I have yet to meet someone who can initially tell you their core fear. We typically chase and battle what I would refer to as intermediate fears. This results in our inability to overcome them. You cannot address your core fear if you do not know what it is.

Here is an example of what I am referring to from my own life. For most of my adult life, I struggled with worry and fear related to finances. Anyone else, or is it just me? This would result in avoiding making and adhering to a budget or being proactive about financial planning. One day I became so frustrated with myself I took a legal pad and wrote down every fear I had in relation to money. As I kept reducing these fears down to more specific emotional fears, I began to realize my true fear was becoming isolated, feeling inadequate, unworthy of love, and helpless.

This took me to a place in early childhood where I experienced these feelings. When we encounter feelings such as these at times in our lives where we are incapable of regulating them and do not receive the relational support we require to cope with them, the brain will dissociate these memories and emotions into isolated memory networks. We were never able to regulate and put words to the felt sense of what we experienced and make sense of it.

Now when these emotions are activated they trigger anxiety as well and cause us to become disoriented and engage in compulsive behaviors, such as drug use and procrastination, in an attempt to regulate them. Subsequently, people tend to shame themselves for not being able to cope with these feelings and for the behaviors they engage in that attempt to regulate their emotions. In my efforts to de-shame my clients, I instruct them this is a neurological issue and is not a reflection of their character, strength, or intelligence as a person.

To resolve these issues requires accessing the felt sense of these emotions, regulating and discharging them, and putting words to the experience. This is the essence of psychotherapy – connecting with previously overwhelming emotions that were experienced with a sense of aloneness or helplessness in a now safe relationship and feeling them through to completion.

I find that most clients experience a level of relief just from identifying their core fear and the origin of its development. When encountering a recurrent fear or pattern of avoidance, I encourage you to follow it down to its core fear and track the felt sense you experience when focusing on it until it leads you to its initial cause. Then with a safe person feel it to completion while putting words to it and making meaning of it. You may have to do this several times until the emotion is fully processed. However, you will then finally be free from this fear and heal your past.