A Trusted Person Can Counteract Your Winning Recipe and Reduce Fear

AS INTROVERTS WE all use some kind of a winning recipe that we created in childhood to compensate for not being outgoing enough. It allows us to hide inside of a socially acceptable way to be – aggressive, distant, humble, proud, or silly. Or any of the thousands of other fronts quiet people adopt to win in an extroverted world. For example, my recipe is to be methodical by building step by step procedures to cope with life events.

In Post #7 we discussed how to reduce fear by creating a new interpretation around the meaning you have assigned to a situation. Here we look at how to exit from a fear-driven endless loop. Your winning recipe tends to fall into one whenever you face a truly menacing hazard.

I faced such a threat when I received orders to report to Vietnam.

How I Discovered The Trusted Person Solution

THOSE ORDERS ARRIVED halfway into my two-year commitment as a second lieutenant in Army Intelligence. I felt devastated, as did my soon-to-be fiancée, a sweet girl who was a student at NYU. I was about to enter into the relentless carnage of that war and could be facing a death sentence.

Before I deployed we used three weeks of leave to join my family in Southern California. We all stayed at a rented house on Laguna Beach. The days in the sun were magical, pushing the fear of what lay ahead into the background. But at night the dark underside of the beautiful Laguna experience emerged as a mortal fear of the ocean.

I looked out over the dark Pacific and imagined that I had to cross every inch of it in a troop ship. I would disembark on a hostile shore where enemy soldiers and civilian sympathizers would try to kill me. 

That was something more sinister than anything I had ever known and I might not come back from it. Many men did not, or returned maimed in some way that seemed to make life not worth living. Wind and forces deep within the ocean propelled the moonlit swells of the sea as a living, moving reminder of the existential threat that I faced by venturing out onto the water.  

It became too much to face.  My winning recipe screamed at me to find a process that could neutralize the fear but nothing could. The narrow view my recipe was taking – from the current day until the day I came home from Vietnam – caused the fear to bounce around like a ball inside a squash court.

Exceptionally afraid, we sat down with my father to share our concerns. A good man who lost his own father at age three, he was gentle and strong, someone I trusted and knew to be a source of wise counsel.

He quickly lifted our vision out of the restricted view that held us. His words pointed us towards the broad and sunny future that awaited beyond. He coached us to focus on our new lives in Boston or San Francisco if either of the graduate schools I had applied to should admit me after my return. As soon as we did that the fear backed off to the point where we could manage it. The solution was simple, but we were so stuck that we never thought of it. The talk with him liberated us into a brighter world.  The recipe was still there but it no longer ran us.

Unpacking the Trusted Person Solution

EXTREME FEAR TENDS to trigger your winning recipe into a vicious cycle where it feeds on itself with no hope of resolution:

It has nowhere to go because the boundaries of its vision are so limited. It wants you to keep being the way it has always told you to be if you want to succeed in life. It is a closed system. It does not learn, it does not change. It is still the same vehicle you built before you knew any better. By now it is so ingrained that it is always working automatically in the background. As soon as you face something big and scary it balloons up to try to help you, but often that only deepens the fear.

One way to break the cycle is to go to a trusted person. Someone whose advice you value can expand your horizon to times and places outside the purview of your recipe and thereby help to alleviate your distress.

How to Rely On Someone You Trust

HERE IS HOW to interrupt the cycle of your winning recipe when it runs wild in the face of fear:

Step 1. Choose the right person.
Selecting the right individual to approach is critical. In my case it was my father, but it may or may not be someone close to you. Ask yourself these questions:

• Is this person impartial? Avoid someone who has an agenda.
• Have they given you good counsel in the past?
• Do you trust them deeply enough to act on something they might say?

Step 2: Share yourself fully.
This is not the time to hold back. Be vulnerable – let them know what you fear, and that you are in a recurring thought loop that leads nowhere except more deeply into anxiety.

Step 3: Listen to understand.
Keep your own agenda out of this. Open yourself to what they are saying, and truly strive to capture their meaning without overlaying your own thoughts and feelings on top of it. Be fully committed to seeing a point of view that may be astonishingly unorthodox, yet hugely refreshing.

If this does not work, find someone else to talk to. The important thing to realize is that unless you act, fear will make you a captive of your winning recipe more thoroughly than you may have ever experienced. Getting coaching from a person you have confidence in will not totally break you free – the recipe never goes completely away – but it can expand your view and thereby relax the grip of fear.

I Invite You To Share Your Fear Today With A Person You Trust

• What person did you share with? How did that help you to exit from the rut of your winning recipe? If you would like us to consider sharing your story anonymously with The Satisfied Introvert community please email it to me at thesatisfiedintrovert@gmail.com.
• How can I help you to identify a person to share with? Please go to the Contact page at the top of this post and enter your name, email and questions. I cannot answer everyone, but will do my best – especially if the answer could benefit others.
• To be notified of new posts to The Satisfied Introvert blog, please go to the Subscribe section at the bottom of this post and enter your name and email. Under no circumstances will we share your information without your express permission. A new post appears every two weeks. Coming up next: “A Unified Awareness Can Defuse Your Winning Recipe And Diminish Fear.” If a particular post does not apply to you, future ones most likely will!

Welcome to the relief that comes from opening yourself

 

up to someone who can interrupt the cycle of

 

your winning recipe, and thereby help you

 

to ratchet down your fear

© 2022 The Satisfied Introvert LLC