Sven Erlandson’s Badass Counseling Insights & Reflections
Is the Greatest Fear in Life the Fear of the Unknown?
"Change will not occur, until the pain gets bad enough." For it is only pain that has the power to force a change in your core belief system. The old belief system -- about life, about yourself, about people, about God/deity, about family, about what is important, about the world, etc -- has to become so confining, so painful, so suffocating, so debilitating as to drive the person away from it, as to give the person the courage to both cut it away and pursue something new and terrifyingly unknown.
"Sven, I feel so foolish for opening my heart and then being rejected."
The real success is in sticking your heart out there and loving and choosing to NOT live in fear. For, again, all of life, every decision boils down to that fundamental choice: fear versus trust. It's not even fear versus love, really. We all feel love and want to express it; it's our natural state. But what keeps us hamstrung, what keeps us from expressing that love is that we fear getting hurt. We fear that we won't be okay, that the pain will be too great, and that we just explode or die from the pain.