People’s worst fears – and how to conquer them

I have to change my mind about something; I said earlier that people’s greatest fear is not failure but embarrassment. However, there is another feeling we fear… Dread even: the feeling of guilt. I didn’t realize this because I’ve always avoided the feeling of guilt by never doing anything that might make me feel guilty later. I watch my step. And luckily, I haven’t needed to feel terribly guilty about anything in my whole life. I’m a bit of a saint, lol. (That might change, but at least I’m taking every precaution not to have a reason to feel guilty; I do hate that feeling, just like we all do.)

Narcissism, most notably, is the unhealthy avoidance of guilt, shame, and embarrassment. What’s different is that a narcissist allows themselves to do things they feel bad about but explain it as unavoidable or justified at the time. Then, they spend their lives avoiding a situation where someone gets to blame them for something they agree is their fault. They build themselves an image to distract people from their blame as they continue doing what they feel or WOULD FEEL guilty about… But since they don’t like to notice their own guilt, they also avoid looking at themselves to really check if they’re guilty or not; therefore, their source of guilt can be completely irrational.

Guilt, shame, embarrassment.

The three monsters in the order of severity. To a Savants*, embarrassment is their most acute fear, for they’ve learned to NOT DO things that they might feel guilty or ashamed of later. Not terribly, at least. There’s always a little fear of guilt and shame, but the Savants* have tackled those monsters and are mainly struggling with embarrassment and fear of negative labels. Hence my websites focuses on not letting the fear of embarrassment stop you from living a full life.

But the feeling of being mortified for something that you should have done, or doing the opposite than what people assumed a rational person would have is what people fear more than death. That people will blame/shame/laugh at you for something you’ll suddenly see their point is the scary part. This can be tackled in two ways, one is a healthy way and the other is avoidance of it: To not DO those things; to always consider things before you speak or act, not only from your perspective but everyone involved, OR to ignore things, block all of that out, and pretend it’s not happening.

What causes these feelings?

Guilt is a feeling that comes from hurting another person through your own ignorance, selfishness, or neglect.

Shame is a feeling when you ARE something that society considers to be wrong, but you have no ability to change that about yourself, or you’ve done something you knew you shouldn’t have knowing it’ll hurt someone, and did it anyway; as in feeling shame for WHAT YOU ARE; neglectful, selfish, etc. Shame relates to knowing you are something you feel ashamed of – rightly or wrongly.

Embarrassment happens when you tackled a situation in a an unbecoming way, and people laughed at you or disciplined you. There are so many different ways to feel embarrassed that it’d take another post to just list them all, but let’s name a few; having thought too highly of yourself when people point out that you were wrong; missassessing a situation and doing a blunder when you should have known better; acting in an unbecoming way in a social situation, making a social faux pax when you wanted to be nice and graceful and cause no offence, etc. (The latter is a huge problem in current society, as insecure people (Gen Z, taught nothing of worth but to be offended at a drop of a hat) try to protect themselves from embarrassment by causing embarrassment in people trying to be nice and graceful by the old standards.)

The trick is knowing what IS the right thing to do.

If you want to avoid feeling guilt, shame, or embarrassment, you need to know what the right thing to do is. How do you even define “the right thing”?

To avoid guilt, you have to see your actions from the perspective of a lot of people and correctly decide how they would react to that situation. That is largely what I’m trying to do with the description of Dog- and the Savants*. The Normal Person* tend to feel too insecure to actually be able to do this, so they’d rather we just pretend everything is fine, but it simply isn’t. They CAN learn it, they’re just typically not willing to. We’ll always hurt each other, but it would be good if it was done for a higher good, rather than laziness of figuring out how others will react to it. We can’t get it right ALL the time, but we certainly can try to.

To avoid shame, you have to observe yourself and be FINE with what and who you are so that there will be no surprises to you. You have to know yourself. You also have to realize that there is NOTHING NEGATIVE about you that you are DOOMED to be; and that being a female or being a male is not a negative, but negativity surrounding either gender may make you ashamed of being associated with that gender, when truthfully all negative gender stereotypes speak of a type that typically has no issues being labelled that negative thing. Instead of rejecting your gender, rather reject the negative stereotyping of your gender and be better.

Embarrassment can be avoided by learning social graces, thinking before acting or talking, being self-aware; avoiding hiding your head in the sand about what you are doing and why; being open-eyed and avoiding naivety… Most importantly; avoid narcissistic thinking – replacing your truthful self-image with false positives.

The purpose of my life coaching

The very purpose of everything I do is to give you tools to navigate these 3 fears. I don’t want you to STOP LIVING or altering yourself because of these things, I just want you to become better at handling these fears at the root level of them.

There is nothing wrong in its right place, and nothing is right in its wrong place. What I mean by this is that whatever you are, pertaining to your shame of self, is FINE. You just need the right people around you who love you for who and what you are, and are “your willing victims” so to speak. Because whatever you are, there is someone who feels ashamed of being your authentic counterpart. ;p Both of you are wrong to be ashamed, but it’s natural we all feel quite a bit of shame of self for a number of reasons. One of those reasons is that we are mostly surrounded and raised by Trail Companions*, and they are NEVER 100% in agreement you’re a good person… Or that they are, leading to a different set of reasons for us to be needlessly ashamed of ourselves.

Every other fear of this nature is fear of embarrassment

Every other fear of emotion is the embarrassment of it, really. Not fear of failure, but the embarrassment of failing. Having thought you had it in you in the first place. Thinking too highly of yourself, that is. There’s the fear of trusting yourself to be loved, to find out that it was a lie or even a prank, some charity or simple friendliness mistaken for genuine love or friendship; mortifying; embarrassing. We fear trusting ourselves or others because it would be embarrassing to find that we trusted a liar, or a con artist.

We fear negative labels attached to ourselves; toxic masculine, member of patriarchy, stupid cow, liar, whore, slut, fat, bitch… Unkind, unwoke, rude; anti-social… A bad parent. You name it. And a lot of people are doing everything in their power to put forth the image of competence, in their fear of being pointed out to be flawed. (We all are, tho.) ONE OF THE FLAWS we have is the false belief we have to be perfect and that we have the right to demand others to be perfect. It’s a horrible way to live.

You should always TRY to BE perfect (not fake perfection), but focus on your own perfection and leave others to their struggles. Guide, not police, lest you be the imperfect one. We are not perfect, and a kind, loving, WOKE person should leave people some room for failures and blunders. Otherwise, you cannot be considered to be very aware of the HUGE damage you’re causing by trying to squat just the tiniest of beauty flaws. Like trying to remove a pimple with pure acid.

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