Family Matters

Posts Tagged ‘anxiety’

Everybody feels bad sometimes – sad, lonely, upset, worried, even angry. OK, except Tibetan monks, maybe, but only after 20 years of meditation and a strict diet of warm water. The rest of us sometimes feel bad.

The problem with feeling bad is not so much that we find something hard to deal with, but that we have been brought up not to feel bad, so we feel really bad about feeling bad. That, of course, makes everything worse, because now, we are feeling bad about ourselves and blocking ourselves from processing and letting go of the original bad feeling.

When I was growing up, I was often told that only girls cried. “Take it like a man”, people said to me and to all of my friends who were boys. The girls were not supposed to take it like men, but they were instructed not to bother others with their feelings and to “show their happy face” like “a good girl” should. So happiness was clearly good and resentment, anxiety, regret and sorrow were bad.

Some people say that fear is the opposite of love and others say it is the lack of it. Regardless of the exact relationship between fear and love, they are strongly connected. If we want to have lots of happiness and love in our life, we need to make sure fear will not be there to spoil the fun.

Fear is kind of the devil that casts a shadow on our life. I know many people who are in constant fear. If you ask them what they are afraid of, they are unable to explain. For some, it is just a pressure that they cannot identify and for others, it is more specific, but generally, you cannot fight anything you cannot define.

If we want to get rid of it, we must know what it is first.

Making a list of 100 fears can help you identify the blockages in your life. If you are unhappy with your achievements in some area and you dig deep enough, you will find there is fear associated with achieving more. If there is a destructive pattern in your behavior and you look at it closely, you will see it is rooted in some fear.

I tell my clients that this list is a big part of our action plan. If we want to achieve something, we must clear the way to it of all the things that are blocking us from making progress and fear is always at the source of those blockages.

In the past few weeks, I overheard talk about a teenager (let’s call him Jonathan), who used to be friendly and “normal”, besides being very talented, but who recently started to miss classes, show up late, fail various subjects and behave indifferently. One speculation was that he might have started using drugs, but he was clearly troubled.

The State Triangle shows the relationships between our thoughts and feelings (mindset), our words (language) and our posture and actions (body language). Change on and the others will change.

My mom used to say that kids have an easy life, but I wonder about this. Every time my kids (my own kids or kids I teach or coach) react to difficulties and challenges, I wonder about it again. I know my mom meant that not knowing too much and having no heavy responsibility is a bliss, but I say that not having enough life experiences, not having enough skills and not being able to express yourself properly can be the opposite of bliss sometimes.

Unlike what the title suggests, most people in the world believe that Friday the 13th is a scary combination. Most people believe that if the 13th falls on Friday, bad things will happen. Believe it or not, believing in it makes it true.

Fears are very natural in every person’s life. From an early stage of our life, we are scared of various things. As we grow older and learn more about life, more of the world makes sense to us and many of our fears disappear.

Unfortunately, many kids are not treated seriously when they express their fears and this makes them even more afraid. Fear has many faces and symptoms and when it is not handled well, it can get out of proportion and lead to growing up with anxiety, panic attacks and depression.

This is the second part of yesterday’s Be a Good Sport!, which includes the last 5 things we need to do as parents to make sure our kids take the positive out of sports rather than the negative.

We all like watching “Heroes” on TV and reading books about strong or creative people who have done things others did not expect them to do. Hearing, reading about or meeting such people is very motivating. Heroism is the courage to face fears, therefore fear and heroes go together.

Fear is a basic human emotion that works like a survival instinct. In a sense, fear helps protect us from danger, though it has reached a point where we see danger even in places where it does not exist.

My immediate answer is “I wish”. I really do. Think about it – how easy it would be if all we needed is to set a goal, write it down (to make sure we will not change it often, based on circumstances) and let the universe take care of it, right?

But I am a person of action. I believe in motion as the ultimate way to growth and I that action speaks louder than words. While the universe is taking care of some of your goals, just because you wanted them, your actions will help you with the rest. When you set a goal and wait for an external source to fulfil it, you fail to help yourself and miss the opportunity to grow.