Even the word fear can ignite a nervous feeling inside a person. Before we can begin to feel safe in our trauma, I want us to break down the word fear and what this truly means. I will share my own personal tricks and tips. 

I have plenty of examples of when I’ve felt fear, but If I candidly share a few examples with you, then you can see if any of the feelings resonate because then after we can begin to review how to break this fear down. 

I was always in fear of my Mum, to me she came across as a dominating, cruel and judgemental character in my life. Her critical words would cut me like a knife, and her silence would be sickening. My body would go into a battle of freeze or flight mode for most of my life, until I recognised I too, have a voice then the fear feeling would be different when associated with fight. The amount of control my Mum had over not just me, but the whole family was disturbing. 

My voice started speaking when I got into my late teen/early adult years. That voice had a purpose and it wanted to challenge the really messed up ideals my Mum would put onto the family. So as I started to speak back to her, heart thumping and palms sweaty. I realised the more I can speak, even if i’m not heard is the first real step to becoming brave enough to overcome the fear. Personally a tip I would suggest is creating a habit, so if you’ve been brave enough to do something once that gives you fear, believe me you can do it over and over again. So I would prepare myself to go into fight mode with my Mum when it came to feeling that fear of not being able to speak up, as I’d remember that day when I first did it and even though that day was then full of rageful, hurtful comments from my Mum as I was standing up for myself and had gone against her, those words I could numb out because it felt good, really good doing something for myself. 

Stick to that routine, and watch how the fear will slowly dissipate into thin air, my next battle with fear came from confronting my Dad and when he would get angry, oh god would he be scary to me. I will be honest with you, confronting my Dad took years and years of pratice and I had to feel physically strong enough to take him on if he tried to lay his hands on me. So I would spend hours in the gym, not only as a escapism but also with the idea that I had to watch my own back from my Dad’s rageful outbursts too. Don’t get me wrong, I still am to this day quite a slim person but I think lifting the weights felt like I had powerful energy and I needed that to boost my self confidence when it came to facing my Dad.

One day I attempted to take him on, when he was being extremely aggressive and trying to throw my older Sister out of the home when she had only come to visit. I went into protector mode and thought he can never throw us out again! So I did stand up against him and even explained that as I’ve gotten older I am stronger, luckily that evening no physical violence was involved but it could have easily led there. I hope when you read these stories, if you have fear lingering inside of you because of my experience I want you to take a second to breathe and recognise I had to go through these moments as they then paved the way to where I am at now, living in a safe, peaceful place and never having to be paranoid that someone was going to come and hurt me again. So my next tip is, to feel that fear and do it anyway (as long as you don’t compromise your own safety) but there are ways you can achieve not feeling the fear, so for me in that moment the priority of protecting my Sister was out of love, not out of fear. 

So that leaves us with two tips, routine and finding an emotion that is greater than the fear itself, can really add value to your life as you will be equipped with the most powerful tool there is and that is standing tall with what you believe in and going against the evil that has been put on this world.

I believe there are many other types of fear that can be felt by a person, and I will do a part 2 to explain the fear when dealing with cultural backlash when leaving a toxic family. 

Until next time…

Sonam x

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My TikTok Handle: Sonam’s_story

My email: sonam.story@gmail.com