CHAPTER 6
THE EMOTION OF FEAR & WHAT WE CAN DO ABOUT IT.
Understanding the roots of all psychological blocks
As a trained psychotherapist, Netherton found, as have others, that some root fear underlies all neurotic and pathological behavior. Everyone has real, expanding love inside. But it got stopped up in our early traumatic experiences. When we tightened the muscles and connective tissue, they got hard and stayed that way. This made the blocks. As long as the blocks are there, the love energy is still stopped up.
The energy of fear is embedded in the innermost layer of the contractions of our connective tissue. It's what emotionally caused us to tighten up in the first place, as it pulled the muscles inward with its energy. Fear was our predominant role in the overpowering traumas of childhood. It was also the major emotion some mothers had during traumatic parts of the birth experience. And it was the major emotion we had during 'past life' experiences of capture, repression, imprisonment, torture and death.
So fear is the most significant emotional element in the experiences stuck inside us. Without fear, we feel connected in a pleasurable way to the world around us. We might even feel so positive that we think there is no limit to our expansion. Fear blocks off this connection. All we see is the limitation that says there's no way to expand. While these thoughts come up quite normally in adult life situations, they also trigger the connections to the unconscious episodes. And it's the unconscious episodes that get us caught in the feelings of hopelessness and the upsets we feel in our bodies.
Netherton would emphasize this by saying the only 'real' emotion is fear. As soon as we try to expand in a direction that's blocked, we'll run into these fears.
Other emotions, like anger and resentment, are also part of these experiences. Identifying with these kinds emotions makes us feel strong, so we don't feel fearful. Nobody enjoys really being frightened; it makes for low self esteem.
Sometimes, sadness, hurt and guilt are also part of our childhood experiences (and all the others, too). Many people identify with them more than they do the fear. Certain dominant emotions then become like 'themes' that run through our communications with others when we're emotionally upset. If you have a friend who does this, you can listen for these and also sense the fear in the 'need to be heard' of their stories.
In our childhoods, these 'other' emotions became imbedded inside us, in a way that they distract us from the fear. They are what we more likely remember and feel. Many people aren't even aware there's fear going on. Now, therapeutically, if you can't get to the fear, you can't get to the love. So, like any good therapy, this system helps people peel off all the layers until the underlying fear is identified and eliminated.
When the fears that are stuck inside are removed, along with the rest of the emotions, we make contact with the love that was there before the trauma took place. In fact, that natural, expanding love energy is just 'there' in all of us. When the blocks are removed, it starts to come out in our everyday lives. Then we'll find we have a lot of positive new experiences. And that will encourage the love energy to grow in new directions. In this way, we develop the kinds of healthy and satisfying relations that were blocked early in our lives. We have more choices in the way we choose to be, and we might notice that we're communicating directly to and from our hearts.
A common term in therapy is 're-parenting.' It means the therapist substitutes for the original parents and 'raises' the child in a positive and supportive way. This will go much faster and more fully as the blocks are released and the person's real inner love can make the connections. This energy itself will also draw the person into satisfying experiences in his or her daily life.
If the block that was removed contained a 'caution' statement, it's removal will not send the person's development into reckless behavior. We might think that this is because the re-parenting therapist will guide us into appropriate caution by explaining how to function in the world. A therapist might do this, but it is almost always unnecessary. I've found that whatever unconscious and exaggerated fear a person has will also manifest as a logical and prudent caution in their conscious mind as well. I jokingly say that we never have to worry about being reckless in the ways that all our life we've been extra cautious. It's part of our personality to be that way. It serves us. When the block is removed, the inner love energy expands outward and incorporates all adult aspects of our personality, including the cautious parts.
This cautious nature will also be identified with an astrological analysis of the birth chart. In fact, if a cautious attitude is indicated in your birth chart, it's for sure that you'll be given both conscious and sub-conscious words of caution as you grow up.
Cautions given to us early in life are not inappropriate fears.. Mother, or whomever, is making an observational statement of fact. If you live in a war zone, you'd better be trained how to survive in it. If you're in a religious or racial minority, you'd be well served by understanding how a lot of people in your society will pre-judge you and treat you, just on the basis of these categories. These statements, or educations, will be made by Mother in non-traumatic times as well as in the specific episodes of terror. It is this terror that gets removed in the processing.
The idea is that you can start with a fresh attitude after the war is over, and that you can resume a normal life after you've been mugged or raped. Of course you'll still have the memory of the event and it may even have shaped your life's work toward helping others who have gone through the same pain. But you'll be free of the terror and physical trauma you experienced during the experience that got stuck inside you. The lesson of the incident does not go away after releasing the physical and emotional trauma that was left over after the event. In fact the lesson is usually clearer and the person is a more effective communicator of it. But we cannot help ourselves, nor others, when we are still currently involved with the event as if it was still going on.
This is why Netherton's work is called a release and alignment therapy. After we release the old trauma that has stayed with us from the past experience, we are no longer living in the midst of that event. We dissolve the block that was created on that date in time. That clears the flow of our life from the years before the incident to now. Our whole learning experience is then in alignment and we can better see how our lives should flow into the future.
Anyone who is afraid to release the trauma involved with a cautionary message is unconsciously transferring the fear of the incident onto the release process. As I inferred in an earlier chapter, it does no good to try to verbally argue the person into doing it. You are only arguing with the energy of terror that's driving the words of the infancy and birth incidents. You are arguing with the person's mother and the past life executioner. You cannot convince the person this way because these scripts have absolute evidential proof on their side. The voices you are arguing with are coming out of events where the warnings are necessary and true. But their degree of fervor do not relate to the current life situation.
As I said in my comment about gravity mechanism, the first line of defense is an argument where the person stands his or her ground. This is what you'll get, described above. If the person turns to hopelessness you know you're striking a deeper chord and winning. Therefore, their pattern will switch roles and play the defeated one to your victor. Again, this is nothing but a transference of the old voices onto the current situation. It may seem that the person is speaking logically, but it is the logic of the defeated person in a birth, prenatal or past life experience that is still sitting in the person's adult body. The words of defeat are also the taped playback of the victimizer in the infancy, birth, pre-natal and past life episodes. I'll explain a lot more about victimization in a later chapter.
The way to help someone stuck in this situation is to teach them lower abdomen breath concentration and/or give them the Bodywork. I covered this earlier.
When fears happen in adult life, it's important to learn how to work with them effectively, in everyday affairs, as well as in these therapy sessions. The kind of fears I'm talking about here are appropriate fears about real life situations; about serious illness, or business failure, or marital breakup, and so forth. Yet it's important to note that the way we relate to these events will be the way we were trained in the appropriate stages of childhood development. And these relate directly to our old and deeply imbedded experiences. In general, we can measure the degree to which we are no longer run by our fears, by how open we are.
I've found that the more someone is open on the outside and secure on the inside, the more they'll express their fears candidly instead of covering them up with blame and criticism of others. When my clients make this transition to speaking about their own issues instead of using avoidance or attacking tactics, I'll respond to encourage more of it. To people who still battle and resist being open, I might exclaim, "Well, that's honest," and to people who are enthusiastic and positive I might say, "That's very good. When you're like this, it makes it much easier for the rest of us to communicate with you honestly and openly."
Being candid about our fears is a sign of objective maturity. Everyone has fears. Almost everyone is afraid of dying. Most of us have fears about finances, sickness, growing old and many other things, too. The more we accept ourselves for being human, and acknowledge others in the same way, the less we have to dramatize and maudlin-ize our conditions to get acknowledgement. If you notice that people around you keep dwelling on their difficulties, it's probably because no one's been accepting them for what they're experiencing, including you. No one can move forward in their environment from A to B if that environment refuses to acknowledge that they're starting at A.
When we're faced with a dilemma it might be because we can't seem to let go of something that's obviously bad for us, or, we feel insecure about heading onto a new path. To get someone moving, the first question I usually ask is, "What are you afraid of?" I think this is a direct way of approaching these large and difficult problems. If this is asked sincerely and without blame or condescension, people usually open up. Going directly to the fear helps us cut through a lot of superfluous material a person can get lost in. I know this works when I need help.
Hopelessness is a major component in a feeling of being blocked. I have devoted an entire chapter on this issue. In it I show how the past life episodes actually did end in hopeless situations. We couldn't get out of the grip of the torturer and executioner, and we died. Then, Mother's words in the prenatal and infancy, about her social situation in this lifetime, were repeats of the words said by our past life victimizers. Obviously her situation did not end in our deaths, but the words are the linkage. I explain this in the chapters of the second half of this section.
In everyday affairs, hopelessness is created by setting time limits to the accomplishment of a project, when we know the project will take longer than that.
If I think I have to get this book finished by a certain date, otherwise I won't have money to eat, and I recognize that it's an unrealistic schedule, I'll feel hopeless. The way to get out of this dilemma is to let go of the effort of accomplishment, create space and get in touch with a higher power or see a bigger view, or make deeper connection with all life. Then alternate answers come. We feel hopeless when we define limits to our life and get stuck in those limits even when we recognize they won't work.
When we look at our confusion by directly addressing our fears, all of the factual concerns we have can get better organized in our minds. But it usually takes a compassionate ear that really hears and understands our dilemma. Then the sorting out works when we get help from this same knowledgeable partner who's good at organizing. This process can also be accomplished with a few people, working as a team, if they are all there at the same time. Each person may have different talents to help us, but the objective organization must take place at the same time that the emotional support does. These methods almost always work better than trying to do it on our own.
Remember that all dilemmas involve relationship. In our minds, relationship is blocked. Working with someone else, we can get out of the 'round and round' thoughts in our heads. The repetitive thoughts are driven by our underlying fear about the situation. Usually, all these thoughts are just the energies coming out of an old traumatic pattern. The thoughts are related to our current situations but they're also recordings of the people in the past. When we go round and round in our heads, we're tensed up with fear in our bodies. And when we're all tensed up inside, we can't go deeper into the issue, face the fears, and solve the dilemma.
The tension keeps the mental panic and confusion going. A partner can keep us objective about our fears without denying them. This can help us relax the tension. A massage therapist who also works well verbally can be a big help. If we're chronically tight because the stresses have been going on for some time, then Structural Integration Bodywork can re-lengthen the connective tissue so we can really relax. After the bodywork, deep massage treatments will renew our release when we tense up again.
When we're alone, we have a tendency to either be run by the fears or try to hold them down in order to think straight. Neither works very well. It's much better to reach out. Remember that reaching out, or expanding, are natural, pleasurable expressions of our better interests.
If we communicate with each other by 'sufficiently' acknowledging our emotional fears, it's much easier to lay out a course of objective action to solve the situation. At the end of Chapter 2 I said it's necessary for both parties to communicate to the same chakra energy centers at the same time. Since emotions tend to over-ride logical sense, instead of the other way around, it always seems to work to address the emotional chakras first. Once you get off the emotional roller coaster in the belly, then you can function logically in your head.
So, helping someone deal with their fears and upsets doesn't mean letting them run on and on; that's just letting them be unconscious while the emotions run them. If our issues are not the same as theirs, we can be an agent of objective focus. That's why practitioners have to go through a lot of Netherton processing before they treat others with it. Even then, working with certain clients will bring up material that never had to be processed out before. But by this time, a practitioner is clear enough to continue working on the outside while still being aware of what they're feeling on the inside.
Invalidating someone else's emotions shows that our own fears and controls are running 'us.'It's important to recognize that denial is a form of control. It's what Mother did in order to function when she was scared about what might be happening to the baby inside her. It's also what we had to do in threatening past life situations. But trying to transfer that necessary internal mechanism onto someone else who's not in that mode doesn't solve the problem.
People can usually handle fearful situations, for themselves and others, when they've never been connected, or they're no longer connected, to similar past traumatic events. Many of us have had similar kinds of experiences in childhood, but many other people have had entirely different kinds of experiences. While fear is at the root of every issue, what's scary for you may not be of concern for me.
To effectively deal with the adult situation at hand, we must be both empathetic and objective at the same time. This happens after you do a lot of work on yourself.
The most effective way of handling fears, from whatever source, is to develop a greater contact with our universal life. Sitting down and doing breath concentration meditation for an hour, or two, or three, can clear the mind of emotional feelings and mental upset sufficiently enough to make some clear decisions, with or without help. It tunes our body-minds into the bigger picture of who we are, at the same time it creates an awareness deeper than the more superficial trauma. And it creates another place to 'live' from which to observe the pattern.
For those of you who have never done it, take note that this is not a mental process. We are not changing our attitudes because we've had some new thoughts about God, or said an affirmation. This process literally changes the state of our beingness, physically, energically, emotionally and psychologically. From this new state of being, we have different thoughts and attitudes. An analogy would be of someone blind from birth who could finally see. No amount of verbal or mental information could create the attitudinal change that accompanies this change in the way the person relates to the world.
The practice itself entails focusing the mind into the present moment, for 15-45 minutes at a time, by placing the attention on the breath in the lower abdomen. All by itself, this increases our energy and allows us to stay more in contact with present reality. If you really develop a good power of concentration, you'll be able to 'let go' of more of the old experiences when they pop up. Your focus will be energized onto the present, like a gyroscope.
Focusing and building energy in the lower abdomen also strengthens the 'I want' first chakra at the base of the torso and nourishes the 'I need' second chakra in the lower abdomen. It actually adds energy to those places. So it strengthens self-confidence and removes the experience of neediness, even though it does not remove the old embedded experiences.
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A further development of this kind of practice is created by what are called Enlightenment experiences. These are direct experiences of the Oneness of all life. They are not thought insights. In the past 2600 years, thousands of people have had them. What does it do for us psychologically? It removes fear.
To summarize, then, here are the aspects necessary to handling our fears successfully. First, you must understand how the mind works and recognize that you over-reactions are caused by connections from old trauma still stored in your body. Second, in order to feel comfortable enough to release what you're attached to, and even to be strong enough to do it, you have to create and nourish your self-awareness mind. Third, you can learn how to release yourself from the patterns once they start. That's discussed in the next chapter.
Fourth, you can remove the old episodes from your body-mind with Netherton, Reichian or similar therapies. That's discussed in the chapter after that. Or you can detach yourself from the body-mind with Enlightenment experiences. Which is the subject of a number of other books.
I've found all are necessary to live a relatively sane life. I notice that the fears I'm still run by are created by my limited outlook on life, by my lack of faith and the lessons I'm still learning. What I'm stuck to in these instances are the hopeless negative aspects of the patterns I still haven't cleared.
However, I've also noticed that as I got more of my stack cleared, the concentration meditation took away the last remnants in the conscious mind sooner, because there was less to clear out with it than before.
The combination of Netherton processing combined with Reichian energy movement techniques and the Bodywork and Meditation literally takes us deeper within ourselves. It creates depth. This kind of depth is not a term describing some sophisticated philosophical thinking. It is the actual three dimensional experience of living more fully, and more deeply, inside the physical body. It is a more solid and stable experience than living on the surface. And this depth allows us to have a fuller contact with the world as well. It is much different than when a person is hiding deep inside with hard walls of flesh and organs around them for protection. This depth is deep and open at the same time.
