Understand that a phobia is much more than just a fear. It is an irrational, overwhelming, uncontrollable fear of a specific object or event. Many warriors have reported “performance anxiety dreams” such as: gun does not work, cannot find grenades, fighting techniques do not work.
Use these dreams to your advantage and ensure you are trained to mitigate these situations and to deal with them if they do happen. Train, Train, Train, Breath, Breath, Breath……
One phobia that pushes almost everyone’s button is interpersonal human aggression. That is the Universal Human Phobia. Death due to human hands, such as: Homicide Bomber, Improvised Explosive Devises (IED), Beltway Sniper, Serial Killers, etc.
Think about this.
Scenario one: a natural disaster (pick one) hits your home. You lose your spouse, children and all of your worldly possessions.
You will have a tough go at it, but with the help of friends and family you will prevail because humans are resilient beings.
Scenarios two: there is a home invasion, your spouse and children are murdered, and the bad-guys burn down your house and all of your worldly possessions.
The end result is exactly the same but the means is different. So why is it so devastating? Humans are not supposed to murder each other.
When violence does happen to us, it can devastate us. It can shatter us. Most of us approach every strange dog we meet with an expectation that it might bite.
Likewise, most of us expect snakes to strike. That’s what they do! But we do not expect that one of the millions of people we interact with in an average lifetime will try to kill us.
At home we simply cannot lead our lives expecting that every human we meet might try to kill us, but in combat we must assume everyone is going to try to kill us!
SF DKD
Pain shared is pain divided (D. Grossman)
Dave at a Sniper graduation