Fearing fear

Being afraid of fear can be really incapacitating. The capacity to handle any difficult emotion starts when we’re babies. If we’re soothed when we cry and get lots of hugs, kisses and are held close as much as possible, our capacity to feel all of our emotions, without being overwhelmed, grows along with us. Our container or window of tolerance grows, or doesn’t grow, in proportion to the amount of support and love we receive, or don’t receive, throughout our life.

What happens when our caregivers can’t help us build a container within our self, is that we’ll create one for ourselves as best we can. We’ll try and contain any chaos in our environment and ourselves so as not to feel like life is falling down around us. We’ll stuff emotions down into our too small containers so we don’t upset others.

Fear, like all emotions, has its unique sensations in the body. When these sensations feel awful, we have the ability to push them away, for a while, this blocks the energy of that emotion flowing through our bodies and this is where problems start. We’re not talking about pushing emotions away once or twice, we’re talking about dissociating becoming a life time habit and coping strategy.

We all have a tipping point, when our containers become full, they start overflowing. This is when we notice symptoms like depression, anxiety, chronic fatigue syndrome, irritable bowel syndrome, unexplained infertility along with many other chronic issues which always have an emotional contributor or cause. Building our capacity or window of tolerance in order to be able to feel painful and difficult emotions cannot be overstated. It is a life changer.