Human suffering is characterized by perception, fantasy and inaction.
These exceptional factors in the workings of the psyche are the three basic human fears: fear of loss, fear of being alone and fear of “not being or being but forbidden”.
If we believe that fear is the inability to act, a gesture, or any action (let alone an activity), then the one with fear will never be the author of his life. After all, life is an opportunity to “dare” and act in the first place. The question arises – how do perceptions and fantasies make us hostage to our illusions and authors of our inaction, which is the content of these fears? And what should we know about ourselves and remember these basic fears of our lives?
First, remember that all of these fears have common indicators:
Let’s talk a little about the content of fear, more precisely about its meaning.
If you are anxious and tense about possibly losing someone or something, but the loss does not happen; if you have been “undefined” in relationships long enough or are often confused in ways that depress you and make you more miserable than happy; if you think everyone should recognize, love, appreciate and “not leave” you; if you have the illusion that someone needs you, needs someone, but this is not always the source of your happiness and joy – you are in fear of loss.
It is the earliest fear that is filled with affect and tension, with no logic or thought at all. This fear is the most affective and “passionate” of the entire cohort of fears. It is covered by affect. It can never be measured by its primary source – the presence of actual loss, for there is no loss in this fear. This fear is imagination and fantasy, which exclude genuine loss.
If the content of actual loss is death, then the fear of loss is more of a legacy that we inherit from our early childhood. And in living that legacy, we can learn many things about ourselves that are beyond the control of human consciousness and its state of adulthood. Namely, how we “cohabitate” with our affect and tension and whether we can simply enjoy ourselves.
There is an essential feature of this fear: we fear ourselves, but we refuse to realize that ourselves, our inner world and our undesired traits, expectations and needs are at the heart of this fear of being alone. This fear is characterized by a deep concern with the demand and search for a partner, a friend, a loved one, or a husband (wife). And this search is the “meaning” of this fear! We look for another to escape or “hide” from ourselves in a world of “compensatory” love (friendship, cooperation, care). We are doomed, of course, for this compensation will never close the door to fear, and we will be deeply disappointed. Emotionally, we experience this fear with a lowering of activity, shame, a desire to please everyone, and despair when all this is not confirmed.
For in this fear, our desire and ability to love, the beginning of which is within us, but … in this place of “emptiness”, is “compromised”. And as we know, we can only give what we have.
It is the most “mature” fear. We get along with it and activate it, but only when there are ambitions, goals, and desires that go beyond the standard way of life and require a presentation of oneself in this life. It is the fear of “mature people” who can do everything but “for others” and never get over the paralysing effect of their inability to assert themselves, to go beyond standard images of themselves in the eyes of others. People with this fear suffer from their lies, the content of which is cowardice and an inability to overcome the temptation to “be convenient”, to serve everyone and to gain acceptance and approval.
This fear makes it possible to lay one’s life on the altar for the life of another, in which there is never any doubt that ‘living for another’ is a crime against oneself and cannot be remedied, alas, because of the loss of time and the irreversibility of life.
What is the mystery of perception and fantasy here?
The fantasy is that these fears are not real. As much as we would like them to be, their content is just the unfinished fantasy of the child we once were. An adult cannot be afraid, for unlike a child, they have awareness, criticality and the ability to make choices, make decisions and act, or simply act but in the right direction.
Perception. It has a fundamental role to play! Initially, perceiving the fear as something realistic, we are always afraid of ourselves in achieving a meaningful outcome. However, the ability to view our fear in terms of ‘the presence or absence of action’ is a mechanism for managing it.
Thus, by viewing fear of loss as an insistence “to be served and unlived and loved”, we gain the exclusive right to love and seek love in the world, but on our own.
With the fear of loneliness, we have a hint of the possibility of gaining exclusive ownership of ourselves and getting to ‘price’ ourselves. As a consequence, we find ourselves, we recognize our needs, though we “troll”, but we acknowledge our desires and, of course, our characteristics (which perhaps someone else is already looking for).
With the fear of “being forbidden,” we give up the illusion of “devaluing” others because those “others” are also in a relationship with their fears.
We simply become capable of being the author of our own lives! And we no longer ‘drive’ from the pleasure of being responsible for others (for they don’t need it). We recognize that our cowardice towards ourselves and in presenting our decisions and ambitions makes us a “means of pleasure to another” who will never realize it or thank us. We recognize the value of time, which is the gauge of our lives. We learn to cooperate rather than lying to ourselves that we are “creating the other and doing him good”. We understand that our resources are time, place and action; they are the means of creating our OWN projects, patterns, and matrices.
If we perceive fears as doom, we are doomed to always be inactive and dependent in love, always afraid and avoiding the most significant person in our lives – ourselves and of course, we will never write the novel of our own life…We will write it, but for or about someone else…
Don’t forget that the most inefficient investment is the ‘feeding’ of fears, in which one loses the one thing you can never get back – the time of life!
One is doomed to have fear, but this doom disappears with the ‘dawning’ of our acceptance of self, the ability to critically assess the world, and never give up on ourselves.
An adult (unlike a child) is doomed NOT to be afraid if he acts. And the lingering stoppage in time is what we call Fear!
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