Quotes About Fear

We lock up the mentally ill because they terrify us. We are afraid of them and even more frightened of what they symbolize. We want to believe they did something that

Too many people are missing their destiny a year at a time because they're too scared to think in decades!" (p. 127)

I never investigate; sometimes the most terrible thing of all is to confirm what you have only imagined.

I know that the World is a terrible place, filled with wild animals and evil men and wicked woman.

Now I know how those Christians felt when they were told they had a booking with a hungry lion in an hour.

What does a monster eat after he's had his teeth out? The dentist.

It's always stimulating to visit new places, acquire fresh knowledge and expand your portfolio of nightmares.

Chronic emotional abandonment devastates a child. It naturally makes her feel and appear deadened and depressed. Functional parents respond to a child's depression with concern and comfort. Abandoning parents respond to the child with anger, disgust and/or further abandonment, which in turn exacerbate the fear, shame and despair that become the abandonment mélange.

Emotional flashbacks are sudden and often prolonged regressions to the overwhelming feeling-states of being an abused/abandoned child. These feeling states can include overwhelming fear, shame, alienation, rage, grief and depression. They also include unnecessary triggering of our fight/flight instincts.

10. Drasticizing/Catastrophizing/Hypochondriasizing. I feel afraid but I am not in danger. I am not "in trouble" with my parents. I will not blow things out of proportion. I refuse to scare myself with thoughts and pictures of my life deteriorating.

Extensive childhood abuse installs a powerful people-are-dangerous program.

A reluctance to participate in such a fundamental realm of the human experience results in much unnecessary loss. For just as without night there is no day, without work there is no play, without hunger there is no satiation, without fear there is no courage, without tears there is no joy, and without anger, there is no real love.

For many survivors, authority figures are the ultimate triggers. I have known several survivors, who have never gotten so much as a parking ticket, who cringe in anxiety whenever they come across a policeman or a police car.

It appears that children are hard-wired to release fear through angering and crying. The newborn baby, mourning the death of living safely and fully contained inside the mother, utters the first of many angry cries not only to call for nurturance and attention, but also to release her fear.

While scaring us out of trusting others, the outer critic also pushes us to over-control them to make them safer. Over-controlling behaviors include shaming, excessive criticism, monologing [conversational control] and overall bossiness.

The survivor becomes imprisoned by a jailer who will accept nothing but perfection. He is chauffeured by a hysterical driver who sees nothing but danger in every turn of the road. Chapters 9 and 10 focus extensively on practical tools for shrinking your critic.

I have worked with numerous "well-therapized" people who were relatively free from perfectionism, but still seriously afflicted with the critic's addiction to noticing potential danger. Said another way, I have seen survivors eliminate much of their perfectionist, self-attacking thinking without realizing that the critic was still flooding their minds with fear-inducing thoughts and images.

This is essential because without a properly functioning ego, you have no center for making healthy choices and decisions. All too often, your decisions are based on the fear of getting in trouble or getting abandoned, rather than on the principles of having meaningful and equitable interactions with the world.

And the day came When the risk to remain Closed tightly in a bud Became more painful Than the risk it took to blossom. – Author unknown

Bravery is, in my opinion, defined by fear. It is taking right action despite being afraid. It is not brave to do things that are not scary.

It is crucial for deeper level recovery that we learn that feelings of fear, shame and guilt are sometimes signs that we have said or done the right thing. They are emotional flashbacks to how we were traumatized for trying to claim normal human privileges.

Guilt is sometimes camouflaged fear

The abandonment mélange is the fear and toxic shame that surrounds and interacts with the abandonment depression. The abandonment depression itself is the deadened feeling of helplessness and hopelessness that afflicts traumatized children.

Emotional flashbacks are also accompanied by intense arousals of the fight/flight instinct, along with hyperarousal of the sympathetic nervous system, the half of the nervous system that controls arousal and activation. When fear is the dominant emotion in a flashback the person feels extremely anxious, panicky or even suicidal.