Emotional fears are camouflaged thoughts

Psychology for Dummies #3 Emotional fear

In my last Psychology post I have been writing about fears and that there are also emotional fears. In fact emotional fears are thoughts with a camouflaged fear cape. 😳 What?!

Let's take a look at an example! A typical emotional fear could be "failing your relationship", right?! When you are fighting with your partner this fear shows a lot of action in body reactions like crying, sweating, shouting, arousal, rising of the pulse... Because of these body reactions you would consider this as fear. Good job, you just spoke body language!

Now you can go a step further and ask yourself...

Why is this an emotional fear?! Why is my body making such a drama of a fight?!

The answers might be like..."because I am afraid he/she doesn't love me anymore"..."because I am afraid he/she is going to end the relationship"..."because I am going to end up alone..."because all my relationships ended like this! We are never going to make it", just to mention a few examples. You might recognise some of these thoughts. Translated in body and mind language these thoughts mean "Help! We are under attack!!!😵

Do you see it, that's exactly the point these are actually misunderstandings in translating and just thoughts!

Underneath the camouflage of all emotional fear are just thoughts!

Imagine yourself reacting to the fight with your partner with thoughts like "I don't get his/her point, let's talk about it" or "Why is she/he reacting so furious?!" Or "what can I do to make him/her feeling more comfortable?!".

How would you feel?! Would you still feel emotional fear? Why not?

Because you are thinking differently!

These different thoughts translated in body and mind language mean something like "we have a problem, we have to work this out". You are still going to feel aroused but like you feel aroused when you are understanding the suddenly not working coffee machine (we always desperately want to solve this problem right 😜) not like when you are under attack. That's a huge difference!

To sum up, fear does come along as an emotional fear, but actually emotional fears are just based on thoughts. That means we can change our feelings in a situation in thinking differently.

That would be great! Easy!
Unfortunately a problem arises...because we tend to believe our thoughts! We are persuaded that our thoughts are true, that's why it's quite difficult to think out of the box 😉.

Just to let you know, it's worth the effort to question your thoughts and sometimes think from a different perspective. Because our feelings might change because of the different thoughts! That's Wow🤔 isn't it?!

Just imagine how powerful you are! Just thinking differently... It's you determining your thoughts, nobody else!

Of course it's not that easy to think differently when you are caught up in emotions. This would be like speaking body language without learning the alphabet. So that's what we are trying to do, learning the alphabet of the mind and your body.

You just made a great start, read further in the next post where I am talking about the emotional fear: feeling insufficient!

Thank you for reading and have a look at the other Psychology posts as well 😊.