MIND MOVESThe best way to overcome fear is to confront it - but it's easier said than done, writes Tony Bates
What fortitude the soul contains
That it can so endure,
The accent of a coming step,
The opening of a door
- Emily Dickinson
AS HUMAN beings we constantly face the unknown. There are so many ways that life can, and inevitably will, surprise us. It is a tribute to our "fortitude", as Emily put it, that we can open our eyes, climb out of bed and start another day.
Fear is a reminder of our inherent vulnerability. But facing what we fear reveals our unique strength as a species.
This Friday there will be an event in Dublin that should be of particular interest to people who live with fear. A one-day conference hosted by No Panic is being held in the Stillorgan Park Hotel.
It will bring together some of the best thinking around to help you understand and cope with fears and phobias.
The organisers promise that the programme will present useful insights to help us make sense of our anxieties, in an atmosphere that will feel safe and non-threatening.
If nothing else, you will discover that, whatever it is that makes you fearful, you are not alone. One of the hardest things about being anxious is that you can feel odd, different and very alone in the world.
Hearing others describe what they have been through can be enormously liberating.
Humans are different from animals in that they can feel afraid not only of potential threats to their physical safety, but to their emotional safety also.
These fears reflect our fundamental fragility as a species and our dependence on one another. We need to be loved and to love and many seemingly irrational phobias are developed out of fear that these needs will not be fulfilled.
While all of us can relate to the experience of fear, very few of us appreciate how incredibly distressing and disabling it can be to experience persistent and crippling anxiety conveyed by all too familiar terms such as "panic disorder", "agoraphobia," "social phobia" and "OCD".
These disorders of anxiety present a considerable challenge to those who experience them.
Overcoming fear requires a great deal of self-compassion. The path to freedom begins by honouring our "symptoms" and appreciating that our actions, however neurotic they may appear, are the best we have managed to do to stay safe.
This is how we regain a basic trust in ourselves and find the courage to let go those behaviours that we erroneously believe keep us safe, when all they do is keep our fears alive.
I found I began to understand anxiety when I began to look not only at what people ran from, but what they ran to. People whose lives are full of fear spend a great deal of time running from dangers (real or imagined) and running towards whatever makes them feel safe.
We instinctively seek the protection of others when we feel threatened. But if people have let us down, we often withdraw from company and put our trust instead in objects or rituals that make us (to some extent) feel safe and protected.
We may check and double-check compulsively to make sure that we haven't overlooked something that might result in danger to ourselves or others.
Because we associate being anxious with a particular place or situation, we avoid them. If we have experienced ridicule or humiliation in social situations, we avoid people or endure their company by staying below the radar in every way we can.
When fear becomes locked on to particular places, people or experiences, it can turn into an exhausting and disabling anxiety disorder. Psychology has evolved many strategies for breaking the grip of anxiety and this conference will spell these out in some detail.
At the heart of all these techniques lies one very simple truth: prolonged and repeated exposure to what we fear, whatever that is, leads to habituation. In other words, we can come to terms with almost anything if we trust ourselves to confront it, and stay with it.
The problem with most anxiety disorders is that we cling to behaviours whose sole purpose is to help us avoid facing what we fear.
We feel we're keeping ourselves safe, but all we're doing is keeping our fear alive and giving it increasing power. When we don't face our fears, we deny ourselves the realisation that we are bigger than they are.
Without confrontation there can be no habituation. Without risk we cannot know freedom.
• No Panic will hold a one-day conference this Friday (June 6th) in the Stillorgan Park hotel, For details tel: (0044)-19 5259 0005 or www.nopanic.org.uk
• Tony Bates is founding director of Headstrong - The National Centre for Youth Mental Health (www.headstrong.ie)