When it comes to discussing fears and anxieties we may be experiencing in life we’ll have often been subject to a lot of contradictory advice over our lifetime.
We’ll all be familiar with our parents telling us as children that we should talk to them if anything is troubling us. As children, many things arise that seem terribly daunting and frightening yet it is only because of our lack of experience and our tender age that we’d often create gigantic mountains out of mole hills only for our parents to come to our rescue and put everything into some kind of rational perspective which we could all understand and which would alleviate, or at least greatly diminish our fears.
However, the real problems arise when it’s us that become the adults. This is because we are also wrongly taught that, as adults, we should always be able to cope with whatever is thrown at us. Therefore, many of us go through our adult life accumulating our own grown-up fears and anxieties, yet feel that we should keep these bottled up within as we should be able to cope.
Quite clearly, this is simply not true and many adults have their lives destroyed by harbouring fears and worries that they simply feel they cannot discuss with anybody. This is not only physically and mentally damaging to the individual but can also affect those living around the person who is going through such emotional turmoil.
The Benefits of Discussing our Emotional Problems
We all need to break away from the old, traditional mindset that we should always be able to cope as adults and that we should always find our own solutions to the fears and anxieties which we may have to conquer in our adult lives.
By discussing your fears and anxieties, you can ease your burden and another adult’s perspective can often have a great impact upon your own perception of events and can help you overcome your fears more quickly. It’s also true that as adults, we tend to be very aware when things don’t seem quite right about a person we are close to and it’s often quite easy to detect that a person is feeling anxious or worried, even though we may not know why. Therefore, by discussing our concerns with loved ones, it not only helps us but also helps them to understand why we feel as we do and puts them in a better position to help us.
Choosing Your Confidantes
Issues surrounding fear and anxiety are all tied in to our emotional and mental well-being and, as much as there have been plenty of awareness campaigns and a lot of effort into eliminating the stigma of mentally related illnesses, there still remains an element of prejudice and stigma attached to emotionally worried or disturbed illnesses and conditions. This is primarily due to the fear of it being an illness or condition which we cannot visibly see and because of a lack of knowledge and awareness amongst people in general.
In raising and discussing our fears and anxieties, we should choose our confidantes carefully as some will be compassionate yet others may be too quick to be judgemental. Therefore, it’s important to decide who to tell and how much to tell them. No-one can know for certain how to make those choices the right ones. All you can rely on is your gut instinct. However, you’ll almost certainly know one or two people whom you’re fairly sure you can rely on to have your best interests at heart and these are usually the people you would turn to first.
As we feel more confident in discussing our worries with a trusted confidante(s), it helps us regain control over our life and enables us to come to terms with our feelings and experiences. It also helps us to conquer our fears and to move on with our lives in terms of re-establishing goals for ourselves.
Using Professional Help
For some people who simply don’t feel that they can trust friends or family members or work colleagues with their deepest, darkest fears and anxieties or they feel uncomfortable in discussing these issues with those who are closest to them, there are many professional outlets that you can turn to instead. Starting with your GP who will treat everything you tell them in confidence, they will be able to refer you to experts within the mental health field who will be able to listen to your concerns and will help you to conquer your fears and to move forward again without fear and worry.
The problem with fear and anxiety is that once it has taken a grip of you, it can often seem to be something that you are going to be stuck with forever and, no matter how hard you try to battle it on your own, the problems can just seem to get bigger and bigger. However, this is rarely the actual reality of the situation – it’s just your perception of it. Therefore, the sooner you do take steps to discuss these issues be that with friends, family or professionals or a combination of them all, the sooner your life will be free from fear and worry.
