Fear wears many faces
By Olivene Godfrey
If we live our lives fully, and if we live for very long, we have our share of fears and anxieties. While many of our fears are vague over unlikely dangers fear is a normal and purpose serving emotion. It is the awareness of a threatening situation.
To be afraid when one should be afraid is good sense. It serves to warn us of danger and puts us on guard. But the wrong kind of fear has the most insidious power to make us do what we ought not to do and leave undone what we ought to do.
Often we fail to recognize fear for what it is as fear wears many faces. No other emotion wears so many disguises--convincing disguises that make us time and again , treat it as something other than itself.Then, sometimes we deceive those who love us. Most of all we deceive ourselves. Fears may be disguised as courage. It often seems to be a teen-age ritual for the adolescent driver to prove his manhood by letting his peers prod him into speeding and taking risks. He acts in this manner not because he's brave. But, because his fear of seeming to be afraid is more commanding than the fear of injury. In the grip of adolescent social fears, many young persons don't dare to acknowledge fear.
Fear may be disguised as snobbishness, ambition, humility,
loyalty, self-sacrifice (that's a mean one), or a missionary zeal for a good cause. It expresses itself as a chip-on-shoulder hostility of being unappreciated, or in some cases it disguises itself as illness. Research on the subject of human fear and anxiety interfere with the ability to reason. The mental wheels may spin faster but they lose traction and thinking tends to become both sporadic and illogical.
To understand fear means there are fears and fears. Some we can live with and couldn't live without. Others so inhibit our powers or distort the expression of those powers, that to live with those fears means to live self-defeated.
See you next time.
By Olivene Godfrey
If we live our lives fully, and if we live for very long, we have our share of fears and anxieties. While many of our fears are vague over unlikely dangers fear is a normal and purpose serving emotion. It is the awareness of a threatening situation.
To be afraid when one should be afraid is good sense. It serves to warn us of danger and puts us on guard. But the wrong kind of fear has the most insidious power to make us do what we ought not to do and leave undone what we ought to do.
Often we fail to recognize fear for what it is as fear wears many faces. No other emotion wears so many disguises--convincing disguises that make us time and again , treat it as something other than itself.Then, sometimes we deceive those who love us. Most of all we deceive ourselves. Fears may be disguised as courage. It often seems to be a teen-age ritual for the adolescent driver to prove his manhood by letting his peers prod him into speeding and taking risks. He acts in this manner not because he's brave. But, because his fear of seeming to be afraid is more commanding than the fear of injury. In the grip of adolescent social fears, many young persons don't dare to acknowledge fear.
Fear may be disguised as snobbishness, ambition, humility,
loyalty, self-sacrifice (that's a mean one), or a missionary zeal for a good cause. It expresses itself as a chip-on-shoulder hostility of being unappreciated, or in some cases it disguises itself as illness. Research on the subject of human fear and anxiety interfere with the ability to reason. The mental wheels may spin faster but they lose traction and thinking tends to become both sporadic and illogical.
To understand fear means there are fears and fears. Some we can live with and couldn't live without. Others so inhibit our powers or distort the expression of those powers, that to live with those fears means to live self-defeated.
See you next time.
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