If I Had a Hammer |
Posted: November 13, 2016 |
If I Had a Hammer
Would you agree that fear and anxiety are designed to warn and protect us? Works great most of the time...but it can also create the opposite effect, especially when they become chronic.
On a subconscious level, a chronic fear experience creates a filter to better keep us safe. Loud noises, fires, car accidents... we learn automatic responses to deal with the fear these evoke, thanks to the filter. Reacting takes precedence over responding.
Not necessarily a bad thing....
However filters don’t just protect us from the negative scary stuff...these subconscious filters keep out the aspects of our lives that are positive, too.
Filters focus on the things that match a past experience because this is what they know how to control. Listen up...if the fearful situation you face is not a match for a stored memory, they make it match. [This is how filters often create a distorted perception of reality; they are looking for a behavioral match.]
Simply put-- when you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Here’s an interesting note: the filter might even seek out fearful situations -real or imagined- because this is how it maintains the status quo. Maintaining a status quo, the “known”, is how it can best prepare and protect you. And so goes the match game of filtering out the unknowns and focusing on the fears.
This is important to know: it does this not to hurt you, but to help you survive.
Filters are protecting that which helped us once to survive.
The key word in that sentence is “once”, because as an adult, the filter from childhood may no longer help.
Maybe your toolbox needs more than a hammer.
Ball’s in your court.
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