Hello fear

I am trying to feel my fear and understand it.  I am aware that I experience much fear due to not feeling very safe as a young one. I was impacted by early losses and death that the entire family went through, but we didn’t talk about them, the emptiness or hole left was a kind of primal soup I swam in and it can take me back under some days now as over years further losses have added to that pool.

My mind has negative messages or forecasts of doom surrounding it…I am learning I need to act to connect and reach through this soup or sea even though I can feel fear of being rejected hurt or left alone with it all again.  I am not a child anymore but an adult but at times that adult carries fear and holds within her a childlike state of being and feeling I need to honour and listen to.  From this place I empathise deeply with what is beneath the words others are saying that cover their own pain and loss and I am becoming aware when their fear of their own vulnerability causes a deflective barrier or projects the painful feelings out in an effort at control and power in a situation where feeling truly vulnerable feels too yhreatening or difficult.

I am aware too that at times I dismiss or cut off my longing to connect due to pain of the past.  I am mid way through a wonderful book on acknowledging and healing pain left from past relationships called Beyond Boundaries.  The auther John Townsend who is also a therapist devotes chapters to the necessary work of greiving met and unmet needs in relationship, needs we deny or reject or gloss over at our peril.

He acnowledges how necessay it is that we feel the pain of loosing good things even in bad relationships for if we deny what felt good and what we needed that got thwarted we block our healing and learning what we need to be truly connected. And it appears to me that fear or past pain unacknowledged which we bury can trip us up in the present and block us for reaching for the love we wish to share with others who are differnt to those who caused us pain in the past.

On the past two morning while feeling all my fear and vulnerability I have moved out of my normal retreat to engage with two new groups.   I broke down in tears at both and was embraced and welcomed which felt so wonderful.  I said hello to my fear, let me take you by the hand, you have a lot of power and its power I need to move forward.  No harm befell me despite inner negative monologues of disaster my mind was running.  Phew.

On Saturday I listened to a powerful talk by Matt Kahn on acknowledging shadow feelings, fear, anger, judgement.  His idea is we welcome these into the light of our consciousness so we can know them, we can acknowledge their power, for if we deny or resist them we resist the learning they carry for us.  I now know for years I have denied the depth and power of my fear, today I can say hello fear I see you and act anyway.