you do that - take action based off your true feelings - the more you will trust both your feelings and yourself. It supports belief in your feelings and creates trust for the next time and then the next, building a rapport with yourself, a history, and a connection.  

Yes, it sounds easy, doesn't it? But no, it's not. You have to believe you are worth it, and take the time for you. If you honestly want to change how you feel, you have to make time for you and your feelings.  You have to get to a point where you tell yourself, I am worth my time. 

And what if those actions don't work out, or fail? What then? Then the cycle begins again. 

Consider what didn't work, or what you need to change to make it work, and try again. As long as you stay true to how you feel and take action that is committed and wholehearted and not doubting, you will at the very least learn something that will help you try again and be successful.  

This is not a one time only deal. You choose to give yourself a second chance every time. You choose to decide you are worth it. Life is trial and error. But until you stop listening to the doubts and actually take action, you will never know. 

Are you worth the risk? The longer you dawdle over the answer, and don't take action, the more room you leave for self doubt. 

So don't doubt - DO!

“The path to success is to take massive, determined action.”– Tony Robbins

How to be accepting & stop resisting what you don't like about your life

Do you get frustrated by the things you can’t change or control in your life?

Do you get angry when things don’t go the way you want?

Do you waste time and energy refusing to accept the ways things are?

 “Resistance is futile”- The Borg Collective - Star Trek: First Contact 😉

I am a not a Trekkie per se, but The Borg were correct. It will cause you more trouble than it’s worth to resist assimilation.

There are some things that you can’t change or control in life, but resisting them will cause you more pain in the long term and keep you stuck in a negative place for longer than necessary.

My best friend used to repeat to me on the phone, “Accept and allow, go with the flow of life.” It took me years to fully understand and embrace this concept. I could understand it in theory but it felt like an unachievable goal for me. I found everything difficult.

Even though I made decisions to do things – like moving to a foreign country and culture to be with my partner - I resisted them. Often it was because I didn’t really want to do them and I was doing them to please another, but I made it harder on myself by refusing to accept that it was a choice that I had made and not one that was forced upon me.

I was locked in the victim mindset.

In the instance of moving to a foreign country for love, this led me to reject what I found there: the friends, community, and the different culture. And rather than embrace the life on offer, I resisted it. I attempted a few things, but when they didn’t go the way I wanted or didn’t achieve the results I was looking for, I felt stuck and I fixated on feeling powerless.

I longed for the things I didn’t have and only focused on what was missing from my life. I became miserable, tense, stressed, frustrated and very angry. For me this manifested mentally in a breakdown in 2008, and physically in two slipped discs in my neck in 2014.

“Resisting what is happening is a major cause of suffering.” -  Pema Chodron 

But it was during the pain I experienced with the slipped disc in my neck (which trapped a nerve, putting my right shoulder and arm in excruciating pain for 8 weeks at a time – they slipped twice) that I learnt to surrender.

I learnt to accept that I couldn’t do anything. I let go of everything – all the expectations I had of myself and of others, all the things I thought I had to do, all the chores I did to try and feel that my life was worth living. I could do nothing, so I did nothing.

And what I found was that there were people to support me and my husband to pick up the slack. And when you aren’t able to lose your temper over something petty, you respond differently - quietly and calmly, and people respond differently.

Within the pain I found the calm I was seeking.

“You can't calm the storm, so stop trying. What you can do is calm yourself. The storm will pass.” - Timber Hawkeye

I had to surrender.

I don’t like to use the word surrender, because to me it means to give up – but I didn’t give up, I opened up.

I accepted that this was how things were going to be and to let go in that moment. I let others help me; I relinquished control; I stopped and observed the life around me.

In accepting that time (and fortunately recovering) I was able to understand that I needed to accept other aspects of my life too. I needed to look at what I did have in my life and appreciate it and embrace it. I started to take walks in nature and appreciate where I was living. I stopped thinking about my future and where my life was going, and started living in the present.

“If you are depressed, you are living in the past. If you are anxious, you are living in the future. If you are at peace, you are living in the present.” – Lao Tzu

When the noise in my mind would start up about where I wanted to live, what I wanted to be doing with my life, and how I felt like I was stagnating and not growing, I would just let the noise go.

I would hear it, register it, but know that I could only get to where I wanted to step by step, day by day. I took the end goal, the one thing I wanted to do the most, and broke it down into small steps - things I could achieve on a daily basis.

This enabled me to feel like I was moving forward. I would still have moments of frustration, but rather than fight that frustration I would allow myself to feel it – journal it out, or express it to a trusted friend, but then I would let it go.

“Resisting your negative feelings just keeps you stuck.” - Kute Blackson

When I was learning to drive, my driving instructor told me I thought too much about what I was doing to make the learning process easy. He said he could always tell when I started thinking about what I was doing because I would stall the car or crunch the gears. He said, “If you just let go and let your body do what you have trained it to do, it will be much easier. When you think about it, you interrupt the flow.”

By thinking about what I was doing I was letting my brain take over and panic about what I was doing. If I had accepted that I did know and allowed the training to flow through me, I wouldn’t have had a problem.

Often resistance is built up from having too many expectations. If we drop expectation of how something will be, and of ourselves in that situation, and not focus on a desired outcome, we can accept whatever happens organically.

We can release ourselves from the need to control. We become open to whatever happens. And accepting how our life is, in that moment, brings freedom and peace.

“It takes radical acceptance to bring inner peace.”- Kute Blackson

It can be a struggle to accept where you are in life if it is not what you want or where you saw yourself being. You can be consumed with trying to change it. But while you are spending time looking at all the things that aren’t working, you are closed to what IS working.

But how do you stop, if you are truly unhappy with your situation?

Have you ever thought about taking a holiday from your thinking?

If there is something you know you can’t do anything about right now, such as: move house, move job, create more time for yourself, go traveling, then set a date in the future  - a month, 6 months, a year from now, when you can review it again.

And every time you find yourself thinking about it, say, “No, I'm not going to think about that until *insert date*.”

I found this worked to stop me constantly thinking about how to change my situation. I knew I wouldn’t be able to for more than a year, so I set a date to review it the following year. And every time I thought about it, I stopped myself. I said, no, I’m not going to think about that now. I took a holiday from thinking about it. And the more often I stopped myself from thinking about it, the easier it became, until I was thinking about it less and less.

And what also happened, during that holiday, was say to myself, okay, I’m here for the next year, so how can I enjoy and embrace the life I have right now?

It changed the entire perspective I had on the life I was actually living. I was able to engage more with the people in my life and create a better day to day existence.

It broke the habit of the negative frustrated thoughts I was experiencing and allowed me to concentrate on the things that I could change in my life at that moment, and give myself room to work on the things that would help me move forward to the change I did want to see.

By accepting my life as it was I'd freed myself from being a victim in my life, which enabled me to find my personal power over the things I could do something about. It gave me freedom and peace of mind.

“Accept – then act. Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. Always work with it, not against it.” – Eckhart Tolle

Limiting beliefs: How to Change Them & Be More Successful in Life

Do your thoughts hold you back?

Do you want to do something, but don’t believe you can?

Have you ever challenged what you believe you can do?

“Whether you think you can, or think you can’t, you’re right.” – Henry Ford

Many of us believe we are in control of our own minds and believe we choose to do things, or not do things, based off what our limits are. But do we truly know our limits, or are they imagined? Are they based off fact, or have they been put there by something someone said, or an experience that led us to believe that?

Belief is everything, whether it is the day to day 'I can do this' kind of belief, or the religious sort. If people want to think or see things a certain way, they will, no matter what facts or experience might contradict them.

The very word: Believe, taken apart, is ‘Be’ ‘Live’ – you ‘Be’ and ‘Live’ based on what you think about the things in your world.

A Limiting Belief is one that suppresses our own personal truth about who we are or what we can achieve. In general we are all limited to rules and regulations as a society or civilisation to function and get along, but what I am talking about are the personal beliefs that hurts us by limiting what we want to achieve in life and stop us growing and thriving.

Many people limit their beliefs to conform to a given set of rules, or to satisfy another. When we stifle ourselves to conform to a belief imposed by another, it stops us from being able to step into who we truly are and live our lives to the fullest. It can lead to an unhappy life and often depression if we feel powerless under such restrictions.

“The only limits you have are the limits you believe.” – Wayne Dyer

Understanding that some of our beliefs are limiting us and identifying those that stop us from reaching for our dreams, is the first step in changing them and releasing ourselves from their bonds.

We need to then ask ourselves some questions - particularly when we find ourselves resisting something we thought we wanted to do:

1) Can I do that?

2) Do I want to?

When asking ourselves the second question, we also check our feelings on it: Maybe we do want to, but we are scared or fearful of the outcome – an imagined outcome. But until we try we won’t know so we can choose to stay in fear or we can push through the fear and try. And whether we succeed or fail it doesn’t matter, because we have tried and learnt something about ourselves in the process.

For example, I might believe that I am not welcome in a particular social group. I might decide in my own mind I am not welcome by over-analysing conversations or body language. But really I am fearful of the rejection if I try to take part in a group activity. I can choose to keep believing that I am not welcome or I can find out for sure by participating.

I am a writer. I can choose to believe that it is a waste of time submitting my work to publishers because it won’t be good enough. But why do I believe it is not good enough? Don’t I have as much chance as anyone? Have I had only negative feedback on my writing? Asking these questions makes me stop and decide what I really believe, and also whether I am helping myself or giving my negatives beliefs power.

Maybe when we were a child we wanted to do something and someone told us we couldn’t, that we wouldn’t be able to - maybe a parent, a teacher or another authority figure. And from that point on we believed it was always out of our reach. And now when someone asks us if we want to do it, we say we can’t. But in truth, we don’t know, because we have never tried or given ourselves the chance to try.

“Learning, too soon, our limitations, we never learn our power.” - Mignon Mclaughlin

Many limiting beliefs are driven by a lack of self-confidence and self-worth, by honestly not believing in ourselves or our abilities. Only by questioning ourselves, in a positive and constructive way, can we challenge the beliefs that limit us in our day to day lives. Only once we start to unlock them can we release our inner power and realise our dreams.

Why don’t you go and write a list of all the things you would like to do, go on - I dare you! Write out all the things you dreamed of, however extreme they might be. And then go through that list and see which ones are within your grasp if you believed you could do them.

It will give you a whole new perspective on your potential, and liberate you. It will also make you question some of the limiting beliefs you hold in other areas of your life.

“Remember: we all get what we tolerate. So stop tolerating excuses within yourself - limiting beliefs of the past or half-assed or fearful states.” – Tony Robbins

Negative Emotion Addiction: How to Recognise & Release it

Do you ever feel anxious suddenly, and without reason?

Do you ever get a bad feeling come on, but you don't know why?

Do you get stuck feeling bad all the time, but don't really know why?

Much like any addiction, Negative Emotion Addiction can be both physical and mental. If we repeatedly experience a negative emotion, it can become habit forming, and our bodies can reflect it as much as our minds.

Through some personal work I was doing I discovered that I have a negative emotion addiction to emotions like Dread, Envy, and Inadequacy. These come up for me both consciously and unconsciously.

The one that I notice the most is Dread, as it manifests physically. On any given day it will appear out of nowhere showing up as a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, as though something has gone wrong - or is about to.

I check myself: Am I missing something? Have I forgotten to do something?

I check the clock: Am I meant to be somewhere? Am I supposed to be fetching one of my children?

I check the calendar: Is there an appointment I should be attending, or a phone call I should be making?

I run through it all, making sure I haven’t forgotten something that will cause a problem later. When I realise I haven’t missed anything and I have no reason for feeling this way, I release it, letting the feeling go, reassuring myself that all is well. 

This is an emotion I felt as a child on a daily basis throughout my entire childhood until I left home. Being a child of domestic violence this emotion was present several times a day, or all day long. It is an emotion formed round a fear of knowing something dreadful is about to happen, coupled with a feeling of insecurity about the unpredictability of it - what will happen exactly, and when?

In my current life there is no reason for me to be experiencing this emotion any more, so I recognise it as being a sort of 'residual' emotion, like part of a withdrawal symptom, now I am no longer experiencing it daily. Each time the feeling arises I consciously undo it and let it go, and in doing that I work to end the recurrence of it.  

“If negative emotions arise you can watch them fly over you like debris floating in the wind.” – Unknown 

Some might say it is a form of Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, and it may be, but as it is only a feeling and not brought on by a flashback or memory, I recognise it as something my body is so used to feeling it simply reproduces it without a trigger. 

However, when I experience Envy it’s more conscious. A steam of thoughts will fill my head: wishing that I had what others had, wishing I was doing what others were doing. It can be about a friendship, a personality trait, a job, but always comparing myself to others, either personally or their living situation. These thoughts can bring about a physical reaction too, again a sick feeling in the stomach much like dread. But I have to consciously stop the spiral of these thoughts otherwise they can grow into larger more negative emotions, like paranoia, anger, or sadness. 

To stop these thoughts I focus on what I do have, and how much I have. I think about all the things I like about my life, and about myself, and what I have to offer in any friendship, relationship, or job. And to continue moving away from these feelings I remind myself that what I believe others have is an assumption and not a reality.  

“Everything we see is a perspective, not a truth.” – Marcus Aurelius  

For me, envy is an emotion born out of a childhood of lack where I felt like I was the only person suffering, and others had much more than me – often not in the material sense, but in the emotional sense: love, happiness, security, sense of belonging, and stability. These were missing from my life as I was growing up and they led me into feelings of inadequacy: I felt I didn’t deserve these things, that I wasn’t good enough, that I was doing something wrong, or being punished. 

I spent a lot of time feeling this way as a child, and it caused a great deal of sadness, and anxiety for me. I got used to feeling that way too; it became my constant, and sometimes my comfort. I would fall into a victim mindset, and find it hard to see what a negative effect these feelings had on the rest of my life. I struggled to sustain friendships and relationships and didn’t understand why people didn’t want to be in my company. I had become toxic to them – and to myself – much like an addict.

But like any addiction it is possible to break the habit: there is a process. Although for a Negative Emotion Addiction it is not so much giving up something as becoming aware of it and letting it go.

Over the years I have changed my thought process and perspective, so now when I experience these negative emotions I follow these steps:

- Become conscious of them;

- Recognise what they are;

- Check they no longer apply;

- Release them, and let them go.

We must learn to question the validity of our recurring negative emotions. We need to ask ourselves: Are these emotions something I am simply used to feeling? Do I need to still be feeling this? Is it still relevant in my life now?

In doing this we can slowly recover from their effects and make room for more positive thoughts and feelings - ones we want to become addicted to.

I discovered NEA through my work with Norval Rhodes doing Energy Healing

Changing the Question: How to Stop Self-doubt

Do you often ask yourself questions like:

Why is this happening to me?

What am I doing wrong?

What is wrong with me?

Often when I’m stressed out, or in an anxious state, or life isn’t working out as I want it to, I start questioning myself. And the questions I tax myself with aren’t helpful, they only exasperate or perpetuate my already frustrated feelings.

These aren’t helpful questions, they are blocking questions. They stop us in our tracks, immobilising us, and even punishing us. They leave us feeling bad, and stuck in a cycle of frustration that can lead to further negative emotions like anger, guilt and shame.

There are two reasons why these questions shut us down:

1. They make the assumption that there is something wrong with us, that we are at fault in some way if things aren’t working out;
   
2. They ask questions that give no solution to the problem.

These questions would leave me sitting in victim mode feeling as though there was nothing I could do to help myself. What I learnt was that if I changed the questions I was asking myself, not only would I uncover the root of the problem causing me to feel stressed, anxious, or stuck in my situation, but I would also find solutions to help me feel like I could move forward again.

When we are blocked and trying to push in one direction, we need to stop and consider if what we are doing is helpful at that time and evaluate what it is really going on.

"Successful people ask better questions, and as a result get better answers." – Tony Robbins.

A friend of mine recently experienced writers block. They expressed to me how frustrated they were about not being able to write, and went on to ask themselves if writing was really for them. They questioned their writing talent, wondered if they would ever write again, and asked if I thought they should give up on the entire thing. They then went on to validate these questions by going over rejection of previous work, and all the failures they had experienced so far in their writing journey. For them, personally, this was spiraling down into a very dark place.

Knowing my friend, and knowing some of the other, non-writing, issues going on in their life, I asked them if how they were feeling had anything to do to with their writing. If maybe other issues, like having to start caring for an elderly, sick parent, which then reminded them of the loss of their other parent, might have more to do with it, topped with frustrations at attempts to get fit being unsuccessful.

I told them to change the questions they were asking themselves about what was going on, and to think about what they could do to ease the pressure on themselves in their current situation; how maybe they were expecting too much from themselves at this time, and to ask themselves 'helpful' questions, rather than destructive ones.

Here are a few examples of helpful questions:

- What am I feeling right now?

- What is this feeling really about?

- How can I approach this differently?

- What is the lesson here?

- What can I learn from this?

- What small steps can I take today to feel better?

"When you finally understand why you’re asking this question – your life can change." - Mastin Kipp

Once I had introduced the idea of changing the question to my friend, they sounded relieved. They were then inspired and motivated to start moving forward again. They could see a way out of their present stuck, depressed mindset. By changing the questions they were able to free themselves from a perpetual negative internal dialogue.

I threw them a lifeline – but one they already had within themselves.

Changing the question can give us back our power, our strength, our desire to keep pushing forward. It can open up a whole world of possibilities. It helps us step out of victim mode and create a constructive plan, or idea, about how we can move forward.

It enables us to stop scolding ourselves and telling ourselves we are doing something wrong. It takes the pressure off and reduces the expectation that there is a need to change ourselves.

By changing the questions we ask ourselves, choices become visible that we couldn’t previously see, and in turn a sense of power that we can actively do something, allowing a fresh perspective on the situation.

This post was originally inspired by a blog post written by Mastin Kipp, over at the Daily Love early this year, called ‘How to overcome the 'what’s wrong with me' thoughts.’ Check it out for a more in depth view.