Asdr1
- Date posted
- 3y
cconccon
- Date posted
- 3y
I'm struggling with this at the moment too!
Daniela!Daniela!
- Date posted
- 3y
I had this EXTREMELY bad. The way I overcame my fear of death was to develop a fear of eternal life aka apeirophobia. For the longest time I was terrified of death and eternal oblivion, but then I considered that eternal life isn’t something that gives life meaning either. Struggling to grasp the concept of infinity and the idea that eventually octillions upon octillions of years will someday become as irrelevant as a millisecond and that anything we do on earth fades into irrelevance as we approach infinity. Upon thinking of it that way for the first time, I cried extremely hard overwhelmed with pure, true terror being afraid of the implications of both death and eternal life. But in the days and months after I began to recover and finally heal for the first time
ALVVIALVVI
- Date posted
- 2y
Hi Daniela! I know that you send this message a long time ago and I m sorry to bother you with these questions. But I have the same kind of obsession/fear that you mention (and I found pretty rare to find people having these kind of obession). My kind of apeirophobia is the fear of being lonely for eternity and it gaves me a lot of anxiety/terrifies me. I'm currently doing ERP and trying to accept the uncertainty but I think its getting worst.... :( I don't understand how can you overcame this fear and accept this could be true (cause for me its really the worst - but maybe everyone thinks the same with their obsessions- rationally I know that is OCD who wants us to feel like that). Do you overcame this fear/obsession? Do you have some advice/tips? Thank you so much and I really hope you are doing better :)
Daniela!Daniela!
- Date posted
- 2y
@ALVVI Awww I’m so sorry to hear you’re going through that 🥺 it’s a really traumatic thing to go through and I wouldn’t want you to deal with it alone like I did. The initial breakdown shattered me but at the time I was in my first year of university taking an intro philosophy class. It definitely triggered me and forced me to confront my deepest existential fears head on, but talking with the professor and also some of the lectures about Buddhist philosophy actually helped me gradually adjust the way I saw life and death. It was painful but it allowed me to rebuild my understanding of my place in the universe and accept that it’s just fine to exist. That was 4 and a half years ago. In 2021 when I was contemplating if I wanted to die bc I had horrible OCD with other symptoms, expressing love to my Mama and family and seeing the joy I brought to other people’s lives just genuinely gave me a sense of meaning and value in life. I’m in graduate school now and I’m a teaching assistant for introductory econometrics, which was my favorite class of undergrad, and really getting to help my students understand the concepts and supporting them is also something I’m really passionate about and gives me a sense of purpose/meaning. Infinity is scary, be it infinite life or infinite death. It’s okay to cry it out because it really is traumatic and your pain is 1000% relatable. I wish I could give you a hug and I hope this helps 🩵
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