Fishing for Anxieties
After this true and embarrassing story, I’ll tell you why I’ve put it on this page.
I feel for these people in the video below (I shouldn’t have laughed, but…) and it reminded me of my one and only foray into fishing, which went thus:
Me, 14.
My Pal Dave, 14
His older brother Shane, 16.
I fancied older brother from afar.
Dad of D & S: Would you like to come fishing with us tomorrow?
Me: (Thinks: Fishing?! Oh, I suppose it will be fun and Shane will be there.). Yes, please – what time? (6am?! I am a teenager!) Er, yes, I will be there, thanks.
Mum kindly gets me up and takes me. It’s cold and I am bleary-eyed, but it’s all in a good cause.
I’m handed this long flexible thing with a dangerous piece of metal on the end and shown what to do with it.
I duly flick this pole and watch to see the hook and bait land in the water. Oh, where’s it gone?
The hook has caught in my jeans about one inch short of my groin.
Looking around wildly, I see no-one has seen this uncool gaff, and I attempt to extricate the hook from the denim… and end up hooking other the jeans leg 😳
I now have two legs joined together where they are not meant to be and am beginning to feel red and sweaty.
Crikey! What now?
Mum sees me… and, in order to get the hook out, MAKES ME TAKE OFF MY JEANS IN FRONT OF SHANE (and his bro and dad, but they didn’t count) 😲😨
I never went fishing again and I never went out with Shane 😭
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The point of this story is that one small thing stopped me going down a certain path.
I treat clients for eating problems, fears, phobias, anxieties and addictions; many assume people assume these people are in a bad place because of some trauma in their lives.
This is true for a good proportion of the people I see (and, with the RTT, they move on from it)
… but a surprising number have their current issue rooted in some small, long-forgotten incident from childhood – as daft as the one I spoke about above.
The trouble is, the beliefs formed then (“I’m not good enough”, “I don’t fit in”, “I won’t get/don’t deserve that”) make the person shy away from being in the same situation
… and then it becomes an ingrained limiting belief that is just as embedded as if it had come from trauma.
(BTW, I’m not worried now about going fishing, but I choose not to; it just doesn’t float my boat, and I like doing other things 🙂 )