ABOUT THE BOOK
A needed prescription for our irrational fears
The Irrational Fear Cure is a radical yet visionary book that serves as a blueprint for achieving personal and societal well-being. It is a timely resource for a world living in the age of a global pandemic.
Author Teri Smith-Pickens, a mental health practitioner, interviewed more than 200 people to help them to better understand where their fears and anxieties come from. She shares these stories throughout the book, highlighting how many people are living in survival mode stemming from trauma in childhood, and as adults, who now use obsessive compulsive behaviors to fill voids they feel on the inside.
She outlines what happens to a mind already filled with irrational fears and chronic anxiety when it encounters the rational fear of a pandemic. By unmasking the truth behind these addictions, she gives a deeper understanding of the fears we all face and how to cure them.
Teri makes it clear that it is not part of God’s plan for us to live in our childhood primal brains and remain in bondage to our fears. Instead, He wants us to put on our spiritual anchor and break free from all fears and anxiety.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Teri Smith-Pickens is an award-winning and best-selling author and speaker, in addition to her work as a mental health practitioner and coach. She has inspired and transformed many lives through her coaching, speaking and media appearances. In 2007, Teri had a supernatural revelation that changed the course of her life, giving her unerring courage to confront important, controversial mental health issues in children’s lives and the society at large, giving birth to her book, The Fear Cure in Four Miraculous Steps.
Author’s LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/teri-pickens-b9387a13/
Author’s Instagram: www.instagram.com/fushia18/
Author’s Twitter: www.twitter.com/TeriPickens
Author’s Facebook: www.facebook.com/centerforeducationandhealing/
Author’s Pinterest: www.pinterest.com/teri_pickens/
Author’s YouTube: www.youtube.com/channel/UCp1eKtZdi37ZfFDjZsK9drQ
The Irrational Fear Cure in Four Miraculous Steps
By Teri Smith-Pickens
Your book is titled The Irrational Fear Cure in Four Miraculous Steps. With so many people suffering from various anxieties today, is it truly possible to cure our fears?
Absolutely! It is the same concept used in psychotherapy when a client has anxiety which is debilitating and disrupts their functioning. It is a signal of something they fear, and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is used to change the person’s mindset to new and better thinking.
You interviewed 200 people to demonstrate fears and anxiety for your book. What primary insight did you take away from talking with those people?
That we all suffer from different levels of anxiety, which is a signal of something feared, usually a threat to survival, which impacts our mental health. People refuse to acknowledge being mentally ill, or to admit to symptoms that are debilitating to their functioning.
How do you think the COVID-19 pandemic is worsening peoples’ anxieties?
We ‘all’ live in Survival Mode, caused by childhood fears gone awry, which causes our thinking to be fear-based and irrational. Now, when you superimpose a rational event like (Covid 19) onto this mental state, it causes an exponentially increased level of anxiety.
What is your number one piece of advice for people suffering from irrational fears?
Talk to someone about the negative thoughts in your head, otherwise you will continue to feed the fear and trigger the irrational parts of your brain which causes your decisions to be impulsive and not well thought out; when you talk to someone you name and arrest the fear so it stops growing and is less frightening.
You make it clear in your book that most irrational fear stems from something that occurred in childhood. Do you have special advice for parents to help their children avoid internalizing a fear that will cause anxiety as an adult?
Absolutely, be vigilant & aggressively protect your young child from all fears until they have developed the ability to reason. Don’t trust their care to others during this primal period. Avoid unsupervised or inadvertent exposure to stuff their minds can’t process, and which ends up in their “implicit” memory, setting their Fight/Flight/Freeze response on autopilot, where it later becomes irrational.
Your book also discusses the importance of three-fold development for well-being – the body, mind and spirit, with the spirit being the most important factor. Why do you think so many people today leave out the spiritual aspect, and what impact does that have?
They are missing their Spiritual anchor which anchors them to something bigger than them. In childhood our anchor is our parents/guardians which later gives way to a belief in God, but when fear is experienced before reasoning comes, it shuts off trust and we go to Survival Mode by depending only on ourselves. This is the psychological mask we wear to cover our authentic self which suffered pain/hurt. If we couldn’t trust our parent/guardians to protect us from our fears, we are not going to trust a God we can’t see.
Does someone have to follow a spiritual life / faith life to benefit from your book?
This is a tough question because the answer to getting rid of Fear is Faith, which is spiritual. They can use the tools to lessen their fears without God, for example, using psychotherapy, but they will not have “the cure”; they will simply continue exchanging one obsessive compulsive behavior for another, to feel like they can stay in their own skin. Only Faith gives the permanent anchor, which is Spiritual.
Ultimately, what do you hope readers take away from your book?
As a species, we must understand the imperative of protecting children from their fears to avoid living in fear-based Survival Mode, and to decrease the annual incidence of suicide for those who just can’t negotiate this “dark night of the soul”.
How and where can readers purchase The Irrational Fear Cure?
The book is available at regular bookstores like, Amazon, Barnes and Nobel, etc. and on my website, www.thefearcure.com
Is there anything else you’d like to tell us about the book?
Don’t use human reasoning when reading this book, look to your own symptoms that will tell you that something is wrong – look at what you have tried so far and see if it worked.
My Review
Smith-Pickens revitalizes her 2009 book with updates for a new decade. With new statistics and polls and university studies to back her up, the author shares the definitions of fear, its causes and our reactions, and steps to reclaim our lives from Survival Mode.
I began reading this manuscript after a church service in which our pastor shared a message of hope, hope for tomorrow, and why Christians have an advantage of claiming and living in hope. The juxtaposition of reading that most people experience times of Survival Mode, described as a “leprosy of the mind,” is intriguing. Smith-Pickens defines real fears and imaginary, or irrational, fears, but that our brains still treat them the same way, causing physical reactions with the release of chemicals or muscle preparation, readying us to survive the sense of threat.
In twelve chapters, the author shares methods for dealing with our fears, stemming often from childhood, or from current events. People of faith, she explains, shouldn’t put our hopes and expectations of dealing with our fears in inanimate objects, for that is submitting to idolatry. Case in point: trusting masks to prevent being infected with Covid-19. Spending time in God’s Word is one way to stop building up our irrational fears. Fears developed in childhood often manifest in other diagnosed conditions. Putting our trust in the right place can be a way to combat these behaviors.
Filled with current stories of events to illustrate her
points, Smith-Pickens offers readers simple practices to guide us out of
existing in Survival Mode to healing and living an authentic life that resists
isolation, poor health, and broken relationships. A few general resources and a
more specific reference lists are included.
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