The upstairs hall in our house has a scary.
Our two cats, who used to lie in the middle of the hall perfectly comfortably, have taken to dashing through it at top speed as if something is about to jump out and eat them. We have no idea what happened, but somehow or other they’ve developed a fear of the hall.
The emotional program for happiness that the cats are operating under is the program for security and survival, and fear is the characteristic emotion. Now, I don’t want to get too doctrinaire about the characteristic emotions of the three emotional programs – anger for power/control, sadness for esteem/affection, and fear for security/survival. They are strong tendencies rather than absolutes; indicators, diagnostic symptoms if you like. These emotions can sometimes be converted into each other – and if you think about it, the programs themselves are not necessarily separate sealed boxes either. Humans are social creatures, so esteem and affection affect security and survival, power and control. If we are rejected and despised by our social group, we have more difficulty getting the resources we need to survive, and less control over our lives. Turning it around, having power and control is famously a generator of esteem and affection.
With that disclaimer out of the way, let’s look in more depth at the emotional program of security and survival.
Security and survival isn’t just about physical security and survival, naturally. It’s just as much about our self-image, our financial security, our security from change, and our survival unchanged. Deep down in our brains, most of us are intensely conservative – we resist personal change, because there’s always a sense in which change brings about the death of our former selves. We fear change, because change, even good change, is a risk and a small death.
And security includes feeling like we’re able to cope with life, to deal with what it throws at us. I often see anxious people in my hypnotherapy practice, and frequently what they’re anxious about is that someone, usually a parent, has given them an image of what they’re supposed to be like, and they don’t believe they can do it. They’re terrified of doing something wrong (perhaps because, at a key time in their lives, everything they did was characterised as wrong). So they try, as much as possible, not to do things.
Susan Jeffers wrote a book about this very issue, called Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway. I have to admit I haven’t read it, but a friend of mine did, and embarked on the amazing program of doing something that frightened him every day. Naturally, he saw great personal growth as a result.
And here we start to touch on the secret which I’ll talk about in more depth in my next post in this series. Part of the key to the Welcoming Prayer, which is a way to bypass the misdirection we get from the three emotional programs for happiness, is to connect to the emotion and then let it go. We call people “courageous” when they continue in the face of fear, when they risk their security and even survival in service of a higher goal or greater ideal. Most of us in the modern world won’t be called upon to risk our physical survival, but we all have an implicit challenge to risk what we are now in pursuit of what we can be.
Next time: how to be connected to your emotions without being overwhelmed.
UPDATE: I’ve now revised the material in this series and turned it into a self-reflection process as part of my ebook, Your Emotional Hamster Wheel and How to Get Off It. It’s included when you sign up for my free Simple Stress Management Techniques course.
Technorati Tags: fear, happiness, emotion, Welcoming Prayer, survival, security
