The book: "Face to face with fear"

Chapter 2 : The panicked child

Our journey begins with exploring the consciousness of the inner child. This is the foundation of healing and coming home. Our childlike innocence, trust and spontaneity which we were all born with has been covered because ot the traumas we sustained. Now what we find when we go inside to our vulnerability is a core of fear - world of deep deep fears, panic and even terror. We learned from a very early age to find ways to compensate for these deep seated fears in order to sur­vive but that did not make the fears go away. On the contrary, they went deeper into our unconscious.

Our wounded inner child has a mind of his own operating quite inde­pendently of our compensated adult. He or she lives in his own world, a world based on experiences and memories of the distant past. He or she is still very much alive and strongly affecting the present. In my case, for most of my life, he operated unconsciously but powerfully. Now, I am more aware of how he feels, why he feels what he does, and how he operates. Let's explore the world of this wounded child.

At the bottom of our wounded child's consciousness is fear - unrecognized, unaccepted fear. The fear itself is not the problem. It is our lack of awareness and acceptance of this fear that causes difficulties. We sab­otage our creativity, our self-esteem and our relationships because lurking in our unconscious is a child who has lost his or her trust of him or her­self and of others. A child who is deeply afraid and who has been starved for love. This child responds from that fear, that starvation and that lack of love in many different unconscious ways. Our restlessness and the speediness with which many of us eat, speak, move and keep busy are some of ways that the panicked child shows him or herself.

It took me a lot of work before I could begin to feel and look out through the eyes of my child. I had to work through mountains of denial and protection. When I finally began to get down there, I also could see why I had covered it up with so much denial. I discovered a panicked child who carried so much fear that I sometimes wonder how I ever survived. How any of us survived. But I see that I am not alone in having this kind of fear. Our wounded child inside knows no meditation and has no dis­tance from his or her fears. It's just that we have covered the fear with a lifelong pattern of unconscious protection. Our addictive behavior is little more than an effort to get some distance from having to feel all the tremendous fear we are holding inside.

For years and years, I covered my fears and vulnerability with compen­sations. I was on a consuming program of performance, trying but for­tunately rarely succeeding, at being the best at everything that I did. Now I can see that my panicked inner child surfaced during moments of stress and pressure. He would come out whenever I thought I would be late somewhere, whenever I was afraid of doing something wrong or whenever I felt under any kind of pressure to do "well". Of course, I al­ways thought that I had no business being panicked, had no idea where all this panic was coming from and I tried to suppress my fears as best I could (with little success}. Fear was never something that won many points in the circles that I moved in.

What is the Fear?

Now I see that these kinds of situations were just the tip of the iceberg. Our fear goes much deeper. It is intense. We have deep fears of survival - of earning enough money and of being able to support ourselves. We have fears of being sexually dysfunctional, inadequate and impotent. We have deep fears of being unloved, fears of being rejected and unwanted. We have fears of being disrespected, abused, ignored, put down, fears of confronting someone, fears of not knowing who we are. We have fears of not being able to express ourselves, of being insignificant.. At a deeper level, there is always the fear of emptiness and death which probably underlies all the other fears.

The fears of our being and the fears of our inner child are different. Our being fears are about dying and dissolving, the fears of our inner child are more about living, about coming out and participating in life. We work with four basic fears of the inner child, all of which originate in some way from our early life trauma.

The Four Big fears of the Wounded Inner Child:

1) the fears of pressure and expectation,

2) the fears of rejection and abandonment,

3) the fears of not having space, of being misunderstood or ignored,

4) the fears of physical or energetic abuse or violation.

I have found out that when I explore my fear behind opening and trusting, I always come up with one of these four. And so do the people I work with. They show up in all the major areas of our life our sexuality, our creativity, our self-assertion, our ability to feel and how we relate with lovers, friends, acquaintances and authority figures. But rather than stay and feel them, we are accustomed to running from them in any way we can. In many respects, so many of the ways how people live in the West­ern world are a massive compensation against feeling fear. We avoid dealing with death by surrounding ourselves with so much security and luxury that we don't have to feel how vulnerable we are to the unex­pected. It's in our culture and is transmitted to us through our parents, our teachers, our religious figures, our politicians everyone we look up to. Had we been raised in an atmosphere with tremendous trust in life, it is very likely that we would not have such a panicked child inside. I can imagine that had I been raised in a deeply spiritual, harmonious environment where my whole conditioning was permeated with a deep connection to existence and to the earth, I would have learned not to have so many fears. But it's not what I got, or for that matter, not what most of us got. If we want to heal, we have to confront our fears - all of them. And the place to start is with the fears of the wounded child.

Our Fears are Cloaked in Denial

However to confront our fears, we have to validate them; we have to rec­ognize that they are there and look for where they came from. In our conditioning, there is no place for fear - we were taught to hide the fear. Our culture doesn't value being honest about fear any more than it real­izes how deeply fear is indoctrinated. Anyway, how can we express what we are not even in touch with? We cover it with protection, denial, and unconsciousness, hiding our vulnerability under a mask because that is what we needed to do to survive. One way or another, we man­aged, pretending that everything was okay. We learned how to cope. We remain hypnotized by our "coping trance", not recognizing how much fear we are covering up inside. As long as we are in this trance, we delude ourselves into believing that it is less painful to deny the fear than to allow it to surface.

Our fear takes us deeper and deeper into isolation and usually we don't even know it. We isolate because our child inside lives in fear. Since we are often so disconnected from this frightened child, we move into a sur­vival mode where there is little or no intimate sharing. Recently, at an in­troductory meeting for one of my workshops, I was doing a preliminary exercise to help people connect with their fears of intimacy. The sugges­tion was to share with the person opposite to you, assuming that this person was your lover or close friend, any fear that you have and have not expressed about coming closer to that person. After some time, one woman raised her hand and said that she could find nothing that she was afraid of.

I probed a bit and she admitted that her husband rarely listens to her when she talks but instead is usually busy reading the paper or doing something else. It turned out that as a child, no one had. listened lo her and actually she could not imagine that someone would take the time or the interest to listen. No one had ever loved her that much. Unsupported and invalidated, she simply lost touch with her child inside and adjusted herself to living without any intimate communication. She had covered up all of her fears with a routine survival pattern based on her early depri­vation. This kind, of phenomenon is common.

Another example: A man in one of my workshops had no notion that he was afraid. He would admit, to being afraid of daring feats in nature but could see no fear in relation to people. I have found that this is a common form of de­nial. (Not so many years ago, it could have been me.) He spoke very mech­anically about things in his life. He had experienced so little intimacy in his life that he had no feeling for what it would be like to share closely with an­other. He had come to the workshop because his marriage was in trouble but had little understanding why. His child inside was totally in hiding and he was in complete denial of his emotional world. Slowly and cautiously as the workshop continued, he came more and more in touch with the pain and anguish inside. The pain of a child who was denied tenderness and accept­ance and who grew up in an environment where no one shared feelings.

It is not only those who are beginning to explore their feelings and doing inner work that discover they have deeper and more hidden fears inside. For me as well as for many of my closest friends, it was not until we found ourselves separating from a loved one that we began to connect with the immensity of our inner fears. One very close friend who has done mil­lions of workshops and has meditated arduously for over twenty years is just ending a fourteen year relationship and coming in touch with primal terror he had no idea was there.

Our fear and our vulnerability are lying just under the surface of our conscious mind, always ready to be awakened. It can surface whenever we allow ourselves to come close to someone, whenever we have to take a risk, and put out our creativity or whenever we expose ourselves in any way. It comes up when we do something that takes us away from the familiar, the safe and the known. Intimacy is perhaps the most common place where we have to confront our panicked child and that is why we avoid it.

If we live in our protected cocoon, never launching our energy, never taking risks into unknown and uncharted territory, we may never have to confront the tremendous fear that lies buried inside. But then we sink into boredom, frustration and depression. It takes some awareness and commitment to come out of denial, to stop the addictions and re-experi­ence this space.

Where Does the Fear Come From?

Probably we are born with it. I think that I was. For the first few days of my life, I nearly died of undernourishment because for some reason, I couldn't digest my mother's breast milk. My mother said that I had "diarrhea of the newborn" but I was probably saying, "Help! Let me go back to where it was so warm and safe." And the original shock of leaving the womb in the way most of us were born and we already have sufficient reasons to be afraid. Whatever emotional, physical, or sexual abuse that we suffered after that just adds to the original trauma of being born. The deprivation and violation we experienced throughout childhood - the lack of approval, attention, love, respect and caring that we all ex­perienced in one way or another - is clearly another major source of our panic. Now our child inside is always expecting, in fact dreading, more abuse and abandonment.

We had deep survival and identity needs which were not meet and we lost our trust. Our needs for love and protection, acceptance, validation, and approval, inspiration and direction, needs for tender, unconditional love were not meet. To our wounded inner child, we have a fear of not getting the basics of what we need. The blow to our innocence and trust may have come so early that there is a basic fear that we won’t survive.

Unfortunately, as a child, we weren't in a position to conclude, "Well, I can see that mom and dad have a real problem here. They can't even get along with each other and they don't seem to be too interested in me. They shouldn't have had me in the first place. It's obvious that I'm not going to get what I need here, so I think what I'll do is just check out and find myself a better situation." Most likely, any place down the block would have been as bad or worse. With the background of emo­tional deprivation that most of us have, entering into our vulnerability now can bring tremendous confusion, panic, fear, self judgment, collapse, and sometimes pure terror. Why? Because our vulnerability and our inno­cence were betrayed.

As I develop greater understanding for the extreme vulnerability that has always been buried under all my efforts, I can appreciate more and more the reason for my panic. Now, I can see that the fear of failure, of disapproval, of not meeting the expectations that were placed upon me by family and culture, was bringing up deep fears of being abandoned and to my inner child such fears must have been devastating. The more aware part of me no longer buys into the success program of my condi­tioning and recognizes that when a loved one leaves or threatens to leave, I will be fine. But my inner child doesn't know all this. He is still freaking out with the same old triggers.

And far beyond all the psychological reasons for our panic is the simple and most powerful reason of all - the realization that we are going to die. We are always facing insecurity, uncertainty, and ultimately death at the hands of forces far beyond our control. No amount of insurance or protection can shield us from that. fear. Deep down, we know it. Without a foundation of acceptance and meditation, all we have is fear covered in compensation. From the perspective of the child, vulnerability equals panic - the panic of being deserted and of being annihilated. Only our meditator inside is spacious and trusting enough to hold vulnerability, insecurity and unpredictability because meditation brings understanding and space. Our child inside simply does not have these qualities. We have to bring these qualities to heal our panicked child. Then we can transform the vulnerability from panic to acceptance. But first, we have to begin by recognizing this deeply anxious part of us that lives inside.

The First Step is to Accept the Fear

The first major healing of our co-dependency and of our wounded child comes when we can recognize, accept and give space to this panic. Normally, we don’t do that. We run away from feeling the fear by:

1) pretending that it isn't there,

2) blocking it out with compensations,

3) by being a victim and getting impatient, and angry at existence or anyone close to us for having to feel this fear and panic,

4) by spacing out,

5) by judging it,

6) by unconsciously regressing and trying to get someone else to take care of our panicked child.

It still takes much courage for me to allow these feelings. There is such a fear that I won't make it, that I won't be able to function, that I will be judged as weak and impotent or that there will never be an end to the fear. When it comes, even after so much time devoted to inner child work, my rational mind still doesn't understand why it should be there and wants it to go away. I am afraid to feel it and afraid to share it. I still judge it and condemn myself for having these feelings. Fortunately my deeper self knows that there is much value to allowing the fears to be there, so that it continues to take me into my core and gives me a deeper silence inside.

There is always a fear tht if we acknowledge the fears, they will overtake us and run our life. That's the reason I ran away from them. But I've round that by going into them, I am empowering myself and building more self-respect. To face them, we have to plug up the leaks - the ways we escape. Some of the biggest leaks come from our strategies and our expectations. In the next chapter, we explore this aspect of our inner child.

Exercise: Exploring the Fears of the Wounded Child

Review the four basic fears – 1) pressure and expectations, 2) rejection and abandonment, 3) not being given space, being ignored or misunderstood and 4) physical or energetic abuse and violation.

Considering each, one at a time, and ask yourself: Do you have these fears? What provokes them in your life today? What do you remember from the past that might have contributed to these fears?

How do these fears affect different aspects of your life – your sexuality, your ability to assert yourself, yous creativity, your relating?

Krishnananda “Face to face with fear” - Koregaon – 2nd, revised edition 1998

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