FREEDOM FROM FEAR
Taking
Back Control of Your Life
and Dissolving Depression
You can be assertive in any type of negotiation without being aggressive or insubordinate. By understanding communications, you will be more effective in the business world, on the street, in the home, or even in your quest for romance and love.
But more importantly, these ideas can give you a greater appreciation and acceptance of yourself. Freedom from Fear is a practical guide for anyone who wants to take charge of their own life and become a happier and more self-accepting and self-actualized person.
The book is based on the author’s own experience. In his early years, Mr. Quinn was a high school math teacher by day and bouncer in a crowded biker bar by night. Later he created a successful software development firm that successfully dealt with some of the world’s largest corporations.
Mr. Quinn is internationally recognized in the self-defense training and security industry for his research into the effects of adrenal stress and adrenal stress conditioning.Reader's Comments on Freedom From Fear
Shidoshi
Stephen K Hayes:
"I
think one of Peyton’s gifts is the ability to comment on some pretty
sophisticated psychological concepts from a view and language that
allows a broader range of people to get it.
There
are folks who need to hear it from a professor.
And
there are those who need to hear it from a fellow traveler on the path;
professors and pastors seem too far removed from their experiential reality,
and tales from prison guards and barroom tough-guys let them feel more “at
home”. It is definitely a wide-ranging piece of work – hard to plug into a
simple narrow genre like “self-defense” or “psychology”
STEPHEN
K. HAYES:
( Author & “Shidoshi” an Instructor
in the ‘Warrior Ways of Enlightenment’, Black Belt Hall of Fame member and
a member of the Security Entourage for the Dalai Lama of Tibet)
skjh@skhquest.com
http://www.skhquest.com/
http://www.mvmeditation.org/
Gregory W. Lester, PHD, Denver, Colorado: An Internationally recognized Self-Help speaker and psychologist and author of POWER WITH PEOPLE
“Peyton’s
background and experience give him something important to say. He says it in a
way that will add a unique viewpoint in the self-help literature and which can
truly be helpful to so many people.”
Joseph
Reynolds: Retired Polymer
Chemist, and fellow "survivor"
"This book is not like anything I ever read before in the self-help field. Peyton sometimes makes Dr. Phil seem like Mother Teresa.
The information is very practical and you can start to put it to work right after you read the book and just do a little thinking on it.
Quinn has paid a price for this knowledge and he is able to communicate things in a way that is fairly easy to grasp. It is information that is quite helpful to know and to realize.
The book is about people, how and why the behave as they do, and especially predatory people. In this book, Peyton showed me a new and more effective way of dealing with such people."
The
author, Peyton Quinn and his wife, Melissa Quinn, taken in 1977 and 2004
Peyton Quinn
"I wrote this book to communicate the ideas and the spiritual weapons that I have discovered to be effective in my life (as I am sure many other men and women have discovered too when dealing with adversity or hostility or even physical violence).
Our time on this planet is finite, my friends, and so we truly need to make the most of it. We can not sit back and let things happen to us, we must make things happen for us!
The book gets into many different areas of life, work, love and romance, personal conflicts, life threatening situations and how to deal with them, the essential quality of forgiveness, and a lot more. But I truly feel there is a coherency to it all, it is all part of the same picture but we mostly see it only through "that glass darkly".
SOME EXCERPTS FROM THE BOOK
As a side note, let me relate a personal story about tunnel vision under the stress of an armed robbery. It was my first experience with armed robbers. It occurred when I was running my liquor store many years ago. Two men were coming into the store. Before they even came through the door, I saw them and knew something was not right. I was listening to my frog brain. I looked at my pistol under the counter, and my frog brain somehow told me, "Don’t go for that gun now." In the next instant, the larger man came through the door. He stepped aside revealing a smaller man with a sawed-off shotgun pointed directly at me.
Needless to say, this was a high adrenal moment for me.
Yet, I had already dealt with adrenal situations involving my possible death before. That is the key, to become conditioned to performing under adrenal stress before we face a crisis.
I said, "OK guys you can get the money and be out of here in seconds, and you don’t have to rap up a murder charge to do it." I was trying to sell them on the idea of not killing me. I suppose this was one of the most important sales of my life.
The larger guy I call the Gopher passed in front of the shotgun man as the Gopher made his way behind the counter. As Gopher did this, I noticed that the shotgun man raised his weapon a moment to bring his partner out of the line of fire. I concluded that the shotgun man did not want to see his partner shot. I was concerned that they had not attempted to disguise themselves. I knew that this might have been because they did not intend to leave me alive as a witness.
My gut told me to take the chance when it came and act, because in this case a compliance survival strategy might be a fatal mistake. The shotgun man ordered me out from behind the counter as he picked up my .45 automatic pistol from near the register. I figured that he ordered me outside of the register island because he was concerned that I might have other weapons behind the counter.
But there was only a narrow space between the register island and the beer and wine coolers. If I stayed in that narrow space when the Gopher came out from behind the counter, he would have to pass in front of me and the shotgun once again. I was praying that the shotgun man did not order me to come closer to the counter as that would allow the Gopher to pass behind me, giving the gunman a free field of fire with his scattergun.
The Gopher was around six-foot-one and 220 pounds or more. He wore a long, black leather coat. As he came out from behind the counter with a paper bag of cash from the register, he passed between me and the muzzle of the shotgun. That was what I was waiting for. That was my chance. I grabbed the Gopher’s leather coat and twisted it to remove the slack from it (as in my former judo training). This gave me an iron grip on the Gopher. I knew that if he broke away, the shotgun man would be free to shoot me. But for now, since the Gopher was so much larger than I, he made a good shield. I knew that if the gunman fired, the buckshot would not penetrate the Gopher to hit me. I also resolved that if a shotgun blast turned the Gopher into a corpse in the next second, that I would marshal all my strength to continue to hold him up as a shield. After I grabbed the Gopher’s leather coat, the shotgun man became frantic. He tried to move to where he could fire on me in that narrow passageway without hitting his partner. I found myself moving the Gopher like he was a rag doll to keep him between me and the shotgun. I suppose a videotape of this might seem funny or even ridiculous. I was no more than eight feet from the guy with the shotgun. He kept jerking his sawed-off weapon about trying to get a clear shot at me. As I held the Gopher as a shield, I moved toward the door to the backroom of my liquor store. Then came the critical moment:
Click
the arrow to continue reading this excerpt from the book, "Freedom
From Fear".
By Peyton Quinn
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Forward What are you really after in life? Some of us might say LOVE, others MONEY and still
others might be brutally honest enough with themselves to say,
“POWER”. Yet, it isn’t really love, money or power that we
truly seek. We only seek these things because we think that they will
bring us HAPPINESS. That is what we are all realty after, simply
happiness! Happiness is the feeling we experience primarily
when we know that we are loved and we can give love and that we are
physically safe and materially provided for and we see a positive future
ahead of us. Now my late, and great father said to me as a child
“Son, you got to have a roof over your head and something in your
belly before you can even think like that”. Well, as was so often
the case my father was quite correct, even if I did not fully understand
the extent of his wisdom as a younger child. But now, at age 54, I have had my own experiences
in life and I have seen that it is also a “spiritual roof” that we
need to put over our heads and a ”spiritual nourishment” that we
need to put into our bellies as well. The personal experiences I speak of include
youthful love, abandonment and betrayal, peace and extreme violence and
in my younger days even being the head “bouncer” in a rough
Cowboy/Biker bar while during the day I was a high school Math teacher! Yet, Later on in life I became the three-piece
suited “entrepreneur” who took an idea and made it into a
technology-based company that did very successful business with some of
the world’s largest corporations. I thus have had the chance to see
how various types of people both work and think, but most particularly,
how predators work, and think, be it in the barroom, or in the
boardroom. The simple conclusion I reached was that predatory
people are fundamentally motivated by the same psychology no matter
where they might be found. You may be dealing with some level of
predatory people in the office, perhaps in the form of the “Boss” or
a middle manager or even a co-worker. You may even have a personal and
intimate relationship with an “emotional predator”. Many of us simply do not have the tools or
experience to fully see when we have been chosen as victims by such
predators and why. Indeed, we may only feel the pain and
frustration and internal conflict that the predator causes within us,
which may obscure all else. I have seen this countless times, people, often
unknowingly, allowing themselves to be bullied by one form of human
predator or another. Indeed, it is often the “better people” that is
the more empathetic, sensitive and genuinely compassionate persons that
so often seem to attract the predator’s eye first. Yet, being empathetic, compassionate and having a
measure of sensitivity to the conditions of others are among the very
finest and most “human” of virtues. But, they are also the very
source from which the greatest spiritual strengths flow. They are the
greatest potential power that a person can posses. When we cultivate and truly learn to use this
spiritual strength we can raise a shield at the predator’s first
attempt at an attack on our happiness and on our internal self-image of
ourselves. This is because that shield can become a mirror of “finely
polished steel” and one sees only their own true reflection when they
look into such a mirror. Hence, the bully sees the face of the bully and
the predator does not see a potential victim anymore, but only the
weakness in his own predatory reflection. To polish that shield to its full potential we
need to first understand how the bully thinks. We need to understand
what it is that he is really after (and why) with his bullying tactics.
The essential ways and patterns of thinking of the predator are
essentially the same no matter where they might occur, in the office or
frankly in the barroom or in the street. Once we understand the essence of the predatory
mind, then we must begin to peel away our own layers of self-deception
or “self-misdirection” that we may have constructed in our own minds
to insulate us from a clearer and more authentic view of ourselves.
We need to realize that we have been given a “sixth, survival
sense” that is shared by others in the animal kingdom but from which
our socialization often has estranged us. We must allow ourselves to see
that while we are far from perfect creatures, we do have an inner
strength that lies dormant within most of us. But the capacity to
actualize that power is truly given to all of us, but it is only through
our own efforts that we can ultimately effect the actualization of
that inner strength and power. There are really only two basic ways to rule a
society, through fear or through hope. The very same is true of us as individuals too. We
can allow ourselves to be ruled by fear, or we can determine that we
will rule ourselves through our own personal sense of positive
self-worth combined with a sense of rational optimism. In achieving this we can also begin to let go of
those “life goals” or “necessary achievements” that are not
truly our own, but have been overtly or covertly imposed
or “assigned” to us by others. You alone must decide what your path to happiness
will be because it is your life and not anyone else’s to live. This is
not often an easy task, but then little of value in
this life is ever achieved easily is it? I have not completed my own journey down my own
path as yet, but I do know that it is my own path, the one that I have
chosen for myself. In this
book I share with you the mental tools, the knowledge and “weapons of
the mind” that I have found effective in the spiritual combat of life.
We are all spiritual warriors in a very important sense. Hence, we must
learn to think like warriors and to develop the courage of the warrior. The true spirit of the warrior lies not in
attacking and plundering the village, but in defending it from those who
would. “Know your self and know your enemy and you will be safe in one hundred battles”Sun Tzu, The Art of War (circa 2 BC)Some Excerpts from The Book The Frog Brain and the Self-Image Living in the 21st century with the body and brain wiring that evolved over thousands of centuries We are living in a 21st century world with the bodies and "brain wiring" that were developed over hundreds of thousands of years. Since before mankind left the caves, our species has fought a continual battle for survival. Hence, fear and stress have always been part of our environment. But in our modern world, our evolutionary reactions to stress and fear are less appropriate to the daily problems we now face in our modern lives…either at our jobs or in our personal relationships. Our biochemistry reacts similarly to the boss chewing us out over a mistake in the office as it did eons ago when we were faced with the danger of taking down a Woolly Mammoth with stone-tipped spears. Our human evolutionary path has left us with some less than truly functional responses to modern life with its new and different forms of conflict. When we understand this, then we have set upon a path that will change our world view, enhancing and protecting our personal self-images and thus our ability to achieve our goals in this brave new world we live in. In this way we will begin to take back control of our lives. That, in brief, is the central theme of this book.
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