Chapter 11

Overcoming Fears and Phobias

In This Chapter

Tracking your anxiety level

Preparing to tackle your fear

Making your fear insignificant

Practising confronting the problem

With well over 500 different phobia names listed at The Phobia List website (www.phobialist.com), you may think that human beings are a highly neurotic species, and perhaps you’re right! People certainly have a knack for getting into a ‘to-do’ over the seemingly smallest of things. Here are ten of the most common fears and phobias:

Dentists

Lifts

Enclosed spaces

Flying

Germs

Heights

Injections

Open Spaces

Public Speaking

Spiders

This list is quite long, and so you’ve probably been affected by at least one of these phobias – certainly I’m familiar with a few.

This chapter helps you come to terms with or get over any fears or phobias that are holding you back from enjoying life to the full. Through the power of creative visualization, you can minimise or even completely cure a phobia, and prevent it from bothering you again. The chapter introduces various techniques, and if I don’t cover your specific phobia from clowns to teapots (or teapot-wearing clowns), you can easily modify one or more of the exercises to suit your personal situation.

Using the Anxiety Meter

The first step towards curing a fear or phobia is to acknowledge that you have it.

If dentists frighten you but you’re in denial and ‘never get round to going’, this chapter isn’t going to help you. But if you’re prepared to admit any phobias to yourself, you can certainly work on relieving them.

Once you’ve admitted to having a specific fear or phobia, you need to ascertain just how bad it is.

Select a fear or phobia that’s giving you concern and then quickly visualize about how it makes you feel. Now look at the meter in Figure 11-1 and decide where the needle is when you think of the fear or the phobia. The figure shows a VU meter, more commonly used to measure the volume level of sound in recording studios and radio or TV stations (with VU standing for Volume Units). But in this case, the meter measures your level of anxiety brought on by a phobia, from –20, which is the least anxious and indicates that you aren’t at all concerned, to +3, which is the most anxious you can be. Imagine that the far right section is red, indicating that a fear is causing you a problem, and that the rest of the meter to the left of the 0 is white.

When you decide where the anxiety needle is pointing, make a mental note and keep that level in your mind’s eye. This reading is the baseline against which you can test the effectiveness of the exercises in this chapter.

Most people who are bothered by a phobia, register their anxiety level as somewhere between about –2 and +3. Any less than that and you’re probably not that concerned, but you do find the phobia a nuisance. Your main goal, however, is to move the needle out of the red (that is, to a position below 0). If you can succeed in that, you’ve minimised your fear or phobia. Then you simply need to see how much farther to the left you can move the needle to continue alleviating the problem.

Preparing to Do Battle with Your Fear

Before you can rid yourself of a fear or anxiety you first need to acknowledge its existence. If you have a phobia, for example, but try to ignore the fact as part of your strategy for dealing with it, how can you attack it head on and permanently remove the problem?

Therefore, in this section you examine your fears and phobias and select any that are causing your problems. You then accept the fact that they are interfering with your life, and choose to vanquish them.

Having taken the two steps of acknowledgement of a problem and having the desire to be rid of it, you then discover the good news that you can address your fears through creative visualization, and I introduce some powerful techniques to help you do this.

Wanting the problem gone

If you don’t like suffering from a fear or phobia, simply getting upset or angry doesn’t help you; instead, you must actively want the problem gone from your life. This firm desire for riddance plants the seed of recovery and provides the motivation to increase that desire until the problem is no longer an issue.

To help get this idea fixed in your mind, repeat some of the following positive affirmations, filling in the blanks with your own problem (and yes, I’ve deliberately made you mention the problem several times because first you need to acknowledge the problem, and then you can focus on solutions):

I acknowledge that I have a fear or phobia.

I no longer want this fear to unduly affect me.

I hate being held back by my problem.

My fear isn’t rational and I want it gone.

I intend to rid myself of my phobia.

Knowing that you can be free from the fear

To be rid of your fear or phobia, you need to make yourself clearly aware that this aim is, in fact, achievable. Recall a time when you didn’t suffer from the problem. You know the fear or phobia didn’t always exist, and in the same way you know that it can (and will) be gone, if you visualize on it.

Try some of the following affirmations:

Having a fear/phobia isn’t my natural condition.

I know that I can be rid of my problem.

Reducing and removing fears and phobias is proven to work.

Millions of others have quashed similar problems.

Getting rid of my fears is easy with creative visualization.

Repeat the affirmations in this section and the preceding one frequently so that they become integrated into your psyche and you and your unconscious mind believe them. You’re preparing yourself for actively dealing with the fear or phobia.

Seeing how you feel when the fear is gone

Take a moment to consider how you’re going to feel when you’re rid of your fear or phobia.

Imagine how being free of the fear or phobia is going to benefit your future life. For example, if you diminish any phobia of spiders or other such creatures, you can take up gardening, clear out the garden shed or dirty garage, take walks in the country or woodland, and perhaps even go camping. If you’re afraid of driving, losing that fear enables the world to open up to you and you can go anywhere without taxis, public transport, or relying on friends and family to drive you. And losing a fear of heights lets you visit high-rise skyscrapers, stand next to the railings and take in wonderful views while sightseeing, and so on.

Whatever your problem, visualize all the things you can (and will) do when the fear’s gone, and feel how much you enjoy your new freedom.

Turning the Issue into a Non-Issue

To vanquish a phobia or fear you need to make it insignificant, to remove any importance it has for you. Doing so is far stronger psychologically than trying to use brute force to confront the fear while it still seems huge to you. This section provides several exercises for diminishing the importance of your fear.

Creating positivity points

You can use a combined physical and mental visualization approach to instantly draw in inner help whenever you become anxious. This technique involves assigning emotions and feelings to parts of your body, which you then touch in order to recall them.

Figure 11-2 shows the palm of a left hand upon which four positivity points (A to D) are highlighted. Sometimes therapists also refer to these as anchors. In the following visualization exercise you assign positive feelings to these points (most people are unlikely to touch locations such as the first segment of each finger very often, making them ideal points to focus on):

1. Touch your right pointing finger to position A – or gently squeeze it between your thumb and finger – and think of something that gives you a great sense of calm.

It may be a piece of music, a location such as a church or a wilderness, a poem you love, or anything else you like, as long as the feeling is strong. If you’re claustrophobic (afraid of closed spaces), imagine somewhere with plenty of space. If agoraphobic (afraid of open spaces), maybe think of a place you feel secure, and so on. Remain focused on that feeling for a while and all the time notice your finger touching the positivity point.

2. Forget that feeling, clear your mind, and touch positivity point B while you think of a situation in which you feel totally in control and fully competent.

The place may be in the kitchen preparing a meal, in front of a computer programming or typing, behind the wheel of a car driving, or chairing a meeting (although all these can also be phobias for some people). Choose your best control situation and think of how it makes you feel, and the way you lose any anxiety and are able to make decisions easily and act decisively. At the same time, be well aware of your finger touching the positivity point.

3. Empty your head of thoughts, move your finger to touch point C, and think about a time when you were at your most creative.

Perhaps you wrote a poem, song, or piece of music of which you’re proud. Or maybe you won a cookery or photography contest. Then again perhaps you’re in the zone while sketching. Even if you don’t think of yourself as a creative person, you are. Humans are creative beings. Just think of something you like to do and are good at. And keep concentrating on what makes you proud for a few moments while feeling your finger touching the positivity point.

4. Clear your mind again and move your finger to point D as you recall something or someone that makes you smile.

It may be a joke you recently heard, a television show you enjoy, a particular comedian, or simply spending time with friends. Or you may find that participating in a sport or activity brings on a smile, or playing a musical instrument does it for you. Again, concentrate on whatever easily comes to mind while also noticing how your finger is touching the positivity point.

5. Empty your mind and spend a few minutes touching each of your positivity points and recalling the specific feeling that each brings.

In the case of this exercise, you’re feeling four Cs:

• Calmness: position A

• Control: position B

• Creativity: position C

• Comedy: position D

6. Keep touching each point until you can easily recall the feelings on demand.

Thereafter you can touch whichever point you need to quickly induce the response you want to deal with the anxiety caused by confronting your fear or phobia. You can use these positivity points in a wide variety of other situations as well.

You have eight more finger segments on your left hand to which you can attach other feelings and emotions, such as love, motivation, and so on, along with two more segments on your thumb and the centre of your palm. And your right hand contains another 15 points. With both hands, that’s 30 different feelings and emotions you can train yourself to recall on demand. Because this book is about creative visualization, I leave it up to you to use your creativity to allocate these associations yourself according to how you feel that they’re likely to benefit you the best.

Making your fear ridiculous

The behaviour therapist Joseph Wolpe was famed for his research on reciprocal inhibition, in which fears can be substituted with sexual arousal, relaxation, hunger, thirst, and even laughter. The idea is to evoke a feeling or response that is incompatible with a feeling of anxiety, which results in inhibiting it.

For example, being afraid of something ridiculous isn’t easy; you’re more likely to laugh or be scornful. You can employ creative visualization to help make fears and phobias seem ridiculous, and so diminish the effect that they have on you.

The idea is to make the fear seem stupid, senseless, or ridiculous. For example, you can visualize a spider as being dressed in a clown costume with crossed eyes, or a snake being like the hapless reptile in the Disney animated film Robin Hood.

In ancient times, people believed that angry gods caused thunder and lightning, so if storms scare you, imagine a feud between two such deities (say Thor and Zeus – the fact that one’s Scandinavian and the other Greek simply makes the whole situation even more ludicrous!). Visualize them fighting over something as stupid as one having thrown a custard pie in the other’s face.

Harry Potter fans will recall the boggart, a shape-shifting being that takes on the form of its intended victim’s worst fear, and which can be vanquished by imagining it as something ridiculous, while saying the charm, ‘Riddikulus.’ If you like you can try visualizing your fear as a boggart and then disposing of it in the same way.

Not all phobias can fit into the ‘making them ridiculous’ category (the following section may be more helpful for cases in which the fear looms large in size to you). But if you can make a fear seem silly, meditate for a while on just how dumb you can make the fear appear. And give yourself an anxiety meter check afterwards to see whether the needle has moved more to the left (check out the earlier section ‘Using the Anxiety Meter’).

Reducing the size of the fear

Many fears and phobias can seem large in size to you, which makes them appear more frightening and harder to tackle. By reducing the fear in size in your mind’s eye you can diminish its effect on you. This technique doesn’t work on every fear and phobia, but can help you with many.

If you fear injections, visualize that the needle on the end of the syringe is very small already. Now imagine it becoming thinner and thinner until it’s only a few molecules wide. Then make it smaller still, until it measures only a few atoms in width. At that size, when the needle’s inserted it easily squeezes past all the other atoms in your skin, gently pushing them to one side without hurting.

Research into injection (and blood taking) phobia shows that you don’t diminish the fear by looking away. I know that this finding seems counter-intuitive, but in fact you have the most anticipation and anxiety when you can’t see what’s going on. So instead, visualize yourself looking down at a part of your skin near the site where the needle is going to be inserted, but not so near that you can see it directly. Focus on that area of skin and imagine seeing the syringe only out of the corner of your eye. You can’t see what’s going on in detail, but you can tell when the needle is inserted and when it’s removed – all the time remaining fixated on your chosen area of skin.

Now, when you have to go for a blood test or injection in real life you can use these same two techniques to minimise your anxiety levels substantially. Take a look at your imaginary anxiety meter from the earlier section ‘Using the Anxiety Meter’; perhaps it’s moved farther to the left.

Imagining that you like what you fear

Imagining that, in fact, you like the thing you fear can help tackle some phobias.

If you’re afraid of cats or dogs, you may think that they can sense this fear (and sometimes they can). But by liking them, they don’t pick up any bad vibes from you and tend to leave you alone.

Of course, you can’t use this technique on all phobias – you don’t want to like cancer, for example. But you can choose to like (or imagine that you like) things such as animals and insects, dentists, and public speaking.

Combine a little willpower, a strong imagination, and your hand positivity points (see the earlier section ‘Creating positivity points’), and you really can visualize your problem as something you like. I leave the details to your creativity and specific fear, but after a few times of doing this exercise, you can find that you’ve reduced your fear.

After trying this exercise, check your imaginary anxiety level (from the earlier section ‘Using the Anxiety Meter’) afterwards. The needle may well have moved to the left. Continuing to repeat the exercise and checking your meter level each time, sees the needle moving even farther left.

Visualizing the fear already gone

In the earlier section ‘Seeing how you feel when the fear is gone’, I suggest that you visualize all the things you can do when your fear or phobia has disappeared. In this section, you visualize that your problem actually has gone and that it no longer affects you.

Briefly recall the problem you want to tackle, and then visualize that you’ve just realised that it’s no longer an issue. Use your imagination to the full, and deeply experience how the fear doesn’t affect you any more. Doing so is quite easy because you’re not in the presence of your fear or phobia right now – it’s only in your imagination, and therefore your imagination can choose not to see the imaginary fear as a problem at all.

Doing this exercise helps your unconscious mind to draw encouragement and know how to help you when you encounter the problem in real life. Your unconscious does its best to bring you the same feeling of the phobia being a non-issue as you consciously imagine it to be.

Use your positivity points to aid this visualization (flip to the earlier section ‘Creating positivity points’ for more details).

After completing this visualization, take a moment to see how your anxiety meter is doing. I hope that the needle has moved over to the left, but how far? Compare it to your baseline reading from ‘Using the Anxiety Meter’ earlier in this chapter.

If your reading is still in the meter’s red zone, don’t worry. Keep working through this chapter’s exercises, repeating them again and again until you get the needle as close as you can to the meter’s white zone.

That’s your first major hurdle, and after you achieve it you simply have to keep on pushing the needle leftwards until it slips out of the red and into the white zone.

Overcoming the Problem

The previous sections guide you through acknowledging your problem and visualizing turning it into a non-issue. When you feel adequately prepared, you need to dig a little deeper to weed out and remove the fear or phobia from your life. In this section, you aim to get your anxiety meter’s needle right out of the red zone (read the earlier section ‘Using the Anxiety Meter’ if you haven’t already).

Confronting the problem head on

The reason people acquire phobias so easily is that they perform a useful function. For example, in parts of the world where spiders and snakes are poisonous, a phobia ensures that you try to keep well away from the beasties to avoid harm. But a phobia can become too strong and prevent you from functioning properly, particularly when it’s about something relatively harmless or even benevolent, such as dentists.

One way of dealing with such a problem is to visualize around your phobia and understand that you have it because your unconscious mind thinks that you need protection against something. Generally, your unconscious mind works to protect you and is always looking out for your best interests. But it works at quite a basic level and doesn’t have the reasoning ability of your conscious mind.

Visualize thanking your unconscious for bringing this problem to your attention and guarding you from potential danger. Then imagine telling your unconscious that it’s done a great job, but now it doesn’t need to maintain the phobia any more. Tell it that you’re going to be mindful and take control over the problem yourself, and promise that you’ll be careful. Mean what you say so that your unconscious believes you.

Now visualize confronting your phobia. Imagine telling it that its job is done now and you’re letting it go. Say that you’re releasing it immediately and that it can leave and go elsewhere. Now turn your attention away from the phobia and leave it to go away in its own time.

So, how’s your anxiety meter doing? Is the needle now out of the red zone? In some cases the preceding exercise is sufficient to shift the needle more than halfway to the left.

Imagining the fear never existed

What if you never had the phobia or fear in the first place? Wouldn’t that be the best of all possible worlds? It never bothered you or held you back, and you don’t have to work at making it disappear.

Visualize yourself in the past, present, and future, and in all cases without the problem. See yourself in a short life-movie from being a baby, through growing into a child, a teenager, a young adult, middle age, and retirement. Note that at all times the phobia was never present. In fact, you’re noting nothing. I know it’s like saying ‘Don’t think of Donald Duck’ (because that very sentence causes you to do so), but as you visualize, note that your fear is not there in your movie – because it’s your movie that you just created and so the fear really doesn’t exist in it. Realise that you’re problem free, have been all your life, and always will be.

Watching the scary thing run away

Instead of being afraid of something, try letting it be afraid of you.

Small creatures such as cats and dogs, insects and spiders, are generally a lot more scared of you than you are of them, and are used to running away from potential danger (at least the undomesticated ones anyway).

Visualize the root cause of your problem running away from you whenever you approach it. If the fear is of a creature, see it scrambling away from you as fast as possible because it’s truly terrified of you. If the fear is something like germs or cancer, visualize them trying to get away from you because your body is too strong. Or imagine thunder and lightning heading off away from you in another direction to terrify someone else who may be scared of them (unlike you).

You can’t apply this exercise to all fears and phobias, but you can address many in this way. And each time you see your fear running for the hills in your mind’s eye, you have one bit less anxiety to feel in the future.

Denying your fear any nourishment

If you deny your fear any sustenance, it may well simply give up and die on its own.

Imagine that the root of your problem is like a nasty, stubborn weed that you want rid of but whose roots go way down so that you can’t easily uproot it. You can, however, deny it any food, water, and sunlight by putting a dark plastic box over it for a week or two. Visualize your phobia withering away and then lift up the box and see that it’s shrivelled up into a mass of brown and grey. Now, simply pull it up with a pitchfork and drop into the bin.

Your fear or phobia is now a thing of the past and it can’t bother you again.

Finding the positive in what you fear

One effective way of dealing with a phobia is to turn it upside down and examine its possible positives.

Spiders eat flies and other irritating insects. Dentists perform an important health role, lifts take you quickly to different floors, planes to different cities and countries, and even vomit is good because it removes contaminants and irritants from your system.

Consider for a minute whether your problem has any positives. To see that you can find a positive aspect for almost everything, I select one of the most common and deepest phobias: the fear of death. Even death has positives, because otherwise far too many people would be in the world and everyone would starve. Also, religious people can visualize the afterlife they can expect. From an evolutionary point of view, without death, species wouldn’t develop and humans wouldn’t exist. You can find positives about any fear or phobia, if you think them over.

Take a look at your anxiety meter (that I describe in ‘Using the Anxiety Meter’ earlier in this chapter) and see where the needle points. I hope that it’s noticeably within the white area now, possibly even to the left of the –1 position. But if you’re still in the red, that’s okay. Keep on using the techniques in this chapter to work on your fear. If you do, I’m convinced that you will succeed.

If the anxiety needle is on the boundary between red and white, visualize giving the meter a quick tap and nudge the needle over. Go on, you can do it.

Using the exercises in this section, you can take the anxiety meter out of the red zone so that your fear or phobia is no longer a problem to you. Even though the fear may still exist and even feature in your mind, the problem aspect of it is now vastly reduced.

Focusing on the Future

Working through the visualization exercises in the preceding sections helps you to reduce the intensity of your fear or phobia problem down to a manageable level. The object of this section is to reduce that intensity even further, and to prevent the fear or phobia from ever recurring in the future.

To do so, you travel backwards and forwards in time to see your before and after feelings regarding the problem, and you set up your own mental department of immigration and border guards to keep the phobia from ever returning.

Going forwards in time

Take a trip into the future with the knowledge that you’re working on beating your fear or phobia.

In this visualization, you use a mental time machine to go forward to the next time you visualize on your phobia, whether that’s later today, tomorrow, or next week:

1. Think about how much less the fear affects you now.

2. Imagine the needle of your anxiety meter (from the earlier section ‘Using the Anxiety Meter’) moving a notch to the left.

3. Jump ahead to the session after that and see how much better you then feel.

4. Visualize that the needle is yet another notch leftwards.

5. Keep on going until the needle is all the way to the left and you see that you no longer have any thoughts about the phobia; the fear has entirely evaporated and absolutely nothing bothers you about it.

Make sure that you perform these additional sessions so that your imagined future becomes your true future. If things go well, move the anxiety meter needle two or more notches to the left each time (if you can), so that you don’t have to perform more exercises than necessary.

Looking back and laughing

Laughter is always a good cure for any problem: it reduces anxiety and releases feelings of relief. So get in the mood for a good laugh as you prepare for the following exercise:

1. Use your time machine from the preceding section to move yourself forward to a point in time at which your fear or phobia is completely gone.

2. Make that time point your ‘now’, and pause for a few seconds.

3. Use the time machine to travel back into the past to the time when the problem affected you.

4. Feel how silly the fear seems as you get closer to it, and how ridiculous you were being hung up over such a stupid thing.

5. Laugh out loud (with, not at yourself) at how foolish you were, and at how glad you are that the problem no longer affects you.

6. Bring yourself back to your future and continue to laugh as you reflect on how the whole situation was a big to-do over nothing.

7. Let go of your adjusted timescale and allow yourself to return back to the real now.

This exercise may seem a little confusing (but probably no more so than the Back to the Future films!), but it serves the purpose of letting you laugh at your problem from a detached viewpoint in which the issue doesn’t exist anymore. You’ve now integrated this feeling into your psyche and your unconscious mind is primed to take things from here.

Seeing all you can now do without the problem

When you feel that fear is no longer an unmanageable problem (after working through the exercises in the preceding sections), you can actively start to look at yourself, your life, and what you’re able to do now.

All you need to do is relax and consider all the things you can now do without the problem on your back or in your way, and how these things are going to become ever easier and more enjoyable from now on.

If you were scared of public speaking and have a wedding coming up at which you must speak, just think how much easier that speech is going to be to give. You’re going to be able to enjoy it and deliver it well, so that the wedding dinner is enjoyed and remembered (for good reasons) by all.

If your fear of failure has been holding you back from starting out on a major project, now you can undertake it – and enjoy when it comes to fruition.

Denying your fear a visa

When you feel that your fear or phobia is so well managed that you’ve pretty much eradicated it, you may want to use the following exercise and the one in the subsequent section to build a block in your mind against it ever returning.

Imagine that all ideas and thoughts can only get into your mind if you let them. Your positive thoughts are like the US and the UK and you have a reciprocal agreement whereby an advance visa isn’t required for citizens of each country to travel to the other. But fears and phobias are from a non-friendly country and they absolutely require a visa before you let them in.

Yes, the exercise seems far-fetched, but the unconscious mind loves weird and wonderful stuff and takes notice of these kinds of ideas because they’re so out of the ordinary. That’s why I like to include highly creative exercises now and then; your unconscious mind appreciates and makes use of them.

Maintaining a border patrol

The preceding section helps you set up a ‘legal’ method for banishing fears and phobias. Now you need to stop any of those pesky negative thoughts from sneaking into your mind ‘illegally’.

Visualize that your unconscious mind is like a big brain-shaped island, surrounded by the sea, and with border patrols and guards spaced out at frequent intervals around the island. Now imagine any fears or phobias that try to swim ashore or pull up in boats are taken or towed away by the coastguard back to their own islands far, far away. In your mind’s eye understand that you have the most effective border agency that’s ever existed, and not a single problem thought can ever get through.

Testing Your Cure

When you feel that you’ve carried out all the necessary preparatory visualization work on tackling your fear or phobia (as I describe in the preceding sections), you can start mentally practising dealing with it.

This section uses the example of someone who’s afraid of lifts. But whatever your issue, adapt the situation as necessary and use the following exercise as an illustration of how to encounter your banished problem in visualization form, so that you can later do so in real life:

1. Imagine that you’re with a friend you know and trust, and you’re both about to enter a skyscraper where you need to get to the top floor.

Stand outside the building with your supportive friend and take a couple of deep breaths.

2. Touch your four positivity points in turn (see the earlier section ‘Creating positivity points’).

Each time, feel the sensations of calmness, control, creativity, and comedy well up as you do so. Know that you can instantly bring any of them to the forefront of your mind whenever you touch its positivity point.

3. Enter the building and, as the pair of you head towards the lifts, call up your anxiety meter (which I describe in the earlier section ‘Using the Anxiety Meter’).

Note where the needle is pointing. While you try to feel calm and unstressed (and use your positivity points), visualize pushing the needle leftwards as far as you can. Wait until the needle is out of the red zone.

4. Press the button in front of you to call the lift, and when the doors open quickly enter with your friend and press the top-floor button.

Keep calm and continue to use your positivity points as necessary. As the lift starts to move you can chat with your friend if you like, or be silent. Your friend knows your problem and is simply there to support you. Feel how the lift moves swiftly and steadily and how it doesn’t bother you, and notice how your anxiety meter is to the left, way out of the red zone. All the time continue to think calm and happy thoughts and use your positivity points whenever you need to.

5. Allow your friend to get off when you get to the top floor, but remain inside yourself, press the street-level button, and travel down.

Notice how the journey’s even easier than with your friend beside you because you’re travelling in an lift for the second time in a few minutes, and your anxiety meter has moved farther to the left of the dial.

6. Wait for your friend to follow you down when you get to the bottom, and imagine how your friend feels in there.

The answer is: he feels absolutely nothing. No phobia. No fear. Just like you. Notice that your anxiety meter’s needle is floating all the way over to the left.

By imagining a friend, you have somebody you can turn to if you feel too anxious. But friend or not, you’re now ready to beat whatever your phobia is in real life, and you need to perform the visualization exercise for real.

You may not even need a friend with you, having visualized one so successfully, but if you have a willing friend, by all means take him too.