A river of emotions ; more reflections on fear

Emotions run like water when they are flowing, at least sadness and that profound opening to ‘truth’ does.. I have a v log to post soon. I was in a bit of a flood before doing it, there seems to be a lot opening with the reading I am doing on fear and seeing how trying to deny SO MANY OF MY FEARS made living and other emotions painful, difficult and confusing…Add to this the fact that sometimes anger can be a reaction that comes not only when we are thwarted but also when we feel a fear we cannot name and feel too scared to express.. Just getting a handle on our fears is good psychological work.

One of the most prevalent fears I suffered from was : THE FEAR OF BEING MY TRUE SELF who I came to believe was not ‘good enough’.. too talk, too emotional, mostly just too full of a life that had to be cut down by an angry witch energy in childhood and we all know losing your way to life energy leads to depression and a vast unnameable sadness as well.

In the chapter on fear I am still working my way through in Miriam Greenspan’s book she is speaking about the Roald Dahl story where witches threaten to turn children into rats. When the story was being read in her daughter’s class it scared one of the children and their parent complained that the story was not appropriate for children.. However some children were not scared by it… The telling of this incident brought to mind the story of Alex in a book by therapist Deborah Campbell, at a very young age Alex was exposed to a lot of scary stories and movies by his Dad and in time developed acute anxiety… Deborah helped him to understand the complex roots of his fear which lay back in the past and due to the fact the father actually carried a lot of buried emotions too that he could not know or confront and so these were passed on to Alex.

As I child I remember being scared by Mum and by the Nuns. I had to tighten my body and stop breathing and this is how I wake up most nights and its taking work to get through it… I have been working with what got buried deep into my body for so long and its something therapist Marion Woodman addresses in many of her books on helping those with eating disorders and other addictions recover.

Just this morning I could feel the ancestral ‘fear urgency charge’ as separate to my consciousness in a way it has never been before.. Jasper ran out as I got out the vacuum to do some cleaning and that used to be a big trigger for me as a child because with OCD Mum was almost violent in her use of the vacuum when in one of her cleaning frenzies…so I relate to Jasper being scared. Sometimes in our house it felt like the cleaning took up all the space around and while it was going on there WAS NO SPACE TO BREATHE.

The trigger for being emotional today too was a chat with my sister who is off to see this plastic surgeon about her breast surgery post cancer surgery..I share about it in the V log I will post for today… I feel a bit of fear for her, I feel responsible to want to support but its not really my job at this point… I went with Mum to Sydney to see her surgeon and then took on the trauma of the surgery going wrong. A lot of stress could have been saved had I had better boundaries even thought the stress of not being there for her at that time may have been enormous.

Recognising that feelings pass through us is important though if we let them. In her book Untamed Glennon Doyle shares about how she learned in time she could survive her emotions if she allowed her self to have them and to feel them instead of denying or reacting. Reacting out of fear often does not end well, as an emotionally mature adult there needs to be some degree of capacity to ‘hold’ while we recognise what is going on underneath.. Will that reaction help and are we playing the role of a victim due to past things that stay unresolved?

Even holding space for a triggered person can be a help since we have mirror neurons and freaking out when they freak out via emotional contagion makes things far far worse.

Yesterday I held space when my sister was anxious about going on a date with someone she really likes.. I just said “I understand you feel anxious and I don’t have any advice but you are going to be okay.” And I spoke to her today and everything went well.. So it is true : sometimes Fear is just false evidence appearing real, but that doesn’t make the fear meaningless if we have been abandoned a lot in the past… fear is there for a reason.. denying it does nothing, learning to feel it and work it makes all the difference in the world….

Anyway I was glad to have the flood of emotions after talking to my sister today and recognise my fear of her being hurt or of losing her.. I felt the vulnerability then of just being human and desiring to be connected which was so often thwarted in my life due to HUGE fears of rejection. Maybe its an insight for the Cancer eclipse. I can hold the fear, I do not have to let it take me over entirely.