Fear: How to Live With It

Fear can be as crippling, if not more so, than a disease or injury. It can keep you from calling the doctor when you have symptoms you haven’t experienced before, or cause sleepless nights worrying about upcoming x-rays or surgery, results of tests or recurrence of disease. Fear can grip you to the point where you can’t function and leave you drained and exhausted.

Not always a bad thing, fear does have its purpose. It can keep us from touching hot objects or making comments that we know are bound to get us into trouble. Some people enjoy the rush of fear, resulting from a scary movie or a ride on a giant roller coaster. However, fear is not helpful when it prevents us from getting the care we need, enjoying social opportunities, and living our lives to the fullest .

There is no doubt that learning of a life altering diagnosis or experiencing some type of traumatic event leaves us with lots of opportunities to be fearful. We wouldn’t be human if we didn’t have concerns about dying. However, left unchecked, fear can destroy our quality of life.

Dr. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross summed up our “fear or fears,” including illness, pain, loss and ultimately death, when she wrote, You will not grow if you sit in a beautiful flower garden, but you will grow if you are sick, if you are in pain, if you experience losses, and if you do not put your head in the sand, but take the pain as a gift to you with a very, very specific purpose. Instead, the goal of life becomes not to elude death – but, because one's fears do not center so much on it, rather to live in concert with it.

The following on-line resources provide ways to cope with fear:

• Livestrong.com Dare to Change your Life: Overcoming Fears

• Coping with Fear of Recurrence

• Strategies for Coping with Fear after a Traumatic Event

• Dealing with Fear (a Buddhist approach, which discusses fear of death)

• Goosebumps: The Science of Fear

• Dr. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross Foundation Includes a complete listing of her books, essays and other materials. Kubler-Ross was a Swiss born psychiatrist who worked and wrote about death and dying at a time when it was not openly discussed. In her book, “On Death and Dying,” she identified five stages of dying denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.