My friend Carmen wanted more information about releasing fear. She asked for an example based on a fear she had about losing her freedom in the form of money (Carmen and her partner are heavily invested in the stock market). I painted for her the following fantasy:

Imagine a stock market crash. You stand to lose thousands of dollars with slim hope of recovery. In six months you’ll have difficulty paying your mortgage, unthinkable only a short while ago. You must radically change your lifestyle, which looks like a severe cutback in your freedom.

Your days become filled with fear. If you are observant of your body’s responses and honest with yourself, you recognize the fear in your solar plexus region, maybe your jaw. You might even have a headache, feel intermittently nauseous or lightheaded. You start to feel “delicate” and uncomfortably vulnerable.

Imagining such a scenario can trigger fear in your body as if it were really happening. This would be what I call a “safe trigger”, since it’s only imagined, not really manifesting in your life. A manifestation that brings an actual reversal to your fortunes monetary or otherwise would be an “unsafe trigger”.

Manifesting a lot of unsafe triggers indicates that you have ignored one too many previous, lesser-magnitude fear triggers. In my example, the unsafe trigger would be where you actually get seriously reversed financially in order to overcome your repeatedly reinforced resistance and wake you up in that area. You had become too numb or too resistant to have anything of lesser magnitude get you off the dime emotionally.

“But what do I do with the fears when they arise? It’s so hard not to try to think about or do something else to take my mind off it all, so I don’t have to feel this fear anymore,” Carmen said.

You have arrived now at a “choice-point”. You are free to distract yourself from that fearful undercurrent with various means at your disposal. This is denial of how you really feel. Feeling hard emotions is not easy. You want to deny that you are afraid by overlaying activities or new thoughts that cover up the fear so you don’t have to notice anymore that you are afraid. Faith must be cultivated that there will be some sort of payoff in the end that will be worth going through the feelings to the other side.

Imagined scenarios are good for proactively triggering old fear. They cause the physio-emotional system to respond no differently at root than if the feared event had manifested. Our collective judgments say something to the effect of “I am causing unnecessary fear with such thoughts” and encourage focusing on something else to stimulate a more pleasurable emotional response. I don’t suggest intentionally generating fearful thoughts. Simply notice when the fearful thoughts arise organically, and once you’ve noticed them, let them arise and vibrate, don’t push them back down, cover them up or distract yourself. You can allow the feelings to come to conscious awareness and express them in sound or tears. Fear will eventually evolve into trust with enough passes through it over time.

Getting to fear “flashpoint” for the first time is not easy. We have all developed intricate minefields of resistance to expression. We have a lot of judgments running about how the fear will “swallow us”, “it will be endless”, “I’ll just be creating more of it”, etc. Those judgments need formal release. The more willing and able we are to vibrate (express) emotions with smaller triggers the more safe, or “proactive” triggers we will experience as opposed to unsafe, or “reactive” triggers.