Learning to Live Beyond Fear
By: Jade Taryn
Tags: Abuse, Life Lessons, Spirituality, Spiritual Growth, Fear

Learning to Live Beyond Fear

How facing everything and rising changed my life and could change yours too

Photo by Sammie Vasquez on Unsplash

Fear is what I used to live in a constant state of, on and off since childhood. Yet it was only somewhat recently that I gained an awareness that fear-based living was only a conditioned state of being and not actual ‘being’ itself.

You see, up until I became a mother in 2017, I was fairly comfortable with sleepwalking my way through life and self-medicating, largely through alcohol and hedonism to numb rather than address my state of fear. Unlike my early teens, where the world seemed filled with greater possibilities, my adulthood saw me refusing to make any little solid plans.

I was horrendous at managing my finances, taking out one piece of credit after the other and more often than not, I was hungover from a diet typically consisting of two bottles of sauvignon a night. Accompanied by anything quick to eat, that could quieten down the sadness of many years battling eating disorders.

Yes, my world was adorned with the extrinsic indicators of success; nice City apartment, successful career, long term partner, lots of smiley Instagram selfies, etc, etc. But in reality, my world had been carefully constructed to mask terrible sadness and huge aspects of my self, that in all honesty, I was filled with shame about.

As I’ve now learned thanks to becoming a mother, your personality is contributed to by all that happens to you in childhood. And whilst my partner and I strive to understand and practice conscious parenting and to be the best versions of ourselves for our young daughter, regrettably, my childhood experience of parenting methods was wildly different.

The root cause of my fear

Fear for me was witnessed and embodied early on in childhood. Fear of angry, violent outbursts from my Father, fear of my Mothers alcohol abuse used as her method to ‘blot everything out’. Fear of going home from my aunts or grandmothers to become the intermediary between yet another round of verbally abusive arguments. Fear of the living room being smashed up again, or yet another coffee table being flung against the wall and shattering into pieces. And the fear of not being able, to be honest about anything.

Pretending everything was okay and never being encouraged to acknowledge the emotions of what was being felt and witnessed.

The trauma and fear of this period buried itself deep within me. Even more so as I was constantly instructed in the practice of silence and hidden shame as the overarching theme to manage any and all emotions. With each argument resulting in the police being called or family members turning up to our home to intervene, it was firmly expressed that speaking about what was happening was forbidden. Not to friends, or to teachers, nor to anyone.

The paradox of my life, that I have long since wrangled with, was that we were outwardly, this glossy looking young family, who had sports cars and wore (much to my mother's pride) ‘the nicest clothes’, all whilst smashed up pieces of furniture were resting in the back garden to be collected, following yet another angry outburst lacking in any self-restraint, or self-moderation.

The elephant in the room, throughout that entire time, was a nine-year-old version of me, who began self-harming as the weight of what was being seen, heard and felt became too much to keep inside.

Brief freedoms

The first expression against this conditioned state of fear was as a 15-year- who at that time, thanks to the development of self and the evolution of own voice stood up against my Father one evening as another physical outburst of anger exploded. Much like my younger years, I stood in the middle of the shoves and abusive slurs towards my Mother, which on this occasion resulted in me being physically picked up and thrown from the front door of our home.

From here, I ran to my Grandmothers house nearby and when the fear of my Father turning up to take me home again became too much, I clambered from the second floor of my grandmothers spare bedroom window, to run away in the dead of night to the flat of a friend, little under three miles away in the town where I went to High school.

The feeling as I ran away from the violence, the control, the anger, the abuse, the name-calling, the rules, the impossible standards, the restrictions and the conditioning were ones of pure relief, pure freedom at last.

That freedom from fear was short-lived. With a return home, several months later becoming inevitable when it was discovered that the people I then lived with, in a high rise social housing block, who as car thieves, often high on drugs and desperate for cash, had taken the keys to my parent's house and attempted to break in. It was only on learning this that saw me returning to my parent's house.

You see for me at that time, living in what could only be described as abject poverty with no food in the cupboards, no hot water, two social workers visiting me to assess my well being. Living with a teen mother and car thieves, and amphetamine addicts, offered a more loving and homely alternative to that which I experienced living with my parents at home.

Photo by Alexander Krivitskiy on Unsplash

Fear resumed again

On my return home, fear continued to plague my late teens and early adulthood. Growing to become a well-rehearsed practice of Forgetting-Everything-And-Running. Keeping friendships at arm’s length, self-confidence and self-belief to a minimum. All thanks to years of being conditioned by strong controls and bold punishments if my behaviour wasn’t deemed perfect enough. Fear kept me in a never-ending and suffocating cycle of never feeling good enough. Fear kept me small, unseen and trapped in a cycle of shame.