Matt's Audio Letter of the Week

Hey everyone, welcome to this edition of the FBL, the Feel Better Letter.

This is Matt.

Today, I wanted to talk about fear, illusion, and delusion.

To quickly define the terms:

An illusion is essentially a misperception — you see something, and later realize you weren’t seeing it correctly.

A delusion is a fixed belief that’s incorrect or not aligned with reality, even when there’s evidence to the contrary.

When it comes to fear — and someone in one of the groups found this really helpful, so I wanted to share it here — fear is an illusion. Or more accurately, fear is a field that creates an illusion through projection.

When you’re in a neutral place, you see the world through a neutral lens. It’s like looking through a clean piece of glass. There may be some blemishes from your own perspective, but overall the lens is unfiltered.

As you drop into different emotional states — especially lower emotions like guilt, shame, anger, fear, or pride — the lens you view life through changes. Fear begins to project outward onto things, and it creates the illusion that those things are the cause of the fear.

But the fear is actually within you. You're projecting it outward.

That’s the first illusion.

The more you feed an illusion, the deeper you go down the rabbit hole. And the deeper you go, the more you drift into delusion, where you become increasingly out of touch with what’s really happening. Because at the core, all that’s actually happening is that you’re experiencing fear. The mind projects it outward, and the more you feed that projection, the bigger the loop grows. As the loop grows, you move further away from what’s real and more into the delusion of what your mind is saying.

This is how the DSM categorizes levels of insight.

• With high insight, a person knows they’re experiencing fear and intrusive thoughts.

• With low insight, they start believing the feared content might actually be true.

• With absent insight, they’re convinced the mind’s story is reality.

The further you move into delusion from fear, the harder it becomes to get out — just like sinking deeper into a swamp. The lack of insight itself keeps you stuck.

One of the great traps of fear is that it promises protection while actually keeping you enslaved and leading you toward destruction.

And one of the greatest challenges is that people try to navigate the road to recovery through the lens of fear — which can only lead you back to more fear. They make decisions from fear in an attempt to overcome fear, and it only pulls them in deeper.

The lower the insight into what is actually happening, the harder it is to recognize what’s going on.

This is why it is so important not to get into the mind in the first place, as I always say. And why it’s so important to have people around you who aren’t in the loop — people you can draw from on your recovery path. Because when you’re seeing an illusion, or worse, when you’re in a state of delusion where you believe something is happening that isn’t, you can’t trust your mind to lead the way. The distortion is too strong.

I wanted to explain this objectively today because the more clearly you grasp what I’m saying, the more you understand the importance of not feeding the illusion. All the rumination, analyzing, checking — anything that validates the illusion — will make it grow. It will grow, and grow, and grow, until eventually it won’t even appear to be an illusion anymore. It will feel all-consuming.

The way out is not managing, mitigating, or fighting with the thought. It’s getting out of the illusion entirely. It’s bypassing the projection altogether.

Hope this is helpful. If you know someone who might benefit from this, feel free to share it with them.

Wishing you all a great day and a great week.