Have you been feeling fear recently? How about your child/ren?
Fear has been a familiar face to me; as a Highly Sensitive person, who was separated from my mother for 5 weeks after birth, in a Highly Sensitive and worried lineage, and in a culture and a family that didn’t understand how to help children heal from stressful and frightening events.
I felt scared a lot as a child and teenager; it was that fear, along with huge self-judgment and shame, that led me to study psychology at University and follow the calling I’ve been on ever since then, 30+ years ago.
I’m so grateful that along that path, I have learnt deeply about what fear is and how to help myself and others with it.
For example, even as a Uni student, during my holidays I worked in a psychiatric unit, where I learnt about relaxation techniques, which I taught there.
Feeling terrified to give birth, I learnt all about the fear-tension-pain cycle from training in HypnoBirthing, P.S.H. and Calm Birth. I understood the impact of the fight-flight mechanism was on birth and went on two have two deeply empowering births.
With Aware Parenting, I learnt about how to help babies and children express their feelings and heal from daily stresses as well as larger traumas. I will always remember being at a workshop with Aletha Solter, whose background was human biology prior to psychology, and realising what the freeze mechanism was all about.
I’ve combined my earlier training in Psychosynthesis Psychotherapy, infant development and Field Project Training to develop my own ways of working with fear, which have profoundly transformed my life.
Buteyko breathing has also played a profound impact on my experience of reducing fear.
I’d love to share how I have combined these 30 years of training and experience to understand, and work with, the three causes of fear in adults and children.
These three levels are:
Needs (present-moment body-based needs);
Feelings (showing up from the past to be heard);
Thoughts and information (including about the past and future).
Understanding these three levels of cause can help us help ourselves and our children feel calmer and more relaxed in ways that help us behave in the most optimal ways at times like this.
NEEDS:
On a needs level, fear is both designed to keep us safe, and signals needs for connection, agency and choice.
Fear has an adaptive reason to keep us safe, and our fight/flight/freeze/fawn system is ancient. Our bodies are amazingly quick at being alerted to possible danger before our conscious minds are even aware of it and resource our bodies to either fight or run away.
It does that through activation of stress hormones, which make the heart beat faster and pushes blood to the muscles of the arms and legs, so we can fight or run faster, as well as speeding up our breathing, increasing alertness, creating sharper hearing and sight, all to help us be safe and survive. Blood is diverted away from areas not essential to survival, such as digestion (leading to various sensations in the stomach and bowels), and in the extremities (leading to cold and clammy hands).
Learning about the impact of fear on slowing down the birth process had a profound impact on my experiences of giving birth.
Freeze happens when there isn’t the capacity to fight or flee, and again it’s adaptive – if we appear to be already dead, a predator is unlikely to eat us, in case we are diseased, thus meaning they might let go and we can get away. Freeze also helps us feel less pain if we are going to be eaten. In the freeze response, the respiratory system, heartbeat and all other functions are slowed right down.
The fawn response was first written about by Peter Walker, who said, “A final scenario describes the incipient codependent toddler who largely bypasses the fight, flight and freeze responses and instead learns to fawn her way into the relative safety of becoming helpful… Servitude, ingratiation, and forfeiture of any needs that might inconvenience and ire the parent become the most important survival strategies available.”
As well as to keep us safe, fear can indicate that our needs are not being met in the moment – in particular, our needs for safety, support, connection, closeness, and agency. A child in alone in a new situation may feel scared because she isn’t receiving enough agency and choice around her own timing, or enough emotional support to take this step. When there are new or frightening things happening, it is normal and natural for children to need lots more closeness; they may cling or want to stay close with us all the time.
Just as we are all born with these mechanisms that are designed to keep us safe, we are all born with mechanisms to release the stress hormones that are created from these mechanisms, once the scary experience has passed (or we’ve realised that there wasn’t anything really to be scared about after all) – through trembling, shaking, crying, sweating, yawning and raging with empathic support.
Children are trying to use these homeostatic mechanisms so often. The domination/colonised culture teaches us very early on not to do these things, which means that the feelings and stress hormones accumulate in the body, leading to agitation, fear, restlessness, and many of the behaviours we find unenjoyable in children and ourselves (such as not being able to go to sleep or stay asleep, not being able to sit still or concentrate, etc.)
FEELINGS:
One of the biggest things about fear is that it is contagious.
Again, this is an adaptive thing, because as children, we come into the world primed to learn about our environment and culture. If we’re born in a place where there are poisonous snakes around, we are going to very quickly need to learn from those around us, by observing their responses, that snakes are dangerous.
I remember a fear contagion experience once with my daughter – she was 2, and one day, a big insect suddenly flew in front of me, and I made a loud noise of shock. Every time after that, whenever she saw any type of insect, she cried and was scared. I’m so grateful that I was practicing Aware Parenting and knew how to help her heal from the fear, and I did, and after that, she was no longer afraid when she saw insects.
We will be talking more about these healing mechanisms later.
However, because it is adaptive to be scared first, and think and look second, and because fear is so contagious, and because as a culture we don’t understand the amazing homeostatic mechanisms of supported crying, shaking, sweating and raging, most of us accumulate these stress hormones and the related fear or terror.
This takes us to the second cause of fear – where something in the present moment reminds us of these past feelings, or we reach such an accumulation of the fear, that it bubbles out in the present.
In these situations, we or our child feel scared, even though the situation in the present doesn’t warrant the level of fear we are feeling.
These are past experiences of fear that are coming up, and we experience them as if they were about the present moment.
So, if your child was separated after birth, and didn’t get to express the feelings of confusion, fear, loss and powerlessness, those feelings might show up at age 3, when you are wanting her to be cared for by someone else.
This can be happening a lot in our present global situation. Elements of the present can help us powerfully connect with feelings from the past.
For example, hearing about health risks might remind us of when a relative got sick when we were a child.
Being quarantined might remind us of when we were sent to our room in a time-out.
Seeing empty supermarket shelves might remind us of being fed on schedule as a baby or being punished by being sent to our room without dinner.
We might connect with ancestral fears, such as if your ancestors are Irish and went through the potato famine.
We feel fear in these ways, not only to try to keep ourselves safe from experiencing those things again, but also because our psyche is trying to heal and release the feelings and tension from the original experiences.
THOUGHTS
Our thoughts can very powerfully create strong fear reactions in our bodies.
Thinking about a frightening event in the past, particularly if we didn’t ever get to express and release the feelings from it, can create strong fear in the present.
Thinking thoughts about possible future scenarios can also create fear.
And thinking repetitive thoughts about something unwanted can create fear.
TEMPERAMENT AND SENSITIVITY
Some people are more likely to feel scared more easily, particularly Highly Sensitive People. Again, this is adaptive – to have people in any community who are more likely to be aware of when something dangerous might be about to happen to the collective.
WHAT CAN WE DO AT EACH OF THESE THREE LEVELS TO HELP OURSELVES AND OUR CHILDREN AT THESE TIMES?
NEEDS
At a safety level, even understanding the fight/flight/freeze/fawn response can help. It’s trying to keep us safe.
Things we can do to help meet our needs for safety and compassion at this time, will help. Giving ourselves empathy, or receiving it from our friends or Inner Loving Presences, “I hear that you feel scared, and I’m supporting you to be safe.”
Meeting our needs for agency and choice are powerful too – so, us making clear choices about what actions we are going to take and not take help us feel less scared. You might have made a clear decision to stay home and felt relieved afterwards.
For our children, the most helpful thing we can do is to help ourselves return to a state of relative calm. If they are scared and they see that we are scared, they are likely to stay scared or become scared (remember the contagiousness of fear, and the importance of children learning what they need to be scared of in any culture.)
We can help ourselves on a needs and body level by becoming aware of our breathing, breathing through our nose (I highly recommend Buteyko Breathing), and hearing loving phrases. For example, you might connect with The Divine Mother, lie down, connect in with your breathing, and with each breath, hear the words, “I’m here with you. I’m listening. I’m here to protect you.”
If we can support ourselves to return to a state of calm, we can support our children back to that state, through empathy, through listening, and through supporting any crying, shaking or raging.
Laughter and play are incredibly powerful tools for helping release fear, both for adults and children.
FEELINGS
To express and release feelings in ways that are healing, we need to find the balance of attention. This means enough safety through support and loving presence and outer safety, and enough connection with the original feelings.
If a child is already crying or shaking, we can support ourselves to stay lovingly present in our bodies whilst we listen to them. We can offer a warm, relaxed presence, touch or holding, and eye contact, along with, “I’m here and I’m listening. I hear that you feel scared. I’m here with you and I will keep on being here with you.”
Having a listening ear for our own feelings and our inner children and memories of the past is so important. If you were sick as a 5 year old and this unexpressed and unreleased fear is showing up now, you might want to send love to that younger part of you, “I hear that you’re scared, sweetheart, and I’m here to keep you safe.”
If your outer child is scared but the fear isn’t being released through tears, play and laughter are some of the most powerful ways we can help them.
Attachment play is a key part of Aware Parenting. When we offer connection, play and laughter, fear literally gets released through the body.
There are nine types of attachment play that Aletha Solter, Ph.D. devised. Here are a few of them:
Contingency games: these can be helpful to help children release feelings around not having agency or choice. For example, the remote control game, where they have a remote control which they can use to make you do funny things like pretending to be a puppy.
The approach-avoidance game, where you and your child can hold hands and run towards something a bit scary, such as a vacuum cleaner, and then run away again and hide, and then run a bit closer each time.
In role play, we can set up games that are similar to what might be going on in the world, and let them choose what happens. So if they have been to supermarket with empty shelves, you might set up a pretend supermarket scene and follow their lead about what games they play.
Power-reversal games can include them running up to you and you pretending to be surprised, and jumping up in the air with a mock “eek!” and saying, “you’re not going to do that again, are you?” with a big smile on your face!
THOUGHTS
Information and thoughts and the mind in general are a powerful way to both create fear and to dispel fear.
With all the news and information out at the moment, I invite you to make choices about where you access your information (people whom you trust and resonate with) and how much you access (I invite you to set Loving Limits with yourself when you find yourself scrolling and feeling overwhelmed.)
Finding clear and useful information that you can then use for your own agency and choices can dispel fear.
The same is the case for your child. Follow their lead and give them age-appropriate information to help them feel a sense of agency and choice too. I invite you to set Loving Limits if they are accessing unhelpful or overwhelming information from social media or the news.
Your mind and will are also powerful. If you find yourself continually thinking about what’s going on over and over, you might connect in with your Inner Loving Presences, who say, “I hear that you feel scared, sweetheart, and I’m not willing for you to think about it for the next hour.” You might choose to tell yourself things that feel helpful, such as, “I’m here to spread love.”
IN GENERAL
In general, a combination of Love and Will; compassion and information/reassurance/encouragement is often most helpful.
For example, “I hear that you’re scared, and I’m here to keep you safe.”
If you want to learn more about fear and play, I recommend: Attachment Play by Aletha Solter and The Opposite of Worry by Lawrence Cohen. I also have free and paid resources on attachment play here on my website.
Big love xoxox