The Way To Relating, Part 5: Fear Vs Panic
By Ph.D. Sherrie Campbell. Posted on .
My recent articles have been discussing the natural emotions (sadness, love, anger, envy, fear) and their unnatural counterparts (chronic depression, possession, rage, jealousy, panic). This is the last article in my series of 5 and will focus on the emotion of fear. Then intent in writing on each of the natural emotions is to help you to stay in touch with what is the most real about you. If we can learn to communicate from the natural emotion, so much of the conflict in our lives would dissipate. Emotions are feelings/energies in movement. The emotions by their natural design are meant to be ‘passing-through energies. They come up because they are meant to come out and be released. They are not designed to stick and cause states of chronic suffering.
The natural emotions are simple in design and purpose, and each of them is meant to help us to grow. Sadness is the way we release and heal, love is designed to help us to be more and more of who we are to the Self and others, anger is our right to say ‘no thank you,’ envy is the inspiration to be a better person, and fear is the energy which makes us move and grow. Fear is our most evolutionary response. Its simple design is to make us so uncomfortable that we are forced to make the necessary changes we need to make to grow as people. If we avoid our fears, we stagnate and become panic-ridden. Fear is a pressure. It is a pressure to change. When we repress our fears we stagnate and work against our most basic evolutionary goals.
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Sadly, fear that is repressed turns to panic. Panic often becomes a chronic state of being. This is unnatural. We are an anxiety and panic-ridden culture. We are also prescribed psychotropic medications more than any other culture. Prescription medications are now causing many deaths amongst us each year, more than ever before. Fear is the emotion that most holds us back. It holds us back from achieving, from changing, from living, from loving, from learning, from maturing, from becoming whole. Or, fear can be used as the inspiration and driving fuel to promote us forward in all those areas.
Two facts: fear equals change and change is uncomfortable. The more afraid of change we become the more chronic our state of panic will become. Panic creates a state of emergency and this is what we avoid. In an effort to avoid our fears we become ‘controlling’ people and we fight to keep everything the same because we are comfortable in what we know. Yet, controlling people are full of panic because life and people by design are unpredictable. Fear’s requirement is an open mind, surrender and flexibility. Its intended purpose is movement, personal growth and expansion. Those who are chronically rigid are considered mentally ill; those who are flexible are considered mentally healthy. The rigid are considered mentally ill because they cannot move with the flow of life, the emotions, their relationships, their jobs etc. They used many techniques to stay stagnate from blaming others, making excuses, forgetting, and wanting everyone around them to change. Panic-ridden people do not think they need to change they think the world needs to change.
