Friday 2 July 2010

Facing your Fears


Good morning! Hope you enjoy the first of our guest series - responses to random images from my Pinterest boards by Melissa from Wife in Training!




Dude, this is the story of my life.

And yours, too.

The best advice I can give is for you to go to your local library and check out Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Read it. And when you get to the part where Harry and his class take on the boggarts and see their worst fears manifest and take on corporeal form, slow down. Read carefully. Take notes if you have to.


In early 2006, I had just gone through a particularly painful breakup which landed me on a therapist's couch in Indiana for an hour a week. As the winter slowly receded and daffodils and blue-eyed marys began to emerge, as the spring storms started to pummel the landscape, I began to regain my equilibrium. And the breakthrough came one day on that damned couch (okay, so maybe it was an armchair) as I was explaining to my kindly, young, and inexplicably bald therapist about how I was constantly overwhelmed by the fears in my head which were constantly screaming and undermining my confidence. I actually didn't identify it as fear, just an insecure voice. And the kindly counselor said, "You need to realize how ridiculous that voice is. It's not true, and you need to laugh at it."

Laugh at it.

Like Harry Potter did to the boggarts.

The boggarts were fear.

My issues all came back down to fear--nothing yet real, all imagined. None of it had any more power than what I gave it.

And so I laughed.

And my life changed.

The fear is still there, of course. But I've learned to live with it. Call it whistling in the dark, bravado, what ever. But I laugh. And I succeed.

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