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| Nineteen-year-old Cork Graham on his Vietnam political prison freedom day May 18, 1984 ( AP/Wide World) |
Fear!
I didn’t mention it in my last post, but that was one of the
major qualities of my relationship with SuzyQ, fear and how that fear expressed
itself in a hard to ignore insecurity: never ceases to amaze me how
self-destructive fear and the resulting insecurity can be. See, when you’re
afraid of things like your significant other is THE ONE, or NOT the one , and prevents
the relationship from reaching its full wondrous potential.
If you’ve been cheated on repeatedly, it effects your self-image,
and especially how you relate to others. You’re always wondering if your love
is cheating on you, or is about ready to
call it quits with you—and you know what they say about what you focus on,
right? How what you imagine can comes true based on the amount of energy and
thought you put into.
What killed that relationship last year was fear of the
unknown, fear of intimacy, fear of loss, and, yes, surprisingly so, fear of
success!
And that’s just a romantic relationship. What about all the
other relationships out there: business, friends…even the relationship we have
with ourselves?
Ironically, the very part of ourselves that’s supposed to
protect us, becomes more inflated and instead of protecting us, actually,
increases our dilemmas. This protective part or ourselves is the ego. A healthy
ego helps us define our identity, supports a strong confidence, and on a base, animalistic level, creates an emotional response for an organism to keep alive.
On the other hand, an unhealthy, an inflated ego, confuses arrogance for
confidence, and is often resulting in someone who has intense conscious and
subconscious fears as the result of repeated stress, especially in someone
dealing with PTSD versus PTSR.
FEAR AND I HAVE HAD A LONG RELATIONSHIP
You could easily say that FEAR and I have had a profoundly
deep relationship, ever since the early years of my life. You might be swayed to
think the opposite by the fact that I lived a relatively privileged childhood,
something my father was able to provide because we were expatriates, and would
never be able to afford, had we lived in the US on his salary. I went to
private school. We got to travel every summer, whether it was back to the
States every other year or at least to one of the many nations around South
Vietnam and Singapore, if not to Europe in special years.
What many who’ve never read My 2004 bestselling memoir: THE BAMBOO CHEST don’t
get is that there were some pretty horrific things happening in Vietnam when we
were there though, and it didn’t matter that we were civilians. Matter of fact,
my first memories of life are those of the second part of the Tet Offensive of
1968, Little Tet, known by those who were there, as much bloodier than the
early battle covered by Walter Cronkite. The deep red color of the blood
spilled onto the streets tinted my childhood nightmares for years.
It’s funny how people, especially my parents, took my silence
and introversion during the latter part of my childhood in Saigon as just a
normal part of shyness: before we arrived in Vietnam, I was very talkative and
pretty precocious. By the time we left Vietnam, I was extremely shy and
withdrawn. And it was another indicator of what fear had been doing to my
subconscious: I started bedwetting again then. I didn’t stop until I was twelve
years old...and interestingly enough, just about the time horrible nightmares
related to what I had seen in Vietnam, faded.
It was about that time that I made a promise to myself: I
would take on any challenge, do everything in my power, to overcome fear. I
would go out into the world and seek fear where it thrived. When the opportunity
came to head into a combat zone as an 18-year-old, that’s what I did, camera in
hand. I can’t tell you how many times from then on that I wished I had stayed
on the normal path, finished my electrical engineering studies at Berkeley and
went on from NROTC midshipmen to naval aviator, flying the newly minted F-18.
But, from age 18 to age 26, yet another opportunity to look that demon in the
eye always availed itself.
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| Midshipman Graham, back row, under the "XIN" in Lexington |
I learned what it was like to be alone in the Thai Gulf,
trying to get away from pirates; being taken prisoner on an island off the
coast of Vietnam; being interrogated by a communist intelligence team; and even
what it’s like to be blindfolded and put up against a wall during a mock
execution.
And those experiences in Southeast Asia were just the fears
of adventure and daring. Can you imagine what it was like to be in prison one
day, having done 11 months, seven in solitary, and then it’s like I’m walking
out on a stage at Carnegie Hall: all the lights were on me. One day I’m in solitary confinement; the next I’m being
interviewed by reporters from almost every news service from around the world.
A week later I’m on GOOD MORNING AMERICA and being remotely interviewed, on a
camera, on camera one, that the engineers were unaware that I was talking to a
dark screen that should have had Joan Lunden’s face on it, so that I’d actually
be able to talk face-to-with someone, instead of just looking at a glass eye
representing millions of viewers. Stage fright, anyone?
Now, if that wasn’t enough of a lesson in how intense fear can
become, there were other opportunities, like helping defend an Army base during
an overrun by enemy forces, ambushes in the jungle and my favorite way to
become scared shitless (NOT!): mortar rounds coming in out of the sky,
explosive detonations that not only hit your emotions, but send shockwaves
through the ground and your body. Terrifying…especially since they’re walking
their mortar rounds in on you, in the hopes you’ll freak and do something really
stupid, like try and make a run for it—right into the sights of their machine-gunners
on the hill.
In the process, I learned how to strike up a treaty with my new
friend, Fear, and have a somewhat less rigorous interaction. It takes a bit of
preparation. There are meditations and positive reaffirmations. Yes, a lot of
that really does work, but you have to put the time, belief, and emotional
energy into the effort.
Often it’s not the actual incident that causes fear. It can,
and often comes about, as a result of how we were raised. Take two children.
Both go through the same, very traumatic events. Scold one child, tell them to
get over it, and tell them to grow up and be an adult—cowboy up! Take the other
child, tell them how much you love them, share with them how fear is something
that we all have, and all we have to do is find a benign place in our minds for
fear to live, so that it’s not keeping us from achieving our life purpose, and
the differences can be amazing!
There are a number of powerful words we can share with the
young, like “do your best, accept your emotions and work with them.” That
doesn’t mean giving awards and bonuses for unachieved goals. We’ve seen the
horrendous effects of that in our “entitled society” that’s sprung up in the
last 20 years. No, it means rewarding goals achieved, and recognizing errors,
fears and failures, and learning how to work with them to get the next stage of
personal development.
I also find it interesting how one fear overcome, doesn’t
necessarily mean that all fears are overcome. Take for example the conversation
I had with the renegade hypnotist and Vietnam veteran Mark Cunningham. We
marveled at how when we were younger, it easy was for us to charge a machine
gun nest keeping our team pinned, yet, find it hard to strike up a conversation
with a woman we’d never met before and to whom we were attracted.
That’s the thing about fear: you can bolster your psyche to deal with fears within one
environment, and type of scenario, by taking a confidence built in another
environment; but, not until you actively practice overcoming your fears within
the specific type of scenario or environment, it just won’t completely gel.
What does that mean?
It means you can
build your confidence in combat, or climbing dangerous mountains, and stick
your chest out and feel confident from that experience of having a confidence
built on those achievements, but not until you actually build practice in the other
scenario, in this case dating and romance, being calm and confident speaking to
someone of the opposite sex, in order to
build your confidence fully, you’ll need to actually go through the repeated
act of improving your speaking experience with those of the opposite sex.
The experience of overcoming fears and building confidence
can be done in a sink or swim scenario, as pretty much my 20s were in the
1980s. Or, it can be the baby steps and solid improvement as done by someone intensely shy, attending
toastmasters to learn how to become a good speaker and turn that almost
crippling fear of tens, hundreds, or even thousands of eyes on you as you speak,
into a rush of excitement that charges your speech for success.
Taking over your mind and mindset, making it an asset is
something I’ve been keen on for a very long time. The techniques I’ve learned I’ve
used to teach a variety of people in the military, law enforcement and even in
the corporate and business world. Over at GCT Magazine, we’ll be releasing that
information soon, in webinars detailing and training the warrior mindset. GCT Magazine's New FREE Newsletter Subscription HERE!
