Overcoming Fear
From the book, What Happy People Know.
By Dan Baker

        To be happy, you must overcome fear, and the best way to overcome fear is with love.  Many people cannot find their love.  It exists, but it’s buried beneath a cold snowdrift of hate.  It’s easy to hate.  You can hate anything from death to terrorists to an unloving father.  But hate does terrible interior damage.  It tarnishes love; hides love, and often even kills love.

        Some people think they can hate some people and love others, but it’s hard.  Love and hate can’t live in the same heart.  Think of the happiest people you know.  They don’t love just their spouses and kids and hate other people.  They have a smile and something good to say about almost everyone.  They have few if any enemies and not much fear.

        For the most part hate is fear.  We all hate the things we’re afraid of.  When someone hurts us terribly, we often hate him for it.  We hate him mostly because we’re afraid he’ll hurt us again, either literally or in our minds, which replays the scene of hurt again and again.  If we had the power to prevent him from hurting us ever again, even in our memories, our fear would fade and our hate would again become just hurt, which can always heal.

        We do have a way to stop people from hurting us again and again, even in our memories.  It is forgiveness.  Forgiveness is the blessing we bestow on not just those who have hurt us, but upon ourselves.  Forgiveness knocks down the walls around love that hate has built.

        Forgiveness doesn’t alter what has happened, the memory remains; the hurt is unchanged.  But forgiveness grants us new eyes, through the grace of love that sees the hurt in a different way.

        Forgiveness isn’t forgetting.  It’s leaving behind your own hate and rising to the next level of life.  It’s not about letting the other guy off the hook; it’s about letting yourself off the hook. 

        From a medical perspective, hate is a heavy burden, creating chronic overstimulation of the sympathetic nervous system, which contributes strongly to depressed immunity. insomnia, hypertension, muscle pain, colitis, ulcers, heart attack, stroke, memory loss, migraines, and impaired cognitive function.  But the worst damage is to peace of mind.  It’s impossible to hate and be happy at the same time.

        Many people resist forgiving because they think it requires a melodramatic outpouring of emotion.  But sometimes all you’ve got to say is, “Hi, how’s it going?  Can I borrow your stepladder?”  In psychological healing, melodrama is overrated.  It works better in movies than in real life.

        You don’t even need to tell someone you’ve forgiven them.  You can forgive someone who’s dead.  The important thing is just to get the hate out of your heart.

         For most people the hardest job isn’t forgiving others, it’s forgiving themselves.  The most destructive hate of all is self-hate, and there’s an epidemic of it in our self-critical society.  This kind of hate usually surfaces as a low-level felling of self-contempt and self-doubt.  People just don’t feel good about themselves.  When this feeling invades their life, they always attach a presumed cause to it.  I’m too fat, too poor, too lazy, the list is endless.  But the real cause is almost always the same one that inspired hatred of others: Fear.  Self-hate is fear of not being loved.  When this fear gets a foothold, it always finds a reason to justify its existence.  Nobody’s perfect, and if you’re afraid you’re not good enough to be loved, you’ll always find an imperfection to feed the fear. 

        Happy people don’t fight their imperfections.  They fight the fear.  They concentrate on their strengths.  Nobody overcomes this fear easily.  The fear of not being enough is strong.  But it’s not as strong as love.

When you focus your mind and spirit on appreciation and loving yourself even this fear fades.