Complete Idiot's Guide to Conquering Fear and Anxiety

you­a parent, a spouse, a child. Or you may wish to be taken care of like a child. Conscious awareness of these anxiety­provoking feelings might be catastrophic toyour sense of well being: you might feel overwhelmed with guilt or shame or go insane altogether.You protect yourself from bringing these feelings into conscious awareness by erecting defenses­repression, denial, avoidance and withdrawal, or displacement, forinstance. As these defense mechanisms tighten their grip, your anxiety increases and eventually may spill over into symptoms like phobias, or obsessions andcompulsions. Phobias, for instance, displace your anxiety away from the repressed desire or stressful loss and onto an external object: a spider, an airplane, a bridge.Since you perceive these external objects as less threatening than your feelings and you can avoid them, you feel less fearful.To loosen the grip of your unconscious mind over your conscious motivation, you have to uncover what truly motivates your symptoms. For instance, underlying a fearof public speaking may be a fear of disapproval, reminding you of the times when your father failed to acknowledge your efforts; regardless of your accomplishments,you feel you will only disappoint people. Underlying a fear of dating may be the feeling that you are unlovable. The person will soon find out and leave you anyway.Page 90When you avoid the fear­provoking person or situation, you experience "secondary" gains that perpetuate them­conscious or unconscious rewards for holding ontoyour symptoms, like attention, sympathy, or nurturance. Take Beth. She is too frightened to drive across bridges unless accompanied by her husband, who holds herhand during the ordeal, as she safely leans up against him. Deep within her is a basic fear of abandonment and of being swallowed up by strong dependency needs, asthe water would swallow her up should the bridge collapse. To lessen the chance of her husband leaving her, she denies her own needs and lives her life to please him.Her phobia