Fear has a strange effect on people.
As we all very well know, fear stems from our sense of separation, a sense of loneliness, desertedness or godlessness. We feel utterly vulnerably in an unpredictable and cruel world that only there to destroy us. Nobody is without fear, we just name our fears differently and manage them individually.
There are so many various ways that I won’t even attempt to name them. When we become aware of ourselves beyond our daily thoughts, feeling and our bodies and start seeing a fragment of the greater picture, we can start pinpointing the structure in which our ‘fear management’ spreads out.
In my family ‘fear management’ ran under two exciting disguises: ‘lunacy’ and ‘addiction’. Becoming senseless caused by mental disturbance or substance abuse or both, allowed us to take ourselves completely out of the present moment that obviously looked unmanageable.
We all have an individualized version of lunacy and substance abuse. My father is an alcoholic, my brother is a game addict. My mother seems the most ‘healthy’ of us all by slowly developing dimension.
I have become a control freak, addicted to dangerous and hardly survivable situations that can only be solved by a high level of intelligence and adaptiveness that I strive on. I cannot stand still. I am incapable of the lowest level of commitment that hints an element of control that maybe imposed on me.
Controlled by love. That is how I have felt all my life. It was always implied that all terror I had to suffer was for my own betterment and came from a sense of love for me.
I grew up with immense amount of abuse in the form of having my power taken away. I was in some kind of detention all the time without a capable parent sticking up for me. Life demonstrated day after day how helpless I actually was and I had no say in it at all.
As a teen, I connately contemplated suicide so to regain at least some control over my life. That was the worst of times because by then I had become a solid rock, unbeatable, uncontrollable; an anger ball.
So, in my competent lunacy, the key behaviour is that of my mother’s. When I was younger, I wholly believed that my father’s alcoholism and emotional brutality was the key to my and my sibling’s developmental defects. However, recently, I have realized that in my case – and probable that of my brother’s – my mum is the ‘bad apple’. All her life she has displayed a strong sense of helplessness and victimhood. Apparently, she has lived a life of a victim suffering our father’s mental instability and substance abuse.
And so, now I see how much I perceive my life as a series of odd occurrences that require me to constantly fight for my very existence and at the same time helplessly flounder in it.
Though I have displayed powerfulness and competence all my adult life, deep inside of me, I have never thought much of myself. I learnt early on, that I have no say in things that matter in my life so I have spent most of my life proving to be powerful and capable, not noticing that, all along, the story was a product of my imagination.
In my loony story, the little fearful girl needing to be cared for inside of me made me force myself appearing all powerful and intimidating.
