Ch 9 - THE FEAR OF DEATH, Why it's at the bottom of all of our issues

CHAPTER 9:

THE FEAR OF DEATH
Why it's at the bottom of all of our issues


As I've mentioned, the events that really form our patterns are what we can call deep trauma, even terror. In processing, our goal is to get out the fear, it's related emotions and everything that causes them. These 'old' feelings are actually energies inside of us. They, as physical things, have absolutely nothing to do with the reality of our present lives, except that they're similar to the feelings we're having about our current situations. (And also, they hinder our health and overtake our conscious abilities to function.)

Most phobias and neurotic upsets are stronger reactions than the actual situation calls for. Even when we factor in childhood upsets and programming, the way we over-react in our adulthood still seems to carry more energy and forcefulness than we might logically expect. We consider ourselves grown up now; we acted that way as children. But even our compassionate friends might tell us we are over-reacting. That is, unless your friend understands that the "reacting" part of your mind thinks the situation is life threatening. And that's the key to the problem.

Data from thousands of observations shows that all 'lifelong issue' psychological problems stem from un conscious fears of death. Obviously, thinking you're all of a sudden going to die is a scary and upsetting proposition.

consciously, we don't have these fears; and in current reality, imminent death is not a relevant issue!!. But in the 'triggered' and related scenarios stored in the un conscious mind, death and near death experiences are an actual part of the scenario.

To be afraid to sky dive or race automobiles is not a psychological problem out of touch with reality. It's a real possibility with a reasonable probability that you could die. But if your guts churn and your belly does somersaults every time you get into a car, then that act is probably triggering some fearful scenario in your un conscious mind. It could even have been a near car crash that mother experienced in your pre-natal, or even on the way to give you birth.

Death, or terror, is the nature of the specific 'pattern shaping events' that keep playing as 'old tapes.' There are a number of other episodes on top of these that sometimes have to be peeled away before the mind gets to this place in the stack. But all of my clients have always come up with childhood, infancy, birth and pre-natal episodes that embody a real or imagined life and death threat. And when they've released these, they're much clearer and more relieved. While everyone I've worked with is initially unaware of this fact, it's never failed to be the kind of episode that appeared when the 'most significant episode' causing their adult issue was called for.

The threat of death is a deterrent. So we might think that these fears inside us are saying, "If I do this, I'll die, so I better not do it." And that's correct. These statements are in there to process out. They're also in there as threats from other people that occurred before we made the recognition ourselves. "If you do this, I'll kill you," will train someone not to behave a certain way. That's the reasoning of some proponents of the death penalty. Childhood spankings, and even reprimands that make kids feel ashamed, are also attempts to do the same thing. But a warning doesn't carry a lot of weight with us if we don't believe the person will carry it out. That's why the bad guys in movies kill one of their insignificant stooges, as a demonstration to our heroes that they mean business.

But how do we get trained to shut ourselves down as far back as we remember? And why does it still affect us as successful adults? Surely we don't believe Mommy's still going to kill us. And maybe our parents have even passed away. The reason, of course, is that the threats are still located inside our sub- conscious minds.
But a threat is not enough to instill panic. It just deters us from acting in a particular way. When a child is threatened, it may withdraw in shock, but it doesn't act terrorized. Only the actual act creates terror.

While we also have to process out the fears and threats of anticipation, the ones that really run us say "I'm doing it, or I did it, and I'm getting killed for it." More exactly, the statements from our abusers in past lives say "You did it and now you're dying for it." Those statements are made during the actual torture and death experiences so the words got imbedded right inside the physical pain. In infancy, Mother's rage while she's hitting the kid might be saying, "I'll kill you," even though she isn't verbalizing it and never consciously would want to do it. I once had a client whose mother was a migrant field worker. In the prenatal she was tied to a post and whipped. The mother was so enraged, that she kept screaming, "I'll kill you."

All these statements go into the sub- conscious mind during the events because we are pre-occupied with strong fear. Finally, we get a chance to experience what we did not experience back then. These words, emotional feelings and physical sensations come out when we finally act on the opportunity to focus our awareness directly on them.

Milder experiences also put in words. And while they are not the most fundamental issue-forming episodes, they come out because they also have fears of death within them. In the prenatal, a mother might feel something is wrong with her, or the baby. She might also be upset because no one is available to help her, including the doctor. All these experiences bring up the fear of great harm and an uncertainty about the future. One of the possible scenarios is that the child will die. While this is rarely spoken verbally, it always seems to come out in words when the emotional energies are released. What locked them in were the actual physical experiences of the child. In these circumstances you, obviously, didn't die. But the fears and tensions in those moments did occur and were placed in your sub- conscious mind. Once in the sub- conscious, they don't keep updates on your survival into adulthood.

I'll have a lot more to say about these death statements in the next few chapters.
So, we don't have to process out everything that happened to us that was an upset. The kind of traumatic incidents that form our patterns are very specific. They cover different kinds of issues, but they all contain a deep-seated fear of death.

In addition, when we process out later childhood experiences involving physical blows and spankings, or significant verbal confrontations, words about death are imbedded in them, too. The major theme of these episodes recreates directly to the theme of our adult issues. The words that come out in processing the episode are the words that we, ourselves, think say and believe in our upset modes. The words are also what our adversaries in adult life think, say and believe. So the words are imbedded in both the early and later childhood experiences. And those words resonate with the experiences where we actually died or thought we were going to die.
To get our adult life calmed down, we have to experience all the elements we 'missed' during the most significant childhood episodes that are still stuck in our minds. This releases them. The overwhelming upsets in our adult lives are merely these childhood upsets, birth traumas, and past life experiences expressing themselves through our grownup bodies.

The 'bottom line' doesn't come out right away. But whatever comes out is relieving. The way to focus in on the roots of the problem is to work downward from the branches of the tree through the trunk . This is an analogy for how we keep going deeper toward inside ourselves in the therapy. By keeping the sequence of processes moving more and more toward the root fears and foundational experiences that have been running us, we work what is necessary at each level of our unraveling, and we don't spend a lot of time unnecessarily processing material that's all at the same level. This is what makes it more of a therapy than just a series of releases without a central focus.

A major help in this regard is the Structural Integration Bodywork. As the Bodywork literally clears the physical body of more and more of its distortions, the episodes that show up on the top of the stack quite naturally are earlier and more fundamental in our development.

The reasons, that episodes containing the fears of death are the true fundamental ones, are contained in a larger understanding of the therapy. They link each time frame to the others. I'll explain this in great detail in the next few sections.