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The Healthy Compulsive Project: Help for OCPD, Workaholics, Obsessives, & Type A PersonalityThe Healthy Compulsive Project: Help for OCPD, Workaholics, Obsessives, & Type A Personality
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core fears

Naming and Taming The Core Fears That Control Us

August 17, 2022 Posted by Gary Trosclair 9 Comments

In a previous post [podcast episode 28] I wrote about the anxiety that people with obsessive and compulsive personalities face, distinguishing surface fears from deep fears, and suggesting four steps for working through the deeper fears that lead to our most painful struggles.

In this post I will explore in more detail how to identify core fears and how to tame them so that we can  lower our anxiety and move toward the healthier end of the compulsive spectrum. Otherwise, we will continue to use our obsessive and compulsive potentials defensively, rather than in pursuit of our passions and fulfillment.

Anxiety forces us to focus our attention on surviving perceived threats rather than pursuing fulfilling goals. Shifting this tendency requires that we face these perceived threats directly, allowing ourselves to experience the very things we fear in order to dissolve their power.

We can see fear at work in the many ways that we try to avoid it, for example, controlling, over-working, people-pleasing, and perfecting. These psychological symptoms, often labelled as defenses, are simply the coping strategies that we use (unsuccessfully) to try to manage our fear.

They are also the barriers to our fulfillment.

Contents

  • Surface Fears, Deep Fears and Core Fears
  • Examples of Unknown Core Fears
  • Naming Your Core Fear
  • Identifying Defenses and Coping Strategies
  • Taming the Fear—Do the Opposite
    • Imaginal Techniques
    • Day-to-Day Behaviors
  • Facing Your Fears—Beyond the Overused Trope
  • Approaching what you really want

Surface Fears, Deep Fears and Core Fears

Surface fears are the ones that we are immediately aware of, such as whether your partner is loading the dishwasher correctly, whether you’ve worked hard enough on that spreadsheet for your boss, whether your guests will be disappointed in the pasta primavera you’ve prepared, or whether you’ve packed enough underwear for your trip to the family reunion. But also more substantial fears such as having a business or relationship fail.

The first step to diminishing anxiety is to identify the deeper fears underneath surface fears. You may not always be aware of deeper fears such as:

• Not being able to control circumstances

• Loss of self-control

• Humiliation or shame

• Vulnerability

• Inadequacy, weakness

• Disapproval, getting in trouble or disappointing others

• Abandonment, isolation, rejection, or separation

• Loss of meaning or purpose, depression, emptiness

• Loss of individual identity or authenticity

• Physical pain, death

If one of these deep fears underlies all of the other fears for you, we would call it a core fear. People typically have one core fear, but you may experience two or three.

Examples of Unknown Core Fears

Let’s imagine some examples of people not realizing their core fear:

• Francis supervises his hires closely. He’s aware of wanting to get good reviews and a raise each year, but he is not aware of his deep fear of shame if things don’t go well at work. He uses control and criticism to keep his workers in line so that he doesn’t experience it.

• Elly spends hours at the gym making sure she’s in great shape. She’s aware of wanting to look good, but she’s not aware of her fear of rejection. As long as she stays in shape she can avoid the fear. No-one would reject her the way she looks. But if she ever fails to get to the gym, she begins to feel a deep dread that she can’t name. She can only avoid it with a tougher workout the next day.

• Peter obsesses and procrastinates about his Ph.D. dissertation. He’s aware of wanting it to be good so that he can spin off some journal articles and increase his chances of getting a teaching position. He’s aware of his fear of not getting a job, but not of his fear that he can’t control the circumstances of a possible job search, and many other things in his life.

• Mary does her best to please people. She’s aware of her fear of isolation and abandonment, and she does everything in her power to prevent it. But she’s not aware of the fear of depression and death that underlie her fear of isolation.

Naming Your Core Fear

In his book Deconstructing Anxiety, psychologist Todd Pressman suggests three questions for identifying our core fear:

  1. Why is that upsetting you?
  2. What are you afraid will happen next?
  3. What are you afraid you will miss or lose?

.

The technique, known as “Digging for Gold,” is to continue asking yourself one of these questions over and over until it seems that you’ve reached the deepest answer, your core fear. If you get stuck with one question, try asking the other ones.

Identifying Defenses and Coping Strategies

An essential skill for all of us who want to tame our deepest fears is to recognize and to stop using our avoidance techniques, the defenses or strategies we’ve developed over the years to keep us from experiencing our worst fears.

We get really good at these strategies. Here are some common ones for people with obsessive-compulsive personality:

• controlling

• overworking

• pleasing

• perfecting and being meticulous

• planning

• being over-conscientious

We rely on them as if they were our superpowers. But they become our tormentors. We are no longer driving. They drive us.

The result of using them to avoid what we don’t want, rather than to approach what we do want, is always that we become more afraid over time, rather than less afraid.

Taming the Fear—Do the Opposite

Once you have named your core fear and the ways that you usually defend against it, you can begin taming the fear by exposing yourself to it and doing the opposite of your usual strategy. (This is not to encourage anyone to be reckless by abandoning responsibilities or jeopardizing their well-being. I’m addressing this to the sort of people that can afford to shave off a lot of the extra effort.)

You can use both imaginal techniques and changes in day-to-day behavior, starting with smaller issues and moving toward larger ones.

Imaginal Techniques

We tend to obsess about how we can get away from fear. Instead, we need to do the opposite and use imaginal techniques to experience what we fear the most, by envisioning what happens when our worst fears come true. Expose yourself to the fear in your mind in as much detail as possible and settle into it. Used properly, imagination can be as powerful as action.

Don’t try to be reasonable. Don’t try to solve the problem. Just be with it. Do this when you have privacy. And for many, writing it all out as you go along can help you to maintain focus.

What would happen if this went on for an hour? A day? A month? Even if it seems like nothing is happening, keep asking “What’s happening?” Be as detailed, graphic, and visceral as you can. You are creating an imaginary film of what your worst fear would be like so that you face it in your imagination.

The point is to have an emotional experience that changes you–not just an intellectual realization.

Watch for a shift. Usually, confronted this way, our worst fear is eventually tamed.

This takes perseverance, but it can yield effective results. Many people feel some relief the first time they do the exercise, but repeated investigations may be needed. Repetition will also continue to diminish the power of the fears.

If you don’t feel stable, it would be best to do this with the support of a therapist.

You might say, but I do this all the time! It hasn’t helped me one bit! Next time you do find yourself in this terrifying place in your imagination, notice if you are trying to get away from it, or you are actually settling into it. Be curious about how you handle it and it will shift with time.

Day-to-Day Behaviors

We can also find opportunities in our day-to-day life to practice doing the opposite in order to face into our fears. Allow yourself to take chances with small tasks first, and build up to larger ones. For instance;

• When you are tempted to exert control by telling others what to do—don’t. Let them make mistakes—without getting resentful about it. Getting past your fear is usually worth the downside of their “mistake.”

• When you feel urgency to work, clean, or fix, slow down or pause. Remember that you are trying to make a significant change in your life.

• When you feel the pressured need to please someone else, don’t. Ask what you need or want instead.

• When you feel the need to plan something out to the smallest detail, don’t. Instead try to remember what you want to happen in a more general way.  Let go.

In each case, monitor the fear that arises from not doing it. Allow yourself to experience it. Is it as disabling as you had feared?

Facing Your Fears—Beyond the Overused Trope

The trope “Face your fears!” has been used so much that we don’t take it seriously anymore.  We dismiss it as something we’ve heard a thousand times before and therefore it could have no power. But there is a reason it became a trope. There’s a reason why the hero always faces the dragon, and why the heroine goes off on her own to build a new life.

Like anything else in life worth having, getting better at facing anxiety takes practice.

Approaching what you really want

The compelling urges that we describe as compulsions originally had meaning. They were meant to energize us to pursue the things we actually wanted, rather than didn’t want. Replace the fear with the passion and you’ll be driving again, rather than being driven by fear.

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  • Phil Fine
    · Reply

    August 17, 2022 at 9:34 AM

    You say that by overworking, pleasing people and striving for perfection, we try to avoid our fears. But in today’s working world where employees can be terminated faster than you can say downsizing, who wouldn’t resort to such behaviors?

  • Phil Fine
    · Reply

    August 17, 2022 at 9:48 AM

    Addendum:

    And during my probationary period, I’d be extra careful of not making any mistakes, as well as trying to do my best. How could it be otherwise?

    • Gary Trosclair
      · Reply

      Author
      August 18, 2022 at 9:16 AM

      I can see why you might ask this. There is a difference between overworking, perfecting and pleasing because of your fears and complexes, and because of reasonable concerns about your job. The point of the post is to sort out the differences by exploring your emotions and motivations deeply. In the larger context of this blog, I make the point that healthy perfectionism, work and planning can be not only productive, but also fulfilling. You might find my post “In Praise of Healthy Perfectionism” to be relevant.

      • Phil Fine
        · Reply

        August 19, 2022 at 9:18 AM

        Well, Gary, maybe . . . but for me, OCD and OCPD are baked in; indeed, they first showed up when I was in my teens long before I could blame them on bad life experiences! And they reappeared with alarming frequency at regular intervals over the next few decades.

        Infact, without Zoloft, I’m also certain that my problems would reappear even though I’ve had counselling up the ying-yang.

        Yes, it’s ultimately self-defeating to be a people pleaser, a perfectionist, or conscientious to a fault. Still, in today’s precarious working world (thank G-d I’m now retired!), I’d be slitting my own throat if I didn’t try to give 110 percent to my job. Moreover, a lot of folks out there likely feel the same way, given cutbacks, outsourcings and job losses.

        Perhaps rather than counsel OCD and OCPDs to try to change their behaviours, or to be imperfectionists, or to stop planning everything, we’d be better off steering them into careers where they could give their perfectionism and conscientiousness free rein.

        Scientific research is one career path that comes to mind; the performing arts are another. And, interestingly enough, in Orthodox Judaism, with which I’m intimately familiar, perfectionism, in some jobs, is a sine qua non.

        Consider the scribal arts. When I scribe letters a new Torah scroll, he has to be a perfectionist. He can’t write the scroll from memory. And he must be exacting since making a mistake while scribing just one letter invalidates the entire scroll.

  • Becky
    · Reply

    August 17, 2022 at 12:11 PM

    The author finds ways to give examples of his concepts and scenarios that make so much sense. It immediately takes theory and puts it into action- I so appreciate that and look forward to these posts
    Thank you!

  • Steven Hall
    · Reply

    November 8, 2022 at 3:46 PM

    Yes Phil, it can be a cruel world, especially a world where inequality is immense and such a huge factor in why so many vulnerable people do not have access to health care and experience serious mental health problems, self-medication/drug dependence, crime, domestic violence, self-harm, etc, etc, etc. And then we lock them up in prison. And in your situation, the stress of living with such tenuous employment security must be terrifying for so many. Not all countries create and allow such a system.

    Your justification for hanging on to your attitudes and behaviour makes complete sense to me BUT … if they’re making you unhappy or messing up your relationships, what will you choose to do? Which can never necessarily resolve all problems, but as conscious sentient beings, continuously choosing this or that is what we do. So, can you, maybe, choose to pivot a little from pessimism toward optimism, while still facing into the full and often harsh glare of reality? I think Garry’s blog-post advice about working on this with a therapist if you can is important,

    My ocpd dilemma is that my obsession with detailed perfection means that I will turn Todd’s ‘digging for gold’ technique to identify core fears into my next living nightmare obsession. And then, after burning out on this, I must identify my defenses and coping strategies. Going down this ocpd rabbit hole terrifies me. Even in therapy, I will go home consumed by my obsession to ‘work it out’ perfectly, and I can’t stop. And when I plead with my therapist that I’m not coping and explain what’s happening to me, most recently I’ve been encouraged to stick with it, and they continue to serve up another dose of rigid cbd for me to swallow.

    Garry, do you know of any more ‘trauma-informed’ therapeutic approach other than standard cbd, that may be more suitable for tackling my ocpd?

    • Gary Trosclair
      · Reply

      Author
      November 12, 2022 at 9:48 AM

      Steve, it seems that you did find the post that I would have sent you to regarding evidenced based treatment. https://thehealthycompulsive.com/psychotherapy/best-psychotherapy-for-ocpd/
      It’s very unfortunate that people keep repeating the false maxim that only CBT is effective. There’s plenty of evidence that psychodynamic forms of therapy are also effective. Problem is, psychodynamic therapists don’t have insurance companies on their side, with the misleading idea that you can fix significant mental health issues in 10 sessions. Aside from schema therapy, which I think is a good combination of cbt and psychodynamic therapy, my main suggestion is to find a good fit with someone who ideally has analytic training, and but certainly has done their own analysis. If they won’t acknowledge whether they have, I would walk out the door.

  • Steven Hall
    · Reply

    November 12, 2022 at 7:38 PM

    Much appreciated Gary

  • Karissa Polakis
    · Reply

    June 22, 2024 at 9:47 PM

    Your post is really helpful and detailed, thanks!

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