Last month I wrote about loneliness, and gave the reader options about managing it. If you have never thought about it, loneliness, over a long period of time, creates thinking patterns of fear. Just as the gentleman in my Halfway House was deathly afraid to ride in an elevator because according to him, “these things go down and kill people.”

The fact that Herman, my client at Friends of Cazenovia Manor Halfway House had been a loner his whole life and had massive trust issues led to many irrational thoughts with little proof to back up his irrational thinking. As you may recall, Herman was 6-foot-11 and weighed 375 pounds. A potential NFL tackle, he slept through the Green Bay Packers’ audition because he didn’t trust them.

When I asked him how he felt about being cut because of being a no-show, his defenses went up, especially fear of being cut because he wasn’t good enough sabotaged his thinking and behavior.

The exercises of cognitive behavioral fear attacking have been used by this writer for years in teaching, coaching, counseling and sales to attack irrational thinking and behaviors of the majority of our population. Talk therapy without action is often cheap and ineffective if it doesn’t lead to rational thinking and self-actualizing.

I’ll give you an example in coaching basketball. Great coaches create an element of fear, to get players to often play above their abilities. In this game, one either wins or loses and there are no ties. The psychology of coaching young men and women has to do with a player’s perception of him or herself, their teammates and their coaches. To get players to the level of embracing fear, but not letting it immobilize them takes a lot of work and repetition.

For example, if we were playing a team known for its pressing defenses and players had abnormal fear of making mistakes with the ball, I would often overload the press and play five on five.

The rationale behind this was if you take care of the basketball when they have more people than you and we are not only not making mistakes, but actually scoring at times, then the fear of making mistakes turns into an opportunity to minimize turnovers and score the baskets.

In today’s game, coaches have their work cut out for them because the two greatest offenses as I see it are passing and catching. If you don’t understand this, go to any game on any level and you’ll see turnover after turnover by both teams, with little regard for the fundamentals.

I would be remiss if I didn’t give you some fear attacking exercises. Think of 10 fears you have. Rank them in priority of 10 being low and 1 being high. Pick out five and from 1 to 5, 5 being the most intense in the ranking. Now ask yourself, “How real are these fears to me, how much power do I give them, and do these fears disable me or not?”

Using rational emotive behavioral therapy, clients ask themselves, “is there any reality to these fears or am I creating a reality?” Am I analyzing people, places, events, the past, recovery, relationships and telling myself I can’t function with people, situations, events, the world and life? Am I rating myself and others as losers for becoming chemically dependent and never being able to follow through with school, jobs, relationships, watching others get breaks and demanding that people, places, and things change to accommodate me and my wishes?

Clients that are willing to go through the pain and face the fears they have, need not have to embrace the current therapy of the week, which puts a band aid on fear attacking and their recovery.

If you would like to know more about fear attacking, there is always a telephone number at the end of each article. Good luck!

Mike Tramuta is a Rational Emotive Behavior Therapist. He can be reached at 716-983-1592.