GeniesLoki

Yeah. An important part of the process leading up to this moment was understanding that actually the fear wasn't doing anything useful here and was only making the situation strictly worse - the bad scenario was very unlikely, and if it occurred nothing would help much with it.

I'm both not sure I could have turned the fear off without understanding that first and also wouldn't have wanted to try.

I'd also add that 'inhibition' in Alexander Technique is not about turning off feelings, but in noticing our habitual responses to them (where feelings can be stimuli) and then not doing the habitual response. It's from that place that *other options* become available.

Yeah, that's fair. I don't think what I was doing was literally inhibition applied to the fear, it's a bit more complicated than that. I really should attend your classes because I still don't really understand how AT frames a lot of this, but it's still been useful as a pointer

I think it's possible to turn down emotions or simply argue around them: "This is silly, stop it" is effective for some people. But yeah I don't want to give the impression that I specifically am advocating for such things as 'stop feeling afraid'.

It's much more along the lines of "feel the fear and do it anyway, just be aware that the 'it' in question might be habitual and unhelpful and you can learn to not do that so that you can do something more constructive instead". Shitty book title though.

This may be something where we're differing then, because "feel the fear and do it anyway" is closer to my normal approach. Here there does feel like something inhibition like where the fear is a bit of a feedback loop and what I was inhibiting was part of the loop?

If the loop is: 1) Fear around a thing 2) Force the thing (do it anyway) Then consider that there might be another way to approach the thing that is being blocked by the forcing of 'doing it anyway'. Inhibition would be applied to 'the way you would do it anyway'.