Fear is an illusion

Fear is the pain that we experience when we anticipate physical or emotional pain. The purpose of physical pain is to prevent tissue damage while the one of emotional pain is to prevent loss.

When I say that fear is an illusion I don't mean like it dosen't exist at all, the pain is as real as it gets.

An illusion is something that is creating the impression of being something else.

There are experiments where they have study the brain of people that experienced fear and the same area of the brain are active that are when you experience physical pain. On the other hand when you experience fear as pain there is no real damage.

If I stab your hand with a knife you will hurt, and that pain is very justified because there is an injury behind it, if i just hover the knife on top of your hand there is a chance you will experience pain from fear. The illusion of fear is that it makes you believe that something is wrong with you that your body is injured or that you experience loss when in fact you are just fine in that moment.  

It is a prevention mechanism, that it supposed to make you avoid danger before it even happens to you and for the most part it works just fine. Fear is also something you learn if you had a series of negative experiences with a thing, if you have to interact with that thing in the future in anticipation to that you will experience fear. Which again for the most part is a good thing is part out of self preservation.

However if you had a very traumatic past, anticipating pain can destroy your present life. When you had so much negative experience almost everything makes you scared, fear is what causes dissociation and when you are dissociated your performance in life is going to be very poor. So now fear is a sabotaging mechanism instead of a self preservation one.

Because fear is a learned thing this means that it can also be unlearned to some degree. Which means that having new positive experiences with the thing that is triggering your fear is going to eventually stop your fear.    

But in order to have positive experiences you have to keep your integrity while your fear is present. By realizing the illusion of fear, that in that moment despise the fact that you feel pain there is actually nothing wrong with you, gives you a certain amount of free will.

Which gives you the choice to run away like you have been doing in the past or act, when you do that your actions are going to be clumsy and awkward because they don't match your emotions. You might even become overwhelmed and relapse, try to run away again.

What I would consider success at this point is action at the limit of your circumstances and your emotions. The repetition of imperfect action over time builds the necessary skills you need in life.