Fear? How can I control it, because it is controlling me

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Hopefully the title drew you in to read this post. Let me start off by giving you the information about myself. I am a 21 year old autistic male. Ok, that's enough information But anyways, I've had a problem dealing with a fear I feel inside that has no cognitive reason, there is no rationale to what I feel, so I will explain it below.

I'm a very passive person, and I think I got this trait from my father, who has even more passive then I was at his age. Just some background information. Well anyways, I did not have a good time in early educational years, like 5th-11th grade. I was a loner and an outcast, and hid under the guise of being a tough thug-like kid to protect myself as a defensive mechanism and to give people the impression that I was not to be messed with. I created this around middle school (7th-8th grade), because I was a nice kid back in elementary school and people who were utter bastards and b*****s mocked me and disliked me for no good reason except for their malicious entertainment.

As soon as I got out of high school and went to college, I gave up my "persona", and became your average joe type fellow. However, when I see someone I knew from the past or encountered anything that seemed confrontational or intimidating, I IMMEDIATELY feel this fast (it happens in second) fear that makes me feel physically weak and a bit nervous/light-headed. There is no thinking process in my head when it occurs, I just feel the symptoms automatically, no reasoning or thinking inside my head, it just happens. There is no "uhhh...this is a guy I had an unpleasent experience with in high school" it just happens automatically. It is a feeling of being utterly physically weak and scared at the same time, but for no logical reason. It happened to me tonight at work, I was working the cash register and I saw someone from my past and I immediately started feeling afraid/scared. I hide it and he couldn't tell, but I felt it and I hate it when I felt it. I has nothing to be afraid of, and yet I felt very afraid. The only thing I can liken it to is a robot being splashed with water and short circuiting.

I HATE feeling like this everytime, and I want so badly to conquer the feeling I have. So if you guys could give me some advice or suggest a book on conquering fear or if you just want to relate, just reply to this. I don't know how many of you deal with this, but it would be reassuring to know that I'm not alone. Thanks for listening!

-Autistic Malcontent

I can totally relate to this. I'm also a passive person, in fact, I'm told that I am in the 'passive' group on the autism spectrum. I got picked on a lot at school, didn't really have any friends. I have a similar reaction when I see people from my old school or have any experience that reminds me of school. I get really tense, and the strain just builds and builds until I break down and sob uncontrollably. I cry until I get dizzy from the lack of oxygen and my hands and feet begin to seize up. Then I have to take a valium.
Luckily, I am not reminded of school very often, so this happens rarely nowadays. Sometimes the reaction is less extreme than other times, too; it depends on how well I'm feeling and if I'm under any other stress.

Can't give you a whole lot of advice on stopping the fear, but I think it will reduce with time. That is all.

Thanks you for relating your experience to me. Luckily for me, it isn't to the point of severity where I cry. I almost never cry, it typically frowned upon males, because I would like to be strong and powerful. I'm glad you can relate to me on this level, I'm sure both of us can relate to this feeling very well. I hate the feeling and I want to learn to control it. Thanks for posting

Perfectly normal for something that hurt you before (or that just happened to be around during or immediately before the time you got hurt) to cause you to feel fear when you encounter it again, immediately and without any conscious thought. That's classical conditioning, these people from your past are conditioned punishers for you. You're not alone, everything that can be made to fear something it didn't fear before has the same experience.

It is especially horrible when it takes too long to figure out what past negative experience(s) you're associating with the thing that's scaring you now.

I too am very disturbed and upset when I have emotional reactions which are no longer relevant to the situation and thus illogical. I think most people deal with that just fine, but I'll get all hung up on it -- irrational fears become even more fearsome because they don't make sense and nonesense is scary and makes me feel crazy and that is scary and I hate myself for torturing myself with the stupid insane reaction. So it layers up into something huge and horrible.

I'm afraid most of the time. I'm afraid of almost all people, and of any situation where I must deal with people or be seen by them. It's senseless because they're extremely unlikely to do anything concretely dreadful and I'm actually quite fond of them in an intellectual way. I really have no idea how I manage to get through my life as well as I do when I'm constantly pretending that I'm okay when I mostly feel weak and humiliated and frightened.

Could be post traumatic stress disorder.

I'm sorry to hear that you're dealing with something similiar to my own plight, or exactly like it. I never thought about classic conditioning, but remembering psychology now, I do recall Pavlov and his experiment with his dogs. Irrational fears are a curse and often turn into something uglier, as you said. Your description mirrors my own, and I think that if we could get rid of this feeling, we would feel much, much better.

However, I'm suprised that a neurotypical, like yourself, experiences this aggravation to the extent you do. Yes, I checked your profile to see whether you have autism or not, and it struck me odd that a neurotypical feels the same way. After all, you have an understanding of emotions and you can understand basic emotional/verbal/body language cues, I can not. This may be a generalization, but you're playing with a full deck of cards, I'm a couple cards short of a full deck. You know, I also think that you neurotypicals have a more in depth thought process than we autistic people, or at least that is my observation from my personal experiences. I don't think, I instantly act, no cognitive process, but somehow I always make the smart choice despite having a in-depth cognitive process in my head.

However, I think because you can think, because you can think in your head, that you can overcome your fear much easier than I can. You can think in your head "Ok, I'm really frightened of this or that and this is the reason why". For a neurotypical, the reason why they feel fear is because they have illogical thoughts that make their bodies react with physical symptoms. Basically, your own mental worries and thoughts inside your head causes your body to feel fear because your body releases cortisol and adrenaline, which courses through your body and prepares your body with the "fight or flight" instinct. There is a book you need to read, it is a book called "From Panic to Power" by Lucinda Bassett. Since you have the capability to mental process thoughts, this book can help you conquer your fear/anxiety. I'm f****d but you're not, there is nothing I can do because I don't have any emotional connotation or feeling towards her advice/words. Words have no emotional meaning to me, I feel like a robot. But at least their is hope for you.

I display a whole bunch of traits that are associated with autism. I'm not diagnosed, see no reason to get diagnosed, and don't know if I can be diagnosed. I suspect I hover at the edge, and I'd be 'mild asperger's' if I'd been born fifteen years later into a family that wasn't full of people who display these same traits. But it seems forward to tell people I have an autism spectrum disorder when I don't know that I do and figure it's not much of one if it's one at all.

It's true, I have an understanding of emotion and I can follow those verbal, facial-expression and body-language cues, badly.

Other people follow them well. With dogs, I do it well; I can look at a dog and tell you what it's thinking, predict its behavior for the next fifteen or thirty seconds with great accuracy, and predict how it will respond to certain actions of mine. I do not have to think about this, and had to look at scientific studies of dog's expressions to tell you what I am seeing that is giving me this 'intuitive' understanding of dogs. My ability about dogs looks like magic to most people, who can't do it without consciously learning the cues of dogs, and are seldom very good at it even if they do study. I think most people read other humans with the degree of skill that I have with dogs, and read dogs with the degree of skill that I have with humans. I can do it, but most of the time it's not easy, and I don't get as much insight as most people do.



I think you, and many people here, overestimate your difference. Possibly because it's damned annoying that a little difference can lead to such a huge problem.

I think most people, these NT people, do not think consciously in a lot of situations, but instantly act. What they are able to do that you don't do is explain to themselves why they do as they do. They very often fail to bother to analyze these explainations, and so it doesn't matter to them if the explaination makes any sense. Very often it doesn't.

If you want an average person to really be able to explain his chains of reasoning clearly, and understand them clearly himself, you must teach him do to symbolic logic. Without it, most people are mostly rational, but often explain their rational decisions with nonesense such as, "It's just that way."



I think it's pretty bizzare to think that you don't think.

I don't know that I can overcome my fear by thinking about it. I think about it a lot. I haven't read the book you mentioned, but I have read others on the topic. No luck. I think I have a pathological condition, an anxiety disorder, and need drugs to adjust my brain-chemistry. Sounds simple, but I was reduced to puking terror over the effort of arranging to see a psychotherapist, and before my last appointment (the second one) it was worse. I can get a referral from her to see the psychiatrist, who will be able to prescribe anti-anxiety drugs for me, but lately I am too exhausted to be able to push through the fear of going to see yet another stranger. I'll probably be able to manage it after a while, once I get used to the therapist and can see her without such an overwhelming reaction.



Very likely I wouldn't get an emotional connection to her words either. But I might.

I think you, too, could probably use anti-anxiety medication. You shouldn't put too much stock in self-help books, they don't always work for the general population, either. Mostly not.

I don't know if this will be especially useful, but it involves my fear and how I overcame it. The trouble is that mine was different.

It's not terribly complicated, I used to be terrified to talk to new people. I then observed almost everyone except for a few that had a hard time talking to new people. I tried to figure out how the people that were social butterflies managed to talk to so many people. The answer that I came up with was that they would talk a little bit to everyone, most people were really happy that the butterfly broke the ice. For the ones that didn't want the butterfly to talk to them, the butterflies just decided that there were plenty of other people to break the ice with. That meant that there was nothing for me to be frightened about. If I was rejected, or said something dumb, I'd just try again with someone else. I eventually became fearless in starting conversations. I'm still horrible at small talk, but guess what, the butterflies whom everybody was in awe of for their "social skills" really were too. They wouldn't spend any amount of time with any one person. They would basically say hello to everyone and then walk to the next person. I mimicked that and it seemed to work for me. There was one time that I got 40 people's phone numbers in one place. That also lead to me meeting my wife.

So on to your problem. It's not unusual to feel some fear at meeting people that went to school with you. That you can take some solace in. The severity of your fear is basically the issue.

Maybe come up with a rehearsed story that you tell people from your different phases. Practice them out loud and then with a trusted friend. Imagine the scary people approaching you and delivering your story. It might work?