Fear is an emotion as valid and necessary as any other. It allows us to anticipate and survive dangerous situations in our lives. In addition, being adaptive, it helps us maintain the level of alertness required to be able to take, at any time, the optimal precautions to protect ourselves. The problem arises when fear becomes a constant emotion that dominates our day to day.
Why are we afraid?
This kind of emotional difficulty usually appears in childhood when a child has to face, in solitude, repeated dangerous situations. Without feeling protected or accompanied, the fear that he experiences begins to grow and take over his life. From being a fleeting emotion, which you should only feel when necessary, fear ends up becoming predominant in his life.
Unfortunately, many children experience mistreatment or abuse on a daily basis.
Not receiving the protection of the adults who should, they feel alone in life. Without any support or help, these little ones, whose emotional tools are still very scarce, look for a way to adapt to this hostile world.
Since, in their lives, danger can appear at any moment, They get used to staying in a constant state of alert, in constant fear. Fear becomes their only survival strategy.
Why does fear reappear in adulthood?
Sometimes, as adults, several decades can go by without fear becoming a problem for these people again. However, it often happens that, one day, any experience, ends up awakening in them the same feeling of helplessness and danger that they lived when they were little. At this moment, the fear is reactivated and reappears with all its intensity.
This was precisely what happened to Claudia, a woman who came to my office in the midst of a deep personal crisis. After 14 years of marriage and three children together, overnight, her husband left her to go off with an old lover, leaving her completely helpless and having to take care of the children by herself.
Apart from working on the grief for the relationship to empower yourself and move on, you also we had to work on a fear that Claudia believed had disappeared, but that he had returned to harass her at night.
Find the source of fear with therapy
During a period of his childhood, a cousin of his father was living in his house. During the day, coexistence was normal and, even, the type was excessively friendly, but at nightfall, the nightmare began for Claudia. Taking advantage of the darkness and silence, this relative entered her room and abused her. After doing so, he intimidated and threatened her.
The situation was repeated many times during the months that the abuser was living at home. Claudia was terrified. however, knowing that no one would believe or defend her, the girl was never able to speak or ask for help.
The relationship with his parents was not good. She had never felt cared for or protected by them, so she found herself completely helpless in the face of the danger of the abuser who, at will, entered her room at night.
This feeling of nocturnal helplessness was what, precisely, unearthed his fears of the past. Seeing herself alone and responsible for taking care of her children, the fear that someone might enter the house made her spend sleepless nights, alert in case she heard any suspicious noise.
Worrying about closing the door when night falls is totally normal, but Claudia’s excessive fear made her obsessed and check, over and over again, if she had closed the door and windows. This, almost compulsion, it was his way of creating a safe place to spend the night, just what the adults of her past never did with her.
As we can see, Claudia’s helplessness reactivated her childhood fears in an exaggerated way.
How to heal that emotion
When fear stops being healthy, The solution is to get rid of the imposed, added and unnecessary fear, to stay with the healthy and adaptive fear that helps to be cautious in truly necessary moments.
In Claudia’s case, in order to balance this fear and keep it at a normal level, which would serve to protect her from possible dangers, but which would allow her to sleep at night, we had to work, in parallel, with their past and with their present.
On the one hand, it was essential understand the situation of the past and assess, from the girl’s side, that the adults (her parents) should have been more attentive, protecting her from possible dangers. They were the real ones responsible for her care, not her.
On the other hand, as an adult, Claudia had to understand that, he could take charge of his own care, without carrying the exaggerated fear of the past that kept him in a continuous state of alert.