From Fear to Love

My ability to process successfully and productively my sadness, my anger, my fear will powerfully impact my ability to feel the positive feelings of  happy, excited, tender, hope and peace.

I popped in my earbuds and scrolled to a Midday Connection podcast during a recent lengthy drive only to find myself face-to-face with an issue I've been trying to get a grip on in my own life.  Listen to this, all straight from the Midday Connection interview with Ray Kane, author of From Fear to Love (links below):

Fear causes us to control.

Out of our fear, we become controlling and that squelches other people from receiving or being able to be in a caring, loving, kind relationship.

If you're walking down the steps and you slip, you grab for the handrail to regain your physical equilibrium.  Control is fear's handrail.

Fear keeps me from being able

to connect with people relationally because

it preoccupies me.

Fear is the intellectual part of the emotion.  Anxiety is what fear creates in my body.  Fear is something I think about while anxiety is something I feel.

The challenge is that when fear comes into my existence,
 I begin to think catastrophically.

That the worst possible thing is going to happen.

• lose my peripheral vision.
• develop tunnel vision
• less hopeful
• more despairing

When someone isn't aware that they are afraid, they probably aren't aware of how they are connecting or not connecting with other people -- not aware of their impact on people.

To be a good fear manager is to become aware -- to gain insight and awareness.  Insight and awareness allows me to have options to choose to do differently.

And that's a key.

My ability to process successfully and productively my sadness, my anger, my fear will powerfully impact my ability to feel the positive feelings of  happy, excited, tender, hope and peace.

So the better able I am to manage, the more present I can be to others.

From Fear to Love

Ray and Nancy Kane

Midday Connection