Fighting your Fears and Anxieties

Surviving the Fight or Fighting to Survive

Fighting your Fears and Anxieties

I am writing this blog because of something that came up in psychology class. Please be patient with me in this blog because it starts out with something that does seem quite technical and possibly a bit boring but it does go on to tell you about how I cope with my fears and anxieties and how our conditions have made us stronger than the average person who doesn't suffer the way we do.

We were speaking about operant conditioning in psychology class and how it deepens peoples fears and anxieties. Operant Conditioning suggests that the consequences of our actions affect the likelihood of those actions being repeated. If it makes you feel good, or it gives a good outcome, you are likely to repeat the action when in a similar situation. If you feel bad after doing something, you are unlikely to repeat it.

Where this comes into fears and anxieties is that under the this approach, operant conditioning deepens our fears by gaining a positive feeling when the fear is avoided, therefore you avoid it even more. So, say you have a fear of lifts for example. You fear that if you get into the lift then that lift might break and you will be stuck for hours with no food or water, or it may fall and cause a pretty gory death. (Sorry to those of you who have these fears for reminding you in a rather graphic way.) Or it could be a fear of lifts based on claustrophobia or germaphobia.

So you choose to take the stairs, or escalators to the next or lower floor. This makes you feel happy, because you know that you aren't going to suffer any of those awful situations on the stairs or escalator. You feel safe, and calm and relieved that you haven't had to experience the unpleasant response of anxiety.

Under this psychological approach this encourages us to avoid fearful situations more and more each time that we  have avoided them and get a positive consequence. Whilst I agree that this happens, and that fears are reinforced by operant conditioning, it doesn't really apply to me. Either because I am backwards or just because I break the mould. I don't know.

When I avoid things that fear me, I feel ashamed and I feel weak. I feel like I have let myself down and I feel like a coward. I feel like I am letting my fear, my mental health and my anxiety win in a way. So whilst my response to these feelings is still a variation of operant conditioning, I don't get the normal response to avoidance of fears. I believe this may have something to do with my borderline personality disorder. The distorted self image, and putting myself down all of the time.

So I face my fears, I put myself into situations that I don't particularly want to be in. Even simple every day things like getting on the bus. I suffer the anxiety and I feel the pounding heart, sweaty shaking hands and nausea. Why? Because once I have, I feel so proud of myself, like I have beaten my demons. It makes me grow as a person, makes me stronger, wiser and much more able to cope with every day life. It gives me the ability to hold my head high because I didn't run away when things got tough. It makes me able to tell myself that I CAN instead of listening to the people that have told me that I can't.

As mental health sufferers, we fight every day, fight against ourselves, our conditions, our fears. We have this internal struggle, this internal battle, through every decision and every encounter. Although this makes our life much more difficult, it enables us to face things that other people wouldn't. There is a reason that people say to you “You're stronger than you realise” or “I don't know how you cope with that”. The terrible experiences that have made us this way are what have made us able to cope with much more than others.

Although you may feel like you can't cope, or that you are weak and useless, you're not. Your condition doesn't show how weak you are, it shows that you have had to be strong for too long. And that means that although you may fall, you may have days where you don't go out and you do avoid your fears, your experiences, your condition is what enables you to get back up when others would stay down. It's what makes you able to keep on surviving the fight and fighting to survive.