In my last piece I outlined the place that the sale of fear is taking in our life. I noted the role fear plays in creating illness. I highlighted the major role of particularly guilty industries: the pharmaceutical companies, politicians, insurance companies and the news and advertising media, to name just five. These are entities that go out of their way to create a culture of fear to sell their products.

Because it is not a one-way street, however, this is not the whole story. Here in FEAR II, I outline the role we play in putting our self at the mercy of fear and dread and the personal responsibility we must own to manage these feelings. If you are interested, I explain this in greater detail, with clinical examples, in my book.

The first difficult and complex reality is that fear and dread are a very large and significant part of being human. These feelings and others, like a sense of doom, are essential elements of the human experience. Repeat this to yourself: “If I want to be fully human then I accept that fear and dread are a part of what I am.” Only by accepting this can you utilize your essential inner energy and at the same time ward off salesmen selling you more fear. You already have a plentiful supply.

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As a graduating engineer myself, I have often found myself hard pressed to solve a particular problem. Everyone experiences these kinds of situations more or less frequently, and even though every single mind has its methods and nuances in how it approaches problem solving in general, there are common pitfalls that everyone seems to fall into. I would theorize this phenomena is related to the structure of thought itself – our highly pattern-based thinking is optimized by evolution to solve certain problems, which comes at a cost. Exploring the biological and physical origins of these phenomena, while certainly interesting, will not be pursued in this short essay, both due to my lack of qualifications on those subjects and the goal of the writing of the essay. What I do intend is to provide insight into some the top three common pitfalls, so you may recognize them when you inevitably run into them. If the short time it takes to read this essay spares someone an afternoon of head-banging, then it will already have been worth it.

As the astute reader will notice throughout the essay, most (but not all) of these pitfalls are related to thinking habits and employment of otherwise good thinking strategies to the wrong problems. At every pitfall I will try to provide an illustrative example, and I’m sure more than a few readers will remember themselves in past experiences where they, too, walked in circles in a frustrating battle against a seemingly unsolvable problem of the same nature. I would also like to point out that in most cases an equilibrium must be found, as for every pitfall there is also the opposite equivalent. Having that said, I’ll begin by exposing a well known thinking flaw.

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Before I began to write, I didn’t fully understand the effects of the past on the present.  Instead, for years, the past appeared in my mind’s eye like faded black-and-white photographs, in which no one, especially me, seemed to be fully alive.

Growing up, I lived a double life.  On the face of it, we seemed like a normal, happy family:  My father had an important career.  We lived in nice houses and wore pretty clothes.  But all this seeming perfection was a veneer, masking the reality that my father sexually molested me, a reality never spoken aloud.

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