Sep 21, 2021
Stop Feeding Your Fears and Terrors and Feed Yourself Solutions
Changing Your Mental Diet
For the majority of my life, I’ve lived in fear. I’ve felt the pervasive terror of not being able to get through the day. I’ve felt dread at the start of each new day. And then at night, I’ve experienced a deep anxiety that I wouldn’t make it through the night.
As a child, I would wake up in the night terrified. So, I would jump out of bed and race to my parent’s bedroom and dive between mom and dad. And I immediately felt safe, even if only for a little while.
In the Shadow
And without realizing it, I became like the rabbit that’s caught in the headlights at night and blindly leaps here and there, trying to escape from something that she can’t see.
Sure, as a teen, I had my horse to help me make it though the day. For anytime I could, I was unknowingly seeking to escape. I’d saddle up, and ride away.
But I never knew what I was really riding away from. Or where I was really going. I just knew that I was hurting, that I needed to get away as fast as I could.
Even if only for a little while.
For when I returned, I was once again that scared rabbit with nowhere to turn to.
So, I lived most of my life in that rabbit’s shadow. For everywhere I went, there was always a sense of fear and anxiety. Even though it may have not seemed like it from the outside.
For I must have seemed fairly normal to the rest of the world. Because I graduated high school with honors. And I got accepted into college.
For my father wanted me to go to college and become a secretary so I wouldn’t have to work so hard to make a living. But, I wanted to be a horse trainer, never realizing that was one of the hardest jobs that I could ever have chosen.
So, at my father’s insistence, I went to college. And even went to my college classes. Until …
Fear overwhelmed me again. I suffered a quiet serene panic attack in the middle of math class … and was totally unaware of why. So, I quit going to classes. And disappointed my parents, as well as myself.
For that shadow of my scared rabbit was back. And I again didn’t know which way to turn. Or where to go.
Lack of Awareness of my Mental Diet
I didn’t know my mental diet was mainly fear and terror. And actions of avoidance caused by my anxiously clinging to terrors that invoked an obsession to numb myself took over my life.
For when you’re scared, you often think you can avoid calamity by trying to inoculate yourself by not seeing. By ignoring the offensive and the negative. Because of your involuntary and obsessive need to succumb.
After all, if you don’t know what the problem really is, there’s no one to fight. And if you don’t see any other options, there’s nowhere to run to. So, you freeze.
And you remain frozen. For years. Even decades. Until …
The pain is so great that it can’t be controlled. And it all comes rushing back at you in one gigantic horrifying moment. A moment of terror so great you can no longer close your eyes to it.
The Tragedy of being Held Captive
It took all those years of avoidance, all those decades of denial, to culminate into that moment when the terror held me captive and I was forced to face it head on.
Forced into seeing my terror for what it really was.
For you can be forcibly pushed into the realization that your entire life has been one gigantic waste. And you then suddenly and finally see what you were avoiding and running away from was the truths of someone else …
the reality of the underlying terror and hurt of someone else.
For you see the most heinous crimes are all too often the culmination of not the victim’s pain, but the perpetrator’s pain.
So, in one painful and terror-filled moment, I saw my father and mother’s pain. I saw how the turmoil of their life was caused by their own lack of maturity. For their inability to escape from their own frustrations, anxieties, and terrors caused their dysfunctional behaviors.
Anyone who’s lived through the ordeal of their parents’ battles knows how detrimental their constant fighting is on you. And sometimes you end up fighting their battles for them by enacting your own version of their struggles.
Thus, you tragically live your life through their eyes instead of your own.
Yet it would be even more tragic if you finally hadn’t been pushed by that moment of terror into realizing that you now have the chance to live your own life.
Stepping Out of the Shadow
For you now see clearly your chance to step out of the shadow of that terrified rabbit. You see clearly exactly where you are going. And that it’s possible to decide for yourself exactly where you really want to go.
For your destiny is not to remain a terrified rabbit. So, you climb out of the rabbit hole you unconsciously and impulsively dived into.
But to become a fully functional human, you must learn to make your own decisions. Learn to live your own life. Start seeing things through your own eyes, the eyes of emerging yearnings to experience and express yourself. Your real self. The self you were born to become.
As Tony Robbins says, “Let your desire to avoid pain and induce massive pleasure drive you to make the changes necessary to take your life to the next level now.”
Don’t settle for more pain and terror by accepting the inevitability of your own misery. In Awaken The Giant Within, Robbins says you can “interrupt the limiting pattern.” You do that when you “take a set period of time and take conscious control of all your thoughts.”
Altering Your Diet
Robbins discovered that you must go on a “Mental Diet.” This mental diet is a diet of feeding on solutions instead of problems, fear, and terror.
According to Robbins, it is “an opportunity to eliminate the negative and destructive patterns of thinking and feeling that inevitably come from living life in an emotionally reactionary and mentally undisciplined fashion.”
Robbins says you start this new mental diet by deciding that for ten consecutive days you refuse to partake of any unhealthy negative destructive thoughts. So, instead of feeding on fear and terror and gnawing on your nerves until they are raw, you feed on thoughts of finding solutions.
Robbins says “our goal is not to ignore the problems of life, but to put ourselves in better mental and emotional states where we can not only come up with solutions, but act upon them.”
Robbins adds that ten straight days of “focusing entirely on solutions, on what’s great in your life, on what works and how lucky you are … [may] make you so strong that what you once thought was a problem may disappear as you assume a new identity of an unstoppable and joyous human being.”
New Feeding Habits
Robbins explains further, “unlike a diet where you starve yourself and eventually have to go back to eating, your old pattern of finding the negative is not one you ever have to return to again.” He says your developing new feeding habits is really “an opportunity to become ‘addicted’ to a positive focus for the rest of your life.”
It’s an opportunity to make a consistent disciplined effort to imbibe healthy nutritional thoughts and emotions that are energizing and life-promoting.
And it’s also a diet that will prevent many unhealthy consequences, like the obesity of self-indulgence that runs rampant throughout today’s society.
For when you change your mental diet, and feed yourself solutions, a whole new world opens up to you. You begin to see the world isn’t as terrifying to you as it used to be. Simply because you’re now dealing with reality instead of imagined fears.
And instead of imagined fears growing into monstrous, gigantic wounds that are ultra-sensitive to the slightest upsets and difficulties, you strengthen your whole nervous system with the solutions of kindness and compassion.
The Morphing of the Bunny
And that scared rabbit inside of you morphs into a hopeful little bunny.
So, stop and listen. Do you hear that little bunny in you calling for help? If you do, answer her.
Decide to free that bunny in you, by feeding it with kindness and the growth-inducing grains of guided reasonable affirming ideas needed for survival.
Free the bunny inside of you from her terror by caring for yourself and others enough to dispel her fears instead of roaring past her without giving any thought to what it’s like to be so scared that you jump straight into the path of danger.
For that bunny may just be the one that lives happily ever after in your backyard. Simply because her fears are conquered and she’s on a healthy mental diet.
The mental diet that alters lives. The mental diet of solutions that overcome fear and anxiety and boosts self-confidence and self-respect each and every single life-restoring day.
