Common steps and sub-activities
Relearning - Function relearning - Banishing fear
The spectre of fear is the opposite of the pursuit of pleasure, it is the belief that a painful, hurtful or traumatic experience of the past will repeat itself. Fear is a little more complex than pleasure, however, as we shall see..............
Let us now suppose that one experiences something which hurts, which makes us sad, which gives us pain. It is remembered. Now let us examine what caused this to happen:
- Perhaps we were to blame, the fault is ours. This may mean our belief system about something is wrong and we need to adjust it. In effect we experienced pain because our belief system was incorrect. Use your perception of events from perception recall to help you. Learn, change the belief system and you have no need to repeat the experience. There is then no need to fear a repeat performance of the pain
- Perhaps the pain was inflicted by someone else. But we then have to ask ourselves, is that experience likely to be repeated? And the answer is only if exactly the same set of circumstances with the same person present themselves. Painful experiences do not repeat unless the pattern – the exact pattern recurs. And since we are in control of our lives we have no need to repeat the pattern. There is then no need to fear a repeat performance of the pain
- If an experience gives you pain, use your heightened perceptions to record in memory every last second of your experience. Alternatively, use your memory of events from the last stage to help you. This may seem bizarre, but you have to face the truth of what you went through in order to make sure you either learn from it or make sure it does not happen again. You have to understand the cause of the pain – why did it happen - and you must remember the consequences.
- Remember, as long as you learn from this, you have no need to ever repeat that experience again
- Repeat to yourself and again this may seem bizarre but it does work. “I have taken advantage of the fact that I was given this experience to learn, and I thank [whoever you want to thank] for providing me with this chance to learn”
- And repeat. This experience cannot be repeated. It is a memory I will carry with me that may give me pain on recall, but it will act as a reminder of what I learnt, but at no time in the future will this same set of circumstances be repeated that gave me this pain. I must now move on.
- Anticipation of these painful experiences is pointless. If you build up your expectations that you will be hurt or will suffer pain, then you will live your life in fear.
There is the world of difference between planning and thinking ahead based on sound belief systems to anticipate future events and thus work round them and plan for them on a rational and cool basis; and driving yourself to distraction thinking about events that may never happen or are so unlikely to happen it is not worth even considering them.
A person who does the latter, has extremely damaging belief systems – they are incomplete and probably faulty. They cannot work from the present to anticipate likely scenarios, all they can think of is to imagine every possible fearful event.
The ultimate person with sound belief systems is the well trained astronaut or fighter pilot. So well trained are they in the systems they are operating, that practically every eventuality can be thought through anticipated and avoided or handled.
The worst person I ever encountered for faulty belief systems was a nervous wreck. Permanently ill, she [yes I'm afraid she was a she] did not ever think anything through, but thought about every worse case scenario. She imagined all the things she feared most would happen, were going to happen. She was a living nightmare to live with – during a day, she would imagine she had cancer, her husband was due for a heart attack, her son would be killed crossing the road, her daughter would lose her job, she would lose her pension, her eldest grandchild would fail at school, her youngest grandchild would die from some childhood disease, she would die a lonely painful death, she would lose her house, her sight, her hearing. She would have a car crash, she would have a crash in the car with her husband, her husband would be disfigured maimed, crippled..............On and on and on it went, inexorably wearing you down. Fear. Fear grounded on ignorance.