Reply To: Fear of confrontation – Help needed – My Journey with PSTEC

Hi plus1g and Peter,

I really appreciate your contributions on the forum. Great reading, breakthroughs and personal insights. Thank you.

Plus1g, I applaud the way you have dealt with your issues as they have come up – thoroughly and systematically. Your posts will surely be inspiring a lot of people who are new to PSTEC; you show what is possible with the PSTEC if you continue to use the tools.

I suspect that, not only will you be helping a lot of people, your posts will also enable you to reconceptualise your issues. It is obvious that you have made tremendous strides in a very short period of time.

You have come up with some big fears/thoughts and beliefs to scramble/eliminate.

One thing I would suggest (and this is just from reading your last post) is that holding a belief like “Mistakes are bad” would lead to a thought like “I must not make a mistake.” It is an offshoot of holding the belief.

It might prove very worthwhile to go back to early childhood events when considering that particular belief. You could do easy counter-examples on “mistakes are bad” using the common self-help type of constructions “If we did not make mistakes, we would not learn” etc.

I would suggest that, while you may accept these, you would get better results by looking at the actual childhood events that most likely resulted in you forming the belief. As a child, were you punished, shunned or ridiculed if you made a mistake? If so, those sort of events are the source of the belief.

Similarly, you seem to be overly concerned about what people think about you. This could also be linked to a belief. What I would suggest is looking at the sort of scenarios where you believe people are mocking, judging or talking negatively about you. I would recommend doing alternative interpretations on these events and also running the CTs on that feeling you have when you are “certain” you are being mocked.

I find this approach to be very flexible and also quite inclusive. In short, you work on the idea that you *might* be wrong and then (using the CTs) consider that, even if you were right (e.g. someone told you *for sure* that you were being mocked.) the emotion is neutralised.

To describe the effect of this in a sentence, it would sound like:

“I don't know for sure that I'm being mocked but, even if I was, WHATEVER!”

I find that working in this way helps make me mentally flexible (questioning what I know “for sure) and emotionally bulletproof (eventually being at ease with the “worst case scenario).

Sorry for the long post, but I hope it helps.

Paul