ENG week3 dq

Fear is defined as the experience whereby an individual experiences unpleasant feelings and very strong emotions that are associated with anxiety, anticipation or as a result of danger. Fear is described, as being natural a natural instinct that is inevitable and it is helpful to individuals especially in the event where they are faced with a threat or by danger. It is very useful to a human being as a protective tool. The kind of above-described fear is known as healthy fear. However, there is another type of fear that is the unhealthy fear also known as pathological fear, which mainly leads to certain weird behaviors in individuals. This kind of fear has very many negative impacts on the behavior of an individual. This kind of fear has been a part of me for the biggest part of my and in this assignment, we are going to focus on my experience living with unhealthy fear and how I went about overcoming my fears and being a bolder person in life. For the biggest part of my life, since I was a child, fear has been a major part of me and a very major influencer of my behavior. I was such a shy and quiet individual who had a very large fear of interaction even with kids of my age group. On most of the occasions, you would find me secluded and not playing with my age group. From a distance, one could always tell that there was something bothering me and that I was always in some a distressed but could not talk out any of my issues to any individual no matter how hard anyone tried. Every one of us can relate to the issue insecurity since every human being is insecure, about some aspect of themselves at different times in their life. Insecurities faced the most major basis for my fear. The aspect of insecurity mainly came from the kind of upbringing that I experienced from my childhood. I was brought up in a family where perfectionism was one of the major values of the family. There was very limited room for error in the family and some of the cased no room for error at all. In the event where one committed an error, one became subject to very severe punishment. I was the major victim in the family among all my siblings since I was born a very playful and very clumsy child and thus, I would often find myself having committed mistake such as breaking objects around the house, getting into trouble with others and at the end of the day I always had a major beating for my mistake. As a result, of the pain afflicted I found myself slowly by slowly withdrawing from being so active to avoid these mistakes and finally this fear of being beaten got the best of me until I suddenly withdrew from major societal activities. The fact that I was the only one being beaten day in day out among my entire sibling also got the idea that I was very imperfect, and I let this blind my judgment and perspective of life. I saw myself as an imperfect person and this highly diminished my level of confidence, self-awareness as well as self-dignity. I could not even answer questions in class or give my opinions in class due to fear of being wrong.  This was a very major hindrance for me since it prevented me from being aggressive and ended up losing on to many opportunities and also because I could not make any interactions. It took a lot for me to get out of my withdrawal status mainly from my teachers at different levels who were psychologically intelligent and could tell what the problem was with me. The journey was a very tough one since in school I had so much support from such teachers and some of my fellow student who encouraged and sometimes forced me to participate in activities but at home, the opposite happened. In school and any other social setting I was told that making mistakes was okay since it is through them that I learnt but on the other hand, at home mistake was a source of punishment. This created so much confusion for me since it seemed like I had been living a double life and this acted as a major source of relapse to my withdraw whenever I was at home. The relapse made the journey harder for me. 

A lot of counseling was done for me, but this was no help since the main cause of my behavior was the factors that surrounded me at home.  However, a breakthrough was finally experienced when one of my teachers got to convince my parents to take therapy sessions with, and they found out the kind of pain they were inflicting on me in the name of a strict upbringing.  I also realized that I could not blame my parents for that since they were almost unaware of the emotional harm caused since they highly believed in strict parenting. The therapy saw a change in my parent and with a support system both at home and school I got out of my withdrawal successful.