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Identifying negative beliefs can help us overcome them.

Past experiences don't need to hold us back from living our lives fully.

Moving beyond the past can free us from fear and anxiety.

My mother raised me to fear traveling.

She told me that traveling was dangerous for a woman. She said that if I pulled my car into a rest stop, chances were high that I’d be raped, abducted and killed. I believed her.

My mother's fear was dogged, and so I adopted it. Yet, I didn’t want fear to drive my life.

Overcoming Negative Beliefs

In my thirties, I pushed my inherited worry of calamity to the curb and drove from where I lived in Boston to where my childhood friend’s memorial service was taking place in Manhattan because I didn’t want to miss it. Days before I left, I felt nauseous as I envisioned driving more than four hours by myself.

During the trip, I sat in my 1999 Honda Civic, my breath shallow as I drove in traffic and across bridges, my fingers tight around the steering wheel, my palms sweaty the entire way. This was before smart car technology and before GPS was a common app on cell phones; I held a traditional paper map on my lap with directions I’d penned and reinforced with a........

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