A Child’s View Of Courage w/o Fear
How A Child’s Fears Grow With Us Into Adulthood
As an intuitive counselor, life coach, emotional addiction counselor and holistic therapist, I have seen over and over again how we as counselors use our psychic and metaphysical gifts to not only foresee the ever-changing future choices but also to help adults understand their seemingly unfounded fears and heal the inner child within. I have done three times more therapy counseling in psychic readings than in my therapy practice to say the least. Sometimes through that counsel, we are blessed with healing ourselves also. Along with my book Soul Windows, Secrets From The Divine available on Amazon.com, I have also written children’s stories. I tell these little stories to my clients to help them to understand how something perceived by their buried child’s memories and emotions becomes an insurmountable fear obstacle as an adult. How fear grows in perception from the inner child who has been wounded between the ages of two and six to an adult’s dysfunctional behavior is a relatively simple and a clean approach by the ego to stay in control and not allow soul growth. We will reach deep within as a child a take our finest attributes and turn them into survival skills to keep from placing blame on parents who are the only behavioral guides we have at the moment. For an example, if you were a child who is gentle of nature then you would become the consummate nurturer to others in the belief that in gratitude, they will nurture you as you are incapable in doing it for yourself for no one taught you how. If you were a fearless and adventuresome child, you would become reckless with your life and heart and others, figuring that somehow you would be able to bluster your way out and no one would see how truly frightened you are in life. Below is a simple story from the inner child’s perspective I have found very effective to get my clients to understand how a child’s fear in the belief of being unloved, unwanted, less than and wrong grows to monumental proportions in an adult’s psyche.
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The Fierce Chihuahua
Imagine if you were two or three years old and never ventured out of your parent’s yard by yourself. You have stepped out all alone and are on the sidewalk for the first time without them. Standing on the sidewalk all by yourself feeling very brave but what comes charging up to you is a fierce little Chihuahua, barking and growling. You know how aggressive and fierce those little Chihuahua’s can sometimes be. They are very barky, charging after you sounding like they’re going to take your leg off. To a frightened two-year-old this Chihuahua is a horrible beast that could eat them alive. Now the little child is scared and looking for her parents to protect her. But they are nowhere to be found because she has chosen to venture off on her own. She believes she has been abandoned by the very people she thought would always be there for her. So the child does what comes naturally to all children who are in fear. She begins running for her life with this fierce little Chihuahua on her heels. Being convinced that if she stops running from what she is afraid of, this little dog will end her life. Now begins the fearful journey that escalates in one’s life. The child is running from the barking and growling Chihuahua, unable to stop and deal with her fear because she believes there is no one to help her. As we grow older, our survival tools become more sophisticated and wiser as we continue running for our lives. We believe that one small dog has now turned into a very fierce and formidable Doberman. We are too afraid to stop and turn around to face what we run from because all our instincts tell us the very thing we are running from will consume us. We just know that small dog is now big enough to eat an adult and has somehow turned into an even more fierce, growling and snarling Hell Hound.
So you run and run and run and run from that buried truth. Finally you get to the point in your life where you cannot run any longer. Judging by how you feel, being so exhausted and so wounded, you absolutely know the Hounds of Hell are now steadily on your heels. You have run and run and run and now you just can’t run anymore. We are adults but still feel like that frightened little child inside and cannot even remember exactly why. You have come to the place that you cannot go on any longer in fear, and you are willing and ready to stop and turn to face whatever you have been running from in your life. As you turn expecting to find these fierce red eyed Hounds of Hell ready to consume you, you see a small barking Chihuahua going yip, yip yip instead. This is what I call the “DUH” epiphany moment. You realize that you have been running from something that could have been managed, if it had just had the light of truth shown on it and to feel worthy enough to believe that someone cares enough to help you.
The venturing off of the child on her own is the very real symbolism of being born into life and leaving the spiritual Oneness. We now carry that Oneness of being part of the God Spark within. If the child had emotionally supportive parents, the child is reassured that she is not alone in the world. This is how emotional abandonment turns into fear and how a small child perceives it as a life or death situation. Because her parents have not come to rescue her, emotionally or physically, she will take on that responsibility she has been abandoned by them. She will then come to the conclusion that she must be responsible for their behavior because she must be unlovable as she has seen no indications otherwise. That becomes the dark secret we hide and run from the rest of our lives. If we do not find the courage to question that child’s instincts, we will continue feeling that a dark secret is buried inside of us, being so bad, so imperfect and so unwanted that we are truly unlovable. Our inner child believes if we acknowledge that truth, it would expose us to the same horrible hurt we felt when we were children. It is what keeps us covering up, denying, and running away from the woundedness.
As we have grow older and wiser, the memory and pain of those hurts take on a feeling all of their own. We may not remember what the hurt was but our body remembers the feeling of the fear associated with abandonment and of being unloved. We will try everything that we know how in our survival instincts to run from those growling dogs until we are physically exhausted, bruised and have reached the end of the line emotionally. We come to that point in life where we stop and know this is it! You know you cannot go on living like this anymore. You raise your hands in pleading exasperation and righteous anger. You are now ready to surrender to something that is beyond you, a Higher Power as there is no other place left to hide or manipulation to try. As in the first step of the 12 Step Program, you have done everything humanly possible to correct the problem or you have sunk to the depths of your humanity and have nowhere to go but up. You finally figure out this can only be addressed by taking the chance of asking God, Buddha, Allah or whomever higher power you believe in to save you from this fearful life of running from the Hell Hounds of being unlovable. Sometimes you just beg for death. If you have to go on feeling so empty and so afraid, death would be a better alternative. That is usually when a supportive disease can appear in your life.
Then something happens. You begin to feel if you faced what you fear, there might be something there to support you. You stop and take a deep breath and look into the deep dark secret fear that maybe you are so unlovable that even God does not want you. When you realize that you are facing what other people gave you as truth and look within to a three-year-old little child’s fears, you see the smallness they gave you. This created the child’s perspective of allowing someone else’s inability to nurture you become a terrifying baggage for the adult. This all begins with a child’s small moment of feeling unloved, alone and unwanted. If that moment is repeated again and again we take that small moment and have the ability to build it into something so fearful that we know we will die if we look within to really see it. We can spend a lifetime calling out for parents to save us from that fierce Chihuahua, the fear of deserving of being abandoned and unlovable. Only through our connection and belief that we are divinely and unconditionally loved and supported by the co-creation of the God Spark within us, do we then have the courage to accept how truly magnificent we are as human being.
‘Courage Sans Peur’ (Courage w/o Fear)
To Contact Susan Z Rich:
Website: www.szrwhitewings.com
Email: szrich@aol.com
407–862–6902
If you are also interested in learning more about Soul Windows life cycles and how it effects our experiences and choices and help in understanding how to handle the emotions that come with them, you can also look up my published book called Soul Windows….Secrets From The Divine by Susan Z Rich. It may help you to see things from a different perspective.
