Overcome the Greatest Human Fear – Be the True You

I was listening to an interview with Amy Scher this week, author of How to Heal Yourself When No One Else Can, and while her experiences and conclusions were so familiar to me she reframed them in a way that I hadn’t considered before.

In talking about her experiences in healing herself from an autoimmune disease, which she was unable to do until she started looking beyond the physical landscape at her inner world, she said “I sometimes feel like there’s missing piece we’re not talking about, which is the greatest fear that we have is the fear of being who we really are.”

Interestingly, as I am finishing off a dive into the world of narcissistic traits, a description Wendy Behary gave as representative of a childhood in Disarming the Narcissist also caught my attention:

“The most popular proposal for the typical origins of narcissism is that the child grew up feeling conditionally loved, meaning that love was based upon performance.

This could come about through a number of scenarios. One might be where the child was criticised by one parent, who made them feel that whatever they did was not really good enough, whereas the other parent may then have doted on, overprotected or used them as a surrogate spouse.

The end result is a child not loved for who he or she was, not guided nor encouraged in the discovery of their true inclinations, never held in the arms of a caregiver who would make them feel completely safe and unquestionable cherished.”

Whether narcissistic traits or people pleasing ones like those I developed, I suspect they all come from conditional love in childhood.

Over the years, with deliberate inquiry, I’ve started to make the links and connections back to those childhood perceptions I had about the need to defend my position, the need to be perfect, the guilt and blame I felt when things went wrong.

Being triggered is a regular occurrence for me. I still take far too much upon my shoulders.

There are times when I find myself longing for acceptance, validation, recognition of who I am, what I need, feel and achieve. There is a longing for support and connection, a need to feel safe to be vulnerable.

All of that is grounded in fear, a fear of putting the real me, the one who was berated as a child, out there to get hurt.

When I watched a SuperSoul Session with Oprah and Gary Zukov a couple of years ago, he made a statement that has stayed with me “Authentic power is the ability to distinguish within you the difference between love and fear, and choose love no matter what it happening inside of you or outside of you.”

This has helped me realise that in order to fully express who I am there is a need to be vulnerable. I have to take responsibility for who I am being, how I am limiting myself and what I am receiving in this world, because I am not a helpless child anymore, I am an adult who can make different choices.

As Amy Scher described when asked how she responds to people who bristle at the idea that our thoughts, beliefs and emotions affect our physical landscape:

“I had doctors who asked Are you under stress? And I was even mad at them for that. There was nothing worse for me than something being my fault. In fact I spent so much of my life not wanting anything to be my fault that one day I just decided to play devil’s advocate and thought What if it is my fault? What if I did unconsciously in some way play some part in the manifestation of my illness?”

And the conclusion it led her to, I think, is really powerful:

“What does that say about me except I’m human? And when I surrendered to the idea that in some shape or form I could have contributed to where I was, I stopped resisting and bristling against the thing that could help me.

I discovered that some of the patterns in my life were crushing my spirit, and when a spirit is crushed it has an effect on the physical body. And interestingly, some of those patterns come back to the fear of it being my fault. I was a people pleaser, I didn’t like anyone to be upset and I was a perfectionist. I had completely irrational expectations of myself.”

What she goes on to say, I have profoundly felt the truth of in my own life too:

“I lived in deep fear of being who I really was. So I had started to contract myself and by contracting who I am, I contracted my body, my energy systems and my emotions.”

I didn’t think of it as being in fear of being me, I just saw it as being a good person, the good girl, the good member of society I’d been taught to be. I had learned to feel comfortable in the discomfort of that skin, never really looking at those parts of me that I’d disowned or suppressed.

When I look back at, say, the panic attacks I had in my early twenties, I can relate to this idea of bristling when a doctor asks about stress. I took pride in being strong and resilient. But if I am honest, I can see in retrospect that I was not in a good place, I’d been through a painful breakup, and I believed I was unworthy of the kind of love I longed for.

With the benefit of hindsight, as scary as it to be vulnerable, I can definitely attest it’s far better than a life half lived, always hiding what I’d really rather say, do or be – even from myself at times. That is why I decided on the journey to me, to take each of these things that show up as less than desirable in my life, or that really trigger me, and to take the time to make the connections with the ways in which old thought patterns might still be at play.

Once I identify the patterns, bringing them into the light of conscious awareness, I work on them in many ways, shapes and forms as I talk about in Want More Energy, Clarity and Time?

What about you? What was it like growing up in your home? What were the expectations and values? What was it you had to work hard to maintain? In what ways have some of those things possibly shown up in your life to your detriment? How did you promise to yourself you’d be different if you have kids? Is it time to overcome your greatest fear and embrace who you truly are?

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy When the Thing That Binds You is the Road to Freedom , Risk Your Friendships More in Order to Be Fully Loved, What Support Are You Blocking Yourself From Receiving? and What I Love About Being With Narcissistic People. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.