Fear is irrational. I am a believer that all fear is a result of something that caused the fear. In order to get rid of fear, we must confront the things that we are afraid of, head on.
When I was a kid, I would have this recurring nightmare. A vacuum cleaner would be chasing me, trying to suck me up into its belly. I would run to my mother in the middle of the night, and she would tell the vacuum cleaner monster, which chased me, to "GO AWAY!" The vacuum cleaner monster would cooperate with my mother and do just that.
Last night, at least 20 years after I had my last vacuum-cleaner nightmare, I was watching the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. There is a scene in the movie in which a vacuum cleaner comes to life and attacks the little boy in the film. The boy's mother shouts at the monster.
"Go away!!!!!" she shouts.
Oh my gosh! My childhood nightmares were suddenly explained! I must have seen this movie as child, and totally believed that vacuum cleaners could come to life and chase people(and in my young mind, I believed that they could suck me up and transport me to some creepy purgatory inside of the vacuum cleaner)! My mother--in telling the vacuum cleaner monster that I dreamed up to "go away"--was simply re-enacting the scene in the movie in order to allay the fears of her oldest son!
So the moral of this story. All fear is caused by something. Fears don't just happen. Sometimes the causes of fears will directly confront you when you least expect them to, and in doing so explain how irrational they were in the first place!
Maybe you will laugh in the face of fear.
Maybe, like me, you will say "EUREKA!!!! That explains everything!"
