The Fear and Anxiety Solution (22 page)

Now that you have established direct access to the subconscious storage space of all your memories, you are able to work consciously with your subconscious to clean up the emotional baggage from your past.

The prospect of finally letting go of fear and anxiety may be exciting—or daunting. You may ask, “What if I can’t let it go?” “What if letting go means I’m no longer safe?” or “Who will I be without fear and anxiety?” Staying stuck on the fence may appear safer than taking a leap of faith into the unknowns of change.

It’s said that change only happens when the pain of holding on is greater than the fear of letting go. What if we don’t have to wait for the pain to become unbearable but instead could make letting go easy, comfortable, and effective? And what if letting go wouldn’t leave you empty, but would instead provide you with valuable new insights, understanding, and self-empowerment?

I developed the Pattern Resolution Process on the basis of the time-line work of NLP and Tad James’s Time Line Therapy, which are both extremely potent methods of addressing negative emotions and limiting beliefs. The Pattern Resolution Process incorporates additional aspects that I’ve found to be especially powerful for releasing subconsciously stored fear and anxiety. As you’ll see, this approach is as effective as it is gentle and safe because it doesn’t require you to relive the past, which could potentially lead to retraumatization. And its steps are so easy to learn that you can work with this process right away.

So what is the Pattern Resolution Process and how does it work? Let me start with explaining some of its major principles.

Discovering your life line showed you how the subconscious mind files memories in a sequential and linear manner. In addition to the time factor, memories are also processed and sorted by the emotions they have in common. As you have probably noticed for yourself, you haven’t been incredibly creative when it comes to experiencing and responding to fear and anxiety. Most of the time you’ve repeated the same patterns over and over again. Imagine that all these fear- and anxiety-charged events are linked together on your subconscious life line like beads on a chain (see
Figure 4
). Such a chain of memories, all of which fall under the same pattern, can span across decades, from the very first time you experienced anxiety all the way to the present.

Some of the memories may stand out, and you’re able to remember them easily because they are related events that happened just recently or are the biggies you often think or talk about. Yet most anxiety-charged memories that are chained together according to their emotional pattern will stay in your subconscious, unnoticed by your conscious mind. This is often because there were just too many similar events to keep separate or these events occurred before the age of three, which for most people is too early to remember. And, as I mentioned before, your subconscious suppresses the more intense and traumatic experiences to protect you from becoming overwhelmed and retraumatized.

Figure 4:
conscious and subconscious memory patterns

So why stir things up? Wouldn’t it be easier to simply keep all those “forgotten” events swept under the subconscious rug and deal only with those you can actually recall? However tempting that may seem, it’s far better to unpack and address those stored memories, because there are, as you’ll see, significant disadvantages to ignoring them.

You may have had the same experience as many of my clients: after years of therapy, there remains an anxiety and weariness that doesn’t seem to release. One client described this to me: “I’m still left with that unspeakable, untouchable part of my anxiety. There’s nothing to talk about or analyze. It’s just always there.”

This intangible anxiety stems from those subconscious memories that you couldn’t access with your conscious mind. Emotional charges from those subconsciously stored events can also bleed back into memories you thought you
had resolved previously. Although this can be quite frustrating, it’s nothing but a nudge from your subconscious telling you there’s more work to do and more for you to learn and grow from—just on a deeper level. After all, if you address only those few events you consciously remember, you wouldn’t take full advantage of all the untapped growth potential the past can offer you.

To find completion and resolution with the past, you need to learn from and release the anxiety of all the events that share the same emotional pattern. Sounds pretty daunting, right? Don’t worry. There’s no need to recall and work through each individual memory. This would be much too time- and energy-consuming. The Pattern Resolution Process utilizes the fact that anxiety-charged memories are chained together. As you consciously instruct your subconscious how to release anxiety from one event, it extrapolates these instructions and applies them to all previous and subsequent memories that fall into the same chain of patterns. So you can unload decades of emotional baggage—and outgrow the past—in a matter of minutes.

How do you resolve an event that has already happened? Everyone knows that time flows only in one direction—toward the future—right? Your subconscious mind, as well as Albert Einstein and his theory of the fabric of time, would beg to differ; both say that the past, present, and future exist simultaneously. For the subconscious, the past is not written in stone and can be changed as much as the present or future. And as you’ll see, neither magic nor insanity is required to do so.

Napoleon Bonaparte once said, “History is the version of past events that most people have decided to agree upon.” I can imagine that, in true emperor fashion, Napoleon would decisively disagree with the ways some historians have decided to portray him. Who likes to be remembered as an egomaniac gone wild or have his name associated with a syndrome (in his case, the “short man’s complex”)?

Even our own history lies in the eyes of the beholder. How many times have you and your siblings or lifelong friends disagreed on certain facts of your childhood, from the size of that enormous fish you caught in grade school to whether your first dog died or ran away or, in the case of siblings, who was Mom’s or Dad’s favorite. It sometimes appears as if you grew up in completely different families or groups of friends. Wouldn’t it be great if
you had a time machine and could go back to find out what really happened? Actually, you can.

Take a moment and think about one of your favorite vacation spots—maybe a beach in Hawai’i or a lush green meadow somewhere in the Rocky Mountains. When you close your eyes, try to remember how it feels to be there. Inhale the salty smell of the ocean or the spicy scent of pine trees. Feel the sun warming your skin and a light breeze brushing your face. Notice your feet in the wet sand or your hands digging lightly into the earth. Listen to the sounds of the waves splashing on the shore or the melodic songs of the birds in the trees. Are you there yet? When you’re completely engaged in this memory and have forgotten everything else around you, your subconscious believes that you are actually there, which makes this little exercise the world’s cheapest vacation.

Here is another impressive example of this ability of the subconscious to travel to different realities. “Snow World” is a 3-D virtual-reality game that helps burn victims deal with the excruciating pain of their recovery. Originally designed for children, it is now also successfully employed with combat burn victims. While the patients focus on the playful challenges they’re facing in this cold and calm virtual world, they’re able to temporarily forget the extreme physical discomfort from their burn wounds. The results of this form of pain therapy are impressive. The patients require significantly less pain medication, and they develop a greater range of motion in their burned limbs, as their muscles are able to relax more.
²

Whether you take an imaginary trip to a snowy mountaintop or lose yourself in an exhilarating movie or an engrossing book, your subconscious does not differentiate between fantasy and reality. Think of all the adventures you have experienced in your life. How many times have you explored different worlds, taken on new identities, and traveled through time and space—all from the comfort of your own sofa? I heard Laura Simms, an internationally renowned storyteller, talk about how most cultures throughout history had revered storytelling as a powerful healing tool. She explained that as we’re captivated by a story, we temporarily detach from our fixation on our own story and its current challenges. This allows our minds and hearts to open up and create more space for our innate wisdom and true healing potential to emerge. We return from the land of fiction with an expanded consciousness and a calmer and more relaxed mind and body, and we’re able to perceive the problems of our own story from a wider angle and address them with a renewed sense of confidence. I believe
that the famous Dr. Norman Cousins tapped into the healing power of storytelling when he successfully treated a life-threatening form of arthritis with a self-prescribed laughter therapy by watching hours of Marx Brothers movies.

Now, you’re probably already a proficient time traveler and storyteller. Fear and anxiety may have led you to spend ample time rehashing and regretting the past and worrying about or dreading the future. But making your life into a drama or horror movie didn’t help ease your fears. So how can you use these natural abilities of your subconscious to overcome fear and anxiety? Can you turn back time, rewrite history, and thus create a brighter future?

Yes, you can.

When it comes to memories filled with fear and anxiety, the idea of rewriting history may seem preposterous. You just
know
that in the past you’ve been bad, guilty, wronged, hurt, or broken. The damage has been done and can’t be repaired.

Well, this may have been the limiting perspective of your inner critic and protector, whom you met and worked with in the previous chapter, but it’s certainly not the truth. We can always make the choice to change our perception of ourselves and what has happened to us. Once we accept this simple fact, we accept that we have the power to create our own reality.

A new perception requires a new perspective. Trying to resolve anxiety-filled memories by talking about and analyzing them may make sense to our conscious mind; however, this method often doesn’t reach the subconscious. The Pattern Resolution Process makes use of the subconscious mind’s innate ability to transcend time and space and guides you back in time to gain a fresh look and deeper understanding of the events of the past. Instead of having you relive the memory, which could potentially aggravate the fear and anxiety already associated with this event, the Pattern Resolution Process leads to a new vantage point high above your life line—a point I call
the place of learning.
From this perspective, you are no longer a part of the space-time continuum, and you have access to the infinite wisdom of your higher consciousness. As you look down from this safe and comfortable place onto the memory you want to resolve, you’re free from any emotional attachments to this event and untethered from other people’s input and imprints, and you’re able to calmly examine what happened.

The place of learning allows you to gain insights about your life and yourself that go beyond one-dimensional conscious analysis. You learn with your conscious, subconscious, and higher consciousness (or your mind, heart, and spirit). When you work with all these aspects of your whole consciousness, you are able to obtain the teachings and growth potential of this memory, and you also gain a deeper understanding of yourself, which some people have described as a shift in consciousness that defies words and explanations.

At the beginning of the Pattern Resolution Process, I’ll ask you to remember some of the earliest events that you associate with fear and anxiety and that may be at the root of the emergence of your inner protector. Then, with my guidance, you’ll go back and safely revisit and address those memories from the place of learning.

You’ll probably find that it wasn’t only anxiety you felt at that time, but also an overwhelming amount of confusion—confusion about why those you should have been able to trust hurt or betrayed you, or about what you did that led you to be punished or ignored, or why life was harder for you than for others. You may even discover that already at this early stage of your life you didn’t understand that how people treated or saw you wasn’t a true reflection of who you were or that people were simply acting out their own issues, which had nothing to do with you.

The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard believed that we lose our innocence as a result of the punishments and traumatic experiences that occur in our early childhood. He considered the confusing contrast between realizing what we’re
capable
of doing and the fear of getting punished for what we’re
actually
doing as the loss of innocence and the source of anxiety.
³