I find fear to be a fascinating, tricky little bitch.
And I say that with respect to the role that fear plays in our lives. If life is a spectrum of emotions, all somewhere between love and fear, how often do you lean toward fear and how often do you lean toward radical love?
How often are you choosing one or the other, versus operating on a default?
I think if most people are honest, fear is the common default.
The fear of not having money causes people to slave away their waking hours to someone else’s cause.
The fear of not having love causes people to spend endless hours on dating sites or pining for that love that might one day grace their lives.
It’s wild, how much time and energy fear takes from you.
Recently, I learned more information about my upbringing that revealed some really grotesque truths to me. I grew up in a family with deep secrets that most everyone in the family still avoids or denies knowing. But in an effort to bring the truth to light, and to liberate my psyche from habitual trauma responses, I go digging for the truth where most would prefer to avoid it.
And even when I discover a truth that is fascinatingly fucked up, at this point, I’m actually grateful for it. Why? Because it helps me to feel less fear.
Did you ever notice how fear has a tendency to become pervasive? It’s nebulous. It sneaks into places you didn’t expect it to be. If one good thing happens for you, you might find yourself wondering when the other shoe is going to drop. This is fear, just lingering around you while you let it.
The purpose of fear is so that you have less power and autonomy – words that could be used to describe what I call Sovereignty. The purpose of fear is so that you spend your time worrying or giving your power to something other than your true purpose, distracting you from your own clarity.
Fear, truly, is not working for you. It’s working against you, unless you notice it and redirect your actions accordingly. Fear will cause you to live on an adrenal-response autopilot called fight/flight. It will hijack your nervous system and therefore your attention. All of these things are taking your life force and, again, stopping you from being who you came to be.
After finding out about another layer of horrific family secrecy that was used to control me as a child – with effects lasting in my subconscious well into adulthood – I was watching the mechanisms that had been put into play long ago. I was, to be clear, not in a fight/flight response about what I’d found out, but rather, I was observing it neutrally so that I could study the response patterns in my thoughts and body.
I became the watchful observer, to witness the cause/effect, and to change my behaviors accordingly. To get more power and sovereignty back.
What I found was that I was actually living, to some degree, from a fear-based energy due to a trauma response from long ago. I couldn’t see it before now, and then, by shining the light of day onto it, the patterns became clear.
And then it became relatively simple to see what to “do” about it.
First of all, don’t react. Don’t give the fear more fear.
Second, don’t turn away. See it, look at it, stare it down. Fear lives in the dark, so shine the light. (Light-shining podcast forthcoming.)
These two things together, simple in concept only when the nervous system has the capacity not to engage in the fear trigger, can neutralize a fear.
The purpose of fear is, honestly, to control you. Fear lives off of your energy while you spin in circles trying to outrun it. Fear that is the result of a trauma keeps you in a loop of victimhood, wherein your energy is perpetually wasted.
To get sovereign, we have to look at our fear patterns. We could say, I suppose, if we look at it as if everything is happening for us rather than against us, that a purpose of fear is to direct you to your sovereignty.
What are you afraid of?
Where are your fears running your behavior?
Where is fight/flight fueling your decision making about how to spend your time, energy, and attention?
Where are you checking out in your life in order to avoid feeling the fight/flight?
If you’re courageous enough to look at these answers, you can get in front of the fear. You can neutralize it. And in that way, the purpose of fear, when you get wise to it, can be to help you stand in the full power and truth of who you are.
Sarah Poet is a polarity integration expert with a knack for seeing the hidden shadows that result from this bizarro separation matrix we inhabit. To book a consultation for individual or couples coaching, or workplace gender reconciliation counseling, please visit www.sarahpoet.com/book.
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