Fear is Always the Enemy
If fear had no part in your life on any level, what would your life look like? Would be finally start that business you’ve always wanted to start? Would you tell someone that you love them? Would you leave a relationship? Move to a different country? Be more sociable? Be less sociable? Let down your ‘everything is ok mask’ and finally reach out for help? Show another that you care?
Fear can be very insidious and it can hide in every nook and cranny, effecting us not only on levels we are conscious off, such as many of the examples above, but also on levels where we have little awareness that fear is indeed playing a part – for example, in the natural and simple expression of everyday love.
As physical beings we have natural built in fears that are designed to protect our physical body from danger – fire, predatory animals etc. These fears are designed to take us out of harm’s way and their function is beneficial.
We also have mechanisms in place that are designed to protect aspects of our psyche from trauma or perceived threat. Trauma is very often understood by many to be a specific single event such as an accident, an act of violence, serious illness or a world event over which we have little or no control, such as war. However, much of the trauma we experience takes places at a very young age and very often in the pre-verbal stage of early childhood development or in the years running up to very early puberty.
The trauma experienced by us as a young child can start with the process of our birth, absent mother or caregiver, over disciplining or controlling father or mother, critical parent, strict parenting or a parent who is not available to respond to a child’s calls for help. In years gone by many mothers were admonished by doctors or simply ignore their baby’s cries for food and were told to feed infants every four hours – this is also trauma.
As we experience repeated, or drip fed trauma, we slowly begin to hide the most precious parts of ourselves away. The parts of us that express our creativity, our joie de vivre, love, humour, magnificence, life force and exuberance all slowly become dimmed. In compensation to all of this, we in turn construct masks and defences designed not only to keep us safe from scrutiny or attack, but also to help us simply fit into our environment. We very often do such a convincing job with creating our mask and defence that we end up identifying with it and believing that the mask is now the real us – therefore, therapeutic process or any kind of self enquiry can become fearful as that which we have constructed risks deconstruction.
So why do we often fear therapeutic process? Simply put, we are often very motivated in not wanting to feel the wounds we have hiding behind our masks and defences. This is where fear starts to work against us. We are in a position of knowing that the masks and defences are no longer serving and fruitful purpose and at the same time, we are afraid of their deconstruction as we fear that delving into the wound that keeps them in place may in some way injure us. Essentially, everything is energy and our wound is simply a place of stagnant and stuck energy.
As we step into it under the guidance of loving support, energy begins to flow once more and we can start to re-claim all the qualities we have not dared to express – love, exuberance, joie de vivre, gentleness, affection etc.
Courage only exists in the presence of fear. The best advice we can give ourselves is ‘feel the fear and do it anyway’.
I look forward to working with you soon,
Shavasti