Fear plays a crucial role in alerting us to situations where self-care is necessary. Notifying you of a possible threat, it blocks love when you don’t distinguish between real and imagined threats or between past and present experiences and are unsure of what to expect from yourself from one day to the next.
We humans treat fear as the singularly most important or existing emotion. It’s as if the others don’t count. In reality, fear is on equal footing with all other emotions.
By consistently prioritising fear, we inadvertently build habits and responses that centre it. These habits effectively become a set of personal rules, titled ‘The Rules For [Your Name] Not Getting Hurt’, aimed at self-preservation. You’ve designed your faux rules, which always have shoulds and musts in them, to protect you from a bigger future pain. However, as you’ve based them on judging you on a past version of yourself and they prompt unproductive or unhealthy responses to fear, you are in more pain from being afraid than you are from actual outcomes. Plus, despite your efforts, the fear remains.
Living with excessive fear is like standing on the seashore with your feet in the water but acting like you’re in the middle of the sea. Recognising this disparity is a crucial step towards reclaiming yourself and experiencing love, care, trust and respect.
I’ve been running Baggage Reclaim since September 2005, and I’ve spent many thousands of hours writing this labour of love. The site has been ad-free the entire time, and it costs hundreds of pounds a month to run it on my own. If what I share here has helped you and you’re in a position to do so, I would love if you could make a donation. Your support is so very much appreciated! Thank you.
Copyright Natalie Lue 2005-2024, All rights reserved. Written and express permission along with credit is needed to reproduce and distribute excerpts or entire pieces of my work.
Manage Cookie Consent
To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behaviour or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
Functional
Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes.The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.