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Psychological life counselling
By Dipl.-Päd. Jürgen
Bendszus, scientific counsellor and therapist
Types of Fear
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Fears are a part of our lives. Fears
challenge us and can also lead us to great
productivity.
However, some people suffer from
inordinate worry and excessive anxieties. Panic
attacks can be experienced in extreme cases. These
fears limit our freedom, quality of life and
achievement potential. We can block out these fears
or confront them.
Only if you examine your anxieties
and get an understanding of their background, will
you be able to overcome them!
Here you will learn...
which types and faces of fear there
are
which are the most important
psychologically understandable life fears
How basic trust and self-confidence
form in early childhood
How specific fears (phobias) are
learned
How fears of life can be overcome |
© irisblende.de |
In medicine we differentiate between 3 entirely
different types of fear:
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Anxieties due to bodily illness |
Anxieties due to mental illness |
Psychologically
understandable excessive fearfulness, specific
anxieties, phobias |
Anxiety and disquietude form
through physiological, sickening processes.
Causes can include:
Neurological illnesses (for
example brain tumor, multiple sclerosis etc.),
non-operable diseases such as thyroid gland, the
heart, blood etc.)
Therapy: medical somatic (physical)therapy |
Through drugs and pharaceuticals
or within the realm of endogenous depressions
and psychoses
Therapy: somatic therapy and psychotherapy
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These fears are
described and explained in greater detail on
this website.
Therapy: Psychotherapy
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Faces of fear – cases (names and
details have been changed)
Paul
called me because he wanted to visit a seminar at his
college. He wasn’t confident enough to go there. The new
people and situation made him feel insecure and anxious. He
was conflicted as to whether he should go to the seminar or
stay home.
Mary
wrote to me that she had always been an anxious type. Lately
it has got worse: “I’ve been fearful that I’m going to fall
down – fearful that I’m going to go blind – have problems
breathing – waking up frequently during the night”. She
considered whether she should do more sports in order to
overcome her anxieties.
Kathy, 35 years old, was a
nurse and active as housewife with a family at the same
time. As her three children were already teenagers, she had
prepared herself in courses to take the final secondary
school examinations. Two weeks before the exam she called me
in a very anxious state and complained that she was becoming
more and more nervous and would frequently awaken during the
night due to her anxieties. She was scared to take the exam.
In these examples we see that anxieties can
constrain our freedom and quality of life: people are afraid
to take things on, they are under-confident, are anxious
about new relationships, suffer from continual watchfulness
and tension. Worry determines their lives.
In addition to this, bodily malfunctions can be caused or
intensified. Many people try to block out their fears and they
are hidden behind their bodily aches and pains. And chronic
anxiety leads to depression! Anxious people can’t assert
themselves in conflicts as well as others and avoid acting on
their interests and needs. They often push aside their
aggressions when doing this, but this can cause new
difficulties.
The most important fears of
life
Fear of unemployment, an accident, break-in, violence, tensions
due to the immigration of foreigners. These are for many people
the most important fears and they are experienced more intensely
by people with anxious personalities.
In psychological counselling and therapy we often meet people
who, in addition to these, have their own very individual and
personal anxieties which they experience intensely. These
include the following:
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Being worried, a relationship could break up
– Being worried about one’s own children or old parents –
Fear of loneliness – |
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Anxieties about taking tests or failure –
Fear of being publicly exposed – |
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Inordinate experience of fear in life crises
and when undergoing a transition to new phases in life as,
for example, with divorce, loss of a person, a new
love-partnership, carrier changes and challenges |
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Anxieties about biological changes, sickness,
old-age and death |
Many clients with very specific fears, sometimes anxieties that
are hard to comprehend, so-called phobias, go to
therapeutic practices: panic attacks with difficulty breathing
or heart problems, social phobias (fear of other people or the
opposite sex), becoming anxious in large areas, for example with
trips by train or plane, fear of blushing, fear of animals,
spiders and many other phobias and finally fear of fear.
People experience many different and diverse types of fear.
Still, these many anxieties have their roots in just a few basic
fears and existential underlying primal fears. Usually these
basic fears are repressed because a person couldn’t stand it if
these fears were continually conscious. Sometimes fateful
situations such as divorce, loss or other crises arise, that
cause these primal fears to break out of the unconscious and
show themselves, for example, in nightmares. According to Irvin
D. Yalom, a renowned American professor of psychology and
representative of existential psychology, there are
four basic fears or primal fears:
Fear of: ... death –
loneliness – freedom –
meaninglessness
Through the family situation, environment and learning processes
that take place in life history, these primal fears are already
formed in very early childhood. Every person takes on a unique,
personal strategy in dealing with these primal fears: for
example one can repress the fear of having a meaningless life by
restlessness or work addiction. – Or the fear of being lonely
can be substituted by hanging on to another person – with the
outcome that perhaps the fear of loneliness will hide itself in
a cover of jealousy. – The fear of old-age and death can be
replaced by a fixation on having a very youthful lifestyle. –
And fear of freedom could be avoided in that one avoids all
situations where one has to make decisions for oneself – a
problem that many citizens of the former German Democratic
Republic suffered from, who had got to know the use of freedom
too little under an authoritarian regime.
Learn more about the
reasons of fear and overcoming
anxieties!
© Dipl.-Päd. Jürgen Bendszus 2010
All rights reserved. This site is for
information and support only and not a substitute for
professional diagnosis and treatment.
Titel of the original German
text: Typen der Angst
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