Dealing with fear, with Peter Levine

The other thing that I think most people don't understand is we can deconstruct fear. The main component of fear is a bodily sensation. So it could be twisting in the guts, it could be tight chest, it could be clenching of the jaw. Those are all things that are going on in the body. They're bodily sensations. And we can contact them through our interoceptive awareness, our awareness of our internal physiological physical sensations. And then we have this thought, oh, I'm afraid to go out, I'm afraid to go to the market to shop. And that thought then couples with that sensation and perseverates it, keeps it going. And I call it a positive feedback loop, but with negative consequences. So one of the keys in helping people get unstuck from fear is to locate the physical sensation in the body and to be able to describe that sensation. So by being able to do that, we start to be able to move through the stock sensations and then we open to the possibility of not being grabbed in fear.