Why do people persist in an unsatisfying relationship, unwilling either to work toward solutions or end it and move on? It's because they know changing will lead to the unknown,, and most people believe that the unknown will be much more painful than what they're already experiencing. It's like the old proverbs say: "Better the devil you know than the devil you don't know. " A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush." These core beliefs keep us from taking the actions that could change our lives.
If we want to have an intimate relationship, then we have to overcome our fears of rejection and vulnerability.
If we're planning to go into business, we must be willing to overcome our fear of losing security to make that happen. In fact, most of the things that are valuable in our lives require us to go against the basic conditioning of our nervous systems. We must manage our fears by overriding this preconditioned set of responses and in many cases, we must transform that fear into power. Many times, the fear that we are allowing to control us never becomes reality anyway.
It's possible for people to link pain, for example, to flying in an airplane, while there's no logical reason for the phobia. They're responding to a painful experience in their past or even an imagined future. They may have read in the papers about airplane accidents, and now they avoid getting on planes; they're allowing that fear to control them.
We must make sure that we live our lives in the present and respond to things that are real, not to fears of what once was or what might someday be. The key thing to remember is that we don't move away from real pain, we move away from what we believe will lead to pain.
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