about 3 months ago my friend martyn and myself decided we would look into AA, we found that simply calling it AA put more of an emphasis on it in general and so we decided to just call it what it is.......fear

once we had deicded to just call it fear we discovered we could overcome it by doing other things we were afraid of, things like jumping from a height for example... after working on like this for only a couple of days and talking about it we discovered that when we were in a suituation that would normally have resulted in AA we found that our minds would go back to the moment when we overcame those other fears and that would cause us to relax and the AA seemed to disappear....

i hope this can be of help to some of you guys

I.C.

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"Man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated." -Ernest Hemingway

You're basically right in calling it "plain old fear", but a more accurate term would be "behavior-enforced fear" because you're not only dealing with your mind/body confusing normal excitement with a life-threatening fear response, you also have to break down all those years of fear-based behavior. It's the same part of the brain that addicts have to work with, except our addiction is avoiding/running-away from potentially-rewarding social situations.

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exactly, it is during those moments of "flight or fight" thats when the true self shines, after doing some self confidence work i found that it can also help to just imagine yourself overcomming these moments when you would experience this. After reading the book Instant confidence i noticed it mentioned that memories are stored in the same way as an imagined image. Therefore imagining yourself being able to do this, your brain will be unable to distinguish wether or not it actually happened and so will believe it did and will genenrate that confident state of mind you imagined yourself having

I.C.

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"Man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated." -Ernest Hemingway