We can train people to fear objects, animals and people. This has been proven.
Hitler taught the German people to fear the Englander’s and to even risk their own lives fighting the so-called dreaded English people.
If you crossed a narrow bridge which has vehicle traffic on it, and for 3 days in a row every time you cross on you bicycle you nearly have an accident which is frightening, then the fear of an accident is being reinforced in your mind. So to protect yourself you gain a fear of crossing bridges, Gephyrophobia.
You decide that the safest thing to do from now on is to avoid the bridge, and maybe even avoid all bridges. This is clearly overreacting, but may seem the wise thing to do at the time of you are insecure in the first place, and if you have suffered phobias etc in the past that have influenced your life and activities etc.
To keep the German people afraid of England, Hitler and his narcissist buddies reinforced the “fear of the English people”.
By doing this he kept the German people thinking that they had real legitimate reasons for disliking the English people and waging war against them.
If someone kept drumming it in your head to dislike someone, or many people did this, you would eventually dislike that person and even hate that person, and fear that person so much that you would physically shake in terror at the sight of that person.
If a parent constantly runs down a person, a political party or anything, the children will, with this constant barrage of dislike will believe that the person, political party or whatever is bad, and they will fear that person, always vote as their own parents have etc.
There is observational learning, like watching mother freak out once a week for your entire childhood over spiders, so you become an adult that is terrified of spiders too.
From this we can conclude that we can be influenced by others to fear things, we can have fears put into our minds by other people, we can have the fears constantly reinforced so that we continue to fear what others want us to fear.
All of this fear is unnatural and unhealthy for our own life. And many fears are easily input into vulnerable, innocent minds, also into minds that are also have suffered mental illness or is suffering mental illness.
If you have fears, please sit down by yourself and consider why you have these fears.
All the best from James Martin Sandbrook.
Tuesday, 4 August 2015, 8:28:29 PM.