What is Fear?
Fear is jittery feeling in our stomach, the soreness and pressure around our heart, the strangle tightness in our throat. Fear is the loud pounding of our heart, the racing of our pulse. Fear constricts our breathing, making it rapid and shallow. Fear tells us we are in danger, and then urgently drives our mind to make sense of what is happening and figure out what to do. Fear takes over our mind with stories about what will go wrong. Fear tells us we will lose our body, lose our mind, lose our friends, our family, the earth itself. Fear is the anticipation of future pain.
Something is wrong; what do I do?
Remember fear arises with any threat to our wellbeing. The real cause of fear is not always evident. When we feel anxious, the anxiety attaches itself to whatever is going on most immediate in your life. So, what are we going to do with the fear? Radical acceptance teachers us that "the sacred pause is fertile ground for wise action," so let's start there.
You know that step one is to breathe. First and most importantly.
We do not try to push the emotion down, we befriend the emotion, we welcome it, we remind ourselves that our brain is doing exactly what it is supposed to do and if you are safe you say just that “hand to heart…I am safe.”
Once the emotion passes, we weigh the evidence. Do I have evidence to support that this feeling is real? If I don’t, what evidence do I have to support that I am safe.
Next, we start the process of radical acceptance.
Feelings and stories of unworthiness and shame are perhaps the most binding element in the trance of fear. When we believe something is wrong with us, we are convinced we are in danger. Fear is sustained by our strategies to AVOID FEELING fear.
Because we are responding to an accumulation of past pain, our responses are out of proportion to what is happening in the moment.
Radical Acceptance reverses our habit of living at work with experiences that are unfamiliar, frightening or intense. It is the necessary antidote to years of neglecting ourselves, years of judging and treating ourselves harshly, years of rejecting this moment’s experience. Radical Acceptance is the willingness to experience ourselves and our life as it is. A moment of Radical Acceptance is a moment of genuine freedom.
#Radicalacceptance is a distress tolerance skill that is designed to keep pain from turning into suffering. My go to thought leader on this principal is #TaraBrach is amazing! I use a lot of her principals on Radical Acceptance in my practice. If you want to learn more pleeeeease check out her book! #Lifechanging #DistressTolerance