Dear Cali Chica:

You wrote: “when an innate and intuitive feeling is to run away from fear, and that does not happen. It must cause confusion. It must make it hard for the child to see what innate ‘feelings’ he should trust then. Give that he never found relief and is still in the continuous blur of anxiety. Perhaps that’s also why self trust never develops. How can one trust when he was not able to follow his most basic instinct?”

The child doesn’t run away from his/ her mother because he needs her too much. He needs what he believes she is for him, survival, life itself. So he stays with her and the fear stays in him, growing. Over time, growing up, he knows that fear and he doesn’t understand. He doesn’t understand where it comes from. Sometimes he feels relative calm but soon enough the fear returns stronger. The child gets scared of that feeing, of the fear getting stronger. The fear is no longer attached, in awareness, to the mother-predator.

So he is not running away, and he no longer know what it is that scared him so much. The source of danger is not clear. Older, he knows there are other family members that could take him in, if he was left by his parents. He knows that there are teachers in school, maybe, that he can turn to and who  will help him. So he doesn’t understand that when he was younger he didn’t know any of this, and that inherently he was born viewing the parent as the difference between life and death for him.

The fear unattached to the original (and ongoing) danger source, misunderstood, unsettled, the child goes as numb as possible. Whatever doesn’t get numbed becomes this or that mental problem (ex. OCD), it becomes a physical manifestation, from my Tourette’s tic to your migraines.

And the child and adult is confused about present dangers, not viewing an abusive relationship as dangerous, for example, not seeing danger where it is. And he sees danger where it is not.

Self trust then would be then to lower that base anxiety, to re-attach it, so to speak, to the original danger, to free his brain from that… infestation of fear, so one doesn’t see danger where there is none and see it where it is.

When no longer seeing danger where there is none, this very thing is what will give you that relief. Every moment you feel anxious, in that moment you see danger right there and then. Most of those moments, there is no real danger.

anita