Touchy Topic Tuesday: What's Your Poison?

As some of you know, I've dealt with irrational fears all my life.

Here is an example of one.


When I was about 9 or 10 years old, I became obsessed with poison.  My mother would use this rust-remover on our hard water stains in our bathtub, and I can still remember the brass-colored bottle bearing the skull and crossbones sitting among the detergents in the laundry room.  When no one was around, I would go open the cabinet and stare at the bottle and marvel that there was poison in it that could end a life, and then I would worry that somehow staring at that poison would harm me, like it was transmittable through vision, and I unknowingly took a large sip.

As I reflected on this memory this week, I realized a lot of my worries sound as silly as that:  me staring at the poison, with no real threat of ingesting it ever coming to pass.  The hard thing for me is to stop staring at the bottle, wondering.  Like I have some sort of affinity or obsession with these irrational fears that will never come to be, but circle round and round them anyway in my mind.  I beat the dead horse, and then continue to beat it.  I literally have to retrain my brain to get off the hamster wheel, and get back on track with the things around me.  This sort of worry is the toxic thing; to my health, to my life, and to my children who are eying everything I do and mimicking everything I say.  That's the real stuff that I end up ingesting.  And the actual worry accomplishes nothing; it is as good as me staring at a bottle of poison, wondering if somehow I accidentally swallowed it.

My guess is that in life, many people have their 'poison,' that source of worry that is destructive at best, lethal at worst.  

But I don't believe that we were designed as humans for this.  It is part of our fallen nature.  That's why when we do ingest the 'poison,' our body does everything it can to get rid of it.  It's a foreign substance that is harmful and can disrupt the basic things of life.  
 We need to 'throw it up' in a sense, and running along with this metaphor, taking the ipecac that forces us to do just that.



Here are some of my practical antibodies:
-Audibly speaking these irrational fears out loud can help us realize that they are ridiculous.  In order to get rid of it, sometimes we just need to call it for what it is, and make it lose its power.
-Reminding ourselves of certain truths we believe in...i.e., I often am telling myself that ultimately I am not in control.




What other things can you do to counteract the effects of unhealthy worry?