Fear, its meaning, and implications have been on my mind for the last 2 and a half years.
I believe I’ve lived my entire life wearing fear as my armor. It has been “protecting” me since I was a child.
I started my journey back to myself in 2021. For me, part of that looks like uncovering and working through my fears. Truthfully, I thought I had recovered from living my life in fear. Jokes on me… A recent discovery revealed that I was very, very wrong. Unbeknownst to me, I had kept my “armor” close by and adorned it in a moment of perceived need.
As humans, fear is a very real thing. And it’s imperative to our survival. The fear response activates fight, flight, freeze, or fawn, allowing us to survive a predator attack – whatever or whomever – that may be.
But I think that in so many of us, as adults, our fear has become maladaptive. As children, we activated our fear responses to keep us alive. In long-term Trauma situations, those survival tactics continued to be activated because we lived in a constant state of threat. The problem with this is that our fear response doesn’t just turn off when we’re no longer exposed to those threats. As a kid, we ate, slept, and breathed fear. So, as we grew up, we continued to live in those same states of survival, with our fight/flight/freeze/fawn modes fully activated.
We often don’t realize we’ve been living in this state. Until something major in life happens to make us wake up.
For me, my preferred survival mode was freeze. I learned that no emotion was safe, so I shut them all off. And I mean ALL of them. I didn’t feel joy, true happiness, sadness, anger, excitement, sorrow, pain, or awe. I was disassociated from my body. When I look back, it’s like I was going through the motions, but never actually living. I lived in this fear state for a very long time and never realized what was happening. I was perpetually afraid of anything and everything. The hard part is that my freeze response didn’t just affect me, it affected my relationship with everyone around me.
I thought I had overcome my traumas since I wasn’t exposed to the threats. But my body remembered and it still does. With more awareness, I’m beginning to recognize when that fear is activated. In those moments when I’m afraid of something, I find my armor coming back on. It’s as if my body is saying: Oh, I remember THIS. This is exactly like the moment you were punished for using the hair dryer for “too long”. Or that time your step mom gave you a quarter to call your mom in the bar. Or that time you decided to be honest with someone about what was going on, and they didn’t believe you.
It seems that, although my life is no longer in jeopardy, my body responds in the same ways it used to: freeze, put on the armor, and distance myself.
But the times I’m afraid now, are nothing like the ones I went through as a kid. My life is no longer in jeopardy. The instances where this fear roars its lioness roar are when I’m trying to love and be loved deeply. Connect with and know my children and allow them to know me. Build a life I truly want to live. Do the things I really want to do. Allow a friend to see my silly side.
Today, these beautiful and life-giving moments are the ones that activate that childhood fear in me, causing me to distance myself from the other person I so badly want to be seen and known by, effectively, leaving me unseen and unknown.
I’m learning that if I listen to that fear and allow it to take hold, it’ll grow. It’ll get bigger and bigger. Eventually, I won’t even hear its voice in my head. It’ll just consume me, stopping my life from being lived all over again. So I fight to remind myself that it’s okay to be afraid. And that I am safe. That I can trust myself in these new situations.
I’m also learning that my fear response from childhood, doesn’t know ME – the grown-up me – anymore. Just like they don’t know YOU anymore. They don’t know what we want or that we are a million times more equipped to bounce back if that thing doesn’t work out exactly as we planned. That childhood fear doesn’t know that if we love and allow someone to love us deeply, we’ll experience something more blissful than we ever thought possible. It doesn’t know that we can be HAPPY by chasing that dream to open up our business or moving to that town we’ve always dreamt of.
Learning to hear those fears, acknowledging them, and quieting them while you move forward toward what you want is where the magic lies. Learning to sit with your fear, but do it anyway, is where you build trust and change your life little by little.
How has fear impacted your life? Is there something you want to do, right now, that you are afraid of? Start learning to just be aware of that fear, and then decide if it’s fear based upon a true need for safety or a body-memory fear from a need of childhood safety. Sit with that awareness and realize that you are safe. And loved. And that you don’t need to be afraid. Even if it doesn’t work out, or if you “fail” at that thing. Realize that often, our adulthood fears prevent us from living the life we are meant to live and having the relationships we so desperately long for.