Positive Psychology Column for 1-18-04 By Tom Muha, Ph.D. Dealing with Fear, Anger, Sadness and Guilt Fear doesn’t leave much room for anything else. Once it takes over your mind, a lot of negative things happen. You feel scared, or angry, or sad, or guilty. That in itself wouldn’t be so bad, but those negative emotions often drive your choices in how you react to the problems that are going on in your life. That’s when you do real damage. When you’re scared, you try to run away from your problems. But the fear is inside of you. No matter where you try to hide, there you are...still worried about what might happen if you faced the challenges in your life. So instead of embracing the legitimate concerns that can motivate you to do your best to resolve your situation, you’re frozen with fear forever. Instead of dealing with the short term stress of confronting the facts, you’re facing a perpetually unresolved problem. Take, for example, people who don’t want to go to the dentist or the doctor because they’re scared of the drill, or the needles, or some other procedure. They avoid the unpleasantness until they’re in really bad shape, at which point they are embedded deep into a medical system that terrifies them. When you’re not feeling well is a tough time to have to learn how to cope with facing one of your worst fears. Just at the time your body needs all the good energy it can get to fight the illness that is threatening to take over, all you’re able to do is add to your body’s distress. “But I have an anxiety attack just thinking about going to a doctor,” some of you will say. Some people resolve to learn how to overrule their anxiety, others abdicate and let their fear predominate. It’s a choice that you make.  If you’ve given in to your fear many times, you’ll be good at doing that. But if you were to make the other choice and learn to manage your emotions, you’d get good at that too. Anger is another form of fear. But rather than running away from the situation, you shift the responsibility for changing things onto someone else. Expressing anger is a reflection of feeling impotent. When you don’t know how to cope with a stressful situation, it’s easy to blame someone else for the problem. If only they would do something to right the wrong, then you’d be fine. But how much control do you have to get other people to do what you want them to do? Damn little, if any at all. People do what they want to do. If you want a situation to change, then change your own behavior. If you do that you can create a 50% change rather quickly. And if you change your half of the relationship equation it invariably influences the whole system. Sadness is also fear based. Sadness stems from feeling like a victim who is powerless to make their life any better. While it’s true that you can’t keep bad things from happening to you, it’s also true that you can create good times that will offset them. You may always be sad about some of the losses in your life. But if you go on to build a new life filled with a great deal of pleasure, play and personal gratification, the positive emotions will out way the negative. And finally there is guilt as a form of fear. The fear behind feeling guilty is that if you have done something wrong, then there is something wrong with you. Actually, if you’ve done something wrong then you ought to feel bad about it. Having guilty feelings make you like the rest of us. We’ve all done things that were wrong. Some people blame themselves and diminish themselves in their own eyes. Others learn from their mistakes, make amends, and forgive themselves so they can move on to living a better life. No one likes to feel bad. Some people face their feelings and find ways to make them fade. Others act out to distract themselves from feeling bad by eating, drinking, smoking or spending. But those unresolved negative emotions become stuck inside of you for days, dragging you into the swamp of unhappiness. How you feel is a choice that is based on how you’re thinking. Unless you’ve been recently diagnosed as psychotic, you can control your thoughts. You can learn to manage your emotions by transforming your negative thoughts into positive internal dialogues.   Tom Muha is a psychologist in Annapolis. He welcomes your comments and questions. To contact him call (443) 454-7274 or email him at tom@achievinghappiness.com.