The Second Dialogue

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What is the key to changing your temperament when it is decided at such a young age? How do you escape constant fear? Drug therapy? Avoiding people and situations? Avoiding actions? Avoiding discovery?

What is fear? Why do good? Confronting fear doesn't stop it from coming back just as strongly. Psychologists are guessing machines. Does it require another person to diagnose you? Distractions lead to peace. You can ride out the waves of emotion, but that doesn't guarantee safety from the next wave. You can minimise the  flood of fear by controlling your actions and choices.

Your sensitivity results in crying, scaring, getting angry or embarrassed easily. The anticipation of facing fears is unbearable for you, resulting in shakes, floods of  adrenaline, and the shutting down of mental processes so that you can't think clearly when you feel you need to.

How can you act without fear of consequences? Ignore planning? Stick to philosophising? So you don't act. But you can't accept your weakness. Where does your morality come from? "Am I doing the right thing?" Where is it learnt? Family are the people you stick with. Family are the people who stick with you. You don't want to hurt people. Why? Because you fear their individual judgement. You think that what they think is controllable and important.

You very closely monitor your own feelings and reactions. You made as many decisions based on them (and drew conclusions about the world and thoughts of  the people around you) as you did from what you saw with your eyes. You believed that everyone thought the same way as you did. You thought it was wrong to treat people differently. But you thought that other people deserved more than you did.

You conformed and drew conclusions about your entire reality around the single goal of avoiding feeling pain or discomfort. You met a woman who accepted you. This met most of your immediate needs for companionship in order to avoid deep constant fear, especially at night. The fear was vague and unclear. Some say it is of annihilation. In spite of not knowing what the fear was exactly, you knew a few tricks to make it go away. Many of those tricks required money. As a consequence of making many efforts to make the fear go away, you had little money regardless of your income. But you could not find a way to guarantee that the fear wouldn't return. Before you applied money to the problem of escaping this giant amorphous fear (which used to be despair or a yearning to understand life's meaning, and which changed over time) you tried to trick your mind into feeling safe.

Not knowing why something happened in your life, or the purpose of your life, caused great discomfort. Until you could sleep at night with unanswered questions about the meaning of life, you wrote out all your thoughts and searched religion, science, magic, fiction and spirituality, risking every relationship in the world for the answer that would provide relief from the reaching tendrils of the fear. Permanent relief from the fear was desired but not found. Faith in finding a belief that could provide relief from mental pain that existed without any obvious threat began to fade so you returned to your family and friends, and re-embarked on a self-medicating regime of pain relief.

Psycho-active drugs were tried and these provided a perfect peace and beautiful memories while they were active in the brain. Opioids combined with alcohol provided a week of peace from the night they were taken. During that time, smoking was unnecessary, fat in the diet wasn't required, the brain was at peace,
software was written to find the names and addresses of the top people in Victoria with unclaimed moneys listed on an internet database, and letters written to them notifying them about it. Then the fear slowly came back and life's previous pattern resumed.

Dealing with the fear distracts you from your goals and has a lot of relationship and health costs. But the kindest acts ever performed have been done under medication, which removes the fear of loss, fear for the future, and the fear of looking foolish. This lets the love of strangers, empathy for everyone on the planet in need, and pity for people's suffering rise to the surface. It makes you come the closest to how you imagined someone like Jesus would think and behave. It made it possible to give hundreds of dollars to beggars and homeless people. Such acts of selfless kindness would cause huge feelings of euphoria and shaking. Because of the overwhelming strength of these feelings, kindness and social obligation was sometimes avoided while you were completely devoid of medication. You feared the overpowering emotions of love or excitement.

So what is the great fear? How can it be defeated, or destroyed permanently? It is not enough to ignore it. Anger can suppress it temporarily. Spirit can take its power to control you away, but not its power to confuse you. It imprisons you by controlling and suppressing your actions. There is no reason to assume everyone is the same, but it is likely that someone thinks the same way that you do.

Dealing with disproportionate physiological reactions to perceived threats with logical reasoning doesn't seem to be able to help. Riding out the fear seems to be the only treatment. But this is not good enough for you. In religious terms, is sin just action based on fear? Where is there room for selfishness - today's prescription for healthy self-help? Are we wired to help others? Not all of us.

You get scared of doing nothing, scared of falling short of your potential because you believe that avoiding the failure of your entire life can only be reached by
continually taking actions that scare you. And in doing so you would be spending your entire life shaking in fear, in anticipation of your next just act. You are scared of letting people down - of gaining their trust and then deciding you promised them more than you wanted to give, and running away.

You are scared of the pain of shame. You do not hold out hope that the joy of achieving your goals will outweigh the fear of achieving the next one. You are scared of confrontation and conflict. You are scared of getting beaten up, but not as much as of making someone angry who will then plot against you behind your back, and convince other people that you are unworthy of their love and attention. If that happened, you would be drawn into conflict and the fear would wash over you.

You are scared of your disproportionate response to threats and how weak that makes you look. Sometimes you are scared of going to hell because you didn't use your natural abilities enough during your life. You are scared of being buried alive or drowning, and you are scared of chronic, life-long pain. You are scared of getting caught, being found out or being blackmailed. You have day-mares about having to give up your life's ambitions because they conflicted with the goals of a person or group that knows too much about your private feelings and memories. You have a fear - sometimes vague, sometimes sharp - that they will damage the   relationships which are most important to you.

While you are not distracted, you are afraid of people so you make them laugh because when they are laughing you think they are not angry at you, and that makes you feel temporarily safer. But in moments of quiet lucidity you still hope that you can find a way to permanently change your temperament.