What Is Your Core Fear? Ready to Give It Up?

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For most of us, our childhoods leave us afraid in some way. Not just of spiders or heights but core fears that affect our relationships, limit our options, and shape our behaviors in major ways. Knowing yours can help you tackle it directly. Here are the most common ones:

Fear of abandonment

You’ve learned that people can leave or will eventually leave you through desertion, death, and being emotionally unavailable. As a child, your ways of coping are limited: You can become clingy, controlling, or good, perfect, and accommodative so that others don’t get upset with you and have a reason to leave.

Fear of smothering

If abandonment is the fear of others moving too far away, some struggle with others getting too close. Closeness, they've learned, can lead to control, a taking over, emotional suffocation. How to manage this fear? Keep others at arm's length, not revealing yourself, being hyper-independent, or pushing others away with anger or control.

Fear of strong emotions

If you grew up in a chaotic, emotionally volatile home, strong emotions created anxiety, and you likely coped by walking on eggshells, being hyper-attuned to the emotional climate so you knew when to withdraw and protect yourself.

Fear of being seen

Here, you learned that if people really get to know you, they will, at best, see you as the impostor you really are or, at worst, the despicable person you already see yourself as. Closeness translates into getting busted. As a result, you’ve learned, like those fearful of smothering, to keep others at arm’s distance by creating a cloak of superficiality and avoiding intimacy or vulnerability.

Fear of being invisible

No one cares about you. You get lost in the shuffle; you have no voice and are quickly dismissed. You have two options: To accept your fate, give up, and blame yourself as worthy of such treatment, or rebel against it: Act out to make others see you, become narcissistic, and manipulate others so that the world revolves around you.

Again, these fears are common, and your childhood ways of coping made sense in your childhood. But maybe it’s time to upgrade that software and change your behaviors so you are less sensitive to these old demons. Here’s how to get started.

Know your fear

Step back 50 feet and look at your life patterns: Where do you get stuck in your relationships? What keeps coming up as a problem? What causes you to leave, stay too long, or not speak up?

Change your story

What partially holds your fear in place is your story, assumptions about you, others, the world: you can’t trust people, you’re an impostor, etc. It's time to upgrade to what’s real.

Approach what you fear

The antidote to that well-ingrained anxiety is running toward what you’re afraid of. If you’re scared to speak up because you’ll get busted or dismissed or people will leave or control you, take the risk of speaking up. This is how you rewire your brain and cancel out those old fears. You find out that what you think will happen doesn’t, which rewards you for taking the risk and changes your view of others. The world becomes less scary.

Take baby steps

Don’t retraumatize yourself by rushing in. It’s OK to go slow as long as you move forward. If you get overwhelmed, you’re likely to quit.

The theme here is that we all have something we can’t do, some old wound that continues to shape our lives. By continuing to give into our fears, they retain their power. The key is behaviorally breaking those old patterns. When you do, you become the adult you really are.