Fear Tales

What is the role of fear in your life? Can fear make you do the right thing, or can it do things right? My answer to both these questions will be “No”, but I know a wide set of people who believe you should have fear of someone or something so that you don’t do anything wrong in life. Fear is an extreme emotion which can overpower everything and make you handicapped leaving you with no capacity to do anything right. Then why do we think fear is important? Are we misunderstanding the role fear actually plays in our life? Fear camouflages itself and attacks its prey leaving the person unable to tell even the Fear Tales.

The initial mode of communication in a man’s life is through crying. When a baby is born, it cries and tells the world: “I am here”. This cry will start getting the child everything it needs upto a certain age. Once the child learns to speak and enters the mischievous phase, we indulge in disciplining the behavior. Initially with love and when we lose patience, it turns into anger and punishment. During these times the child reverts to its original mode of communication. When an adult demonstrates anger, there comes the entry of fear in the young mind. Fear is a camouflaged emotion. It can take any form and so kids don’t understand how to communicate this and they go back to what they initially learnt: crying. Sometimes we leave the communication unaddressed thinking it is good to have some sort of fear so they don’t repeat the same mistake and sometimes we console the child giving our own reasoning for that cry saying: are you sad, did you get hurt, did you feel bad etc. But fear once entered will never leave the body because it can camouflage and stay without, we noticing its presence.

Kids always say they are scared of going to school, scared of this teacher, scared of some senior student etc. We parents tend to ignore that because we think once we finish school that fear won’t have a role in our life. Adults love to have a reunion after 10-15 years. When they do that, there will always be a conversation of that one teacher whom we are scared of or one senior who bullied us or some other story which instigated fear at that age. The emotion is no longer intense, but the memory still exists. Our camouflaged fear made us forget the pain which shaped our personality. Since we no longer have to face the same situation, we forget the pain of fear we went through and feel there is no need to address that for the kids too. Here we follow the saying: “this too shall pass”. Kids not knowing how to express the feeling resort to either crying, silence, rebel, withdrawal and many more unrelated behaviors which we don’t associate with fear.

Fear has an integral part in all our lives because what that creates within us can never be explained nor can be structured. A simple statement like: “I don’t like you” to a strong emotion: “I HATE YOU” both can be a result of the same fear in two different people. Both are right because what they felt can never be explained in a way that other person can feel it.

As a little girl, I was very scared of one of my aunt. It was only because of her appearance, her voice and her stern look. She was taller than my mother, had a louder voice than my mother and a command over her speech. I am comparing her to my mother because for kids adults means parents. So, they associate physical features of any adult to their parents and compare them with those standards and draw conclusion of like or dislike.  When we are small everything looks huge but as we grow, we realise, OK! It is not that bad. But certain relationships are built on the foundation of fear, and it is then that we start avoiding such people no matter how closely we are related to them. My aunt loved me a lot and my fear was because of my imagination and not because of anything she did to me. So, as I grew tall, she started appearing like a normal adult, her voice sounded just like any other person and her appearance became her recognition to me. Love conquered the imaginative fear created in my mind for myself. But when we base our relationship on fear and not love, as we grow old, we start drifting apart. We no longer like that feeling of being associated with that relationship. We try to get rid of fear by getting rid of the people who create fear.

A bond is created with love, but a gap is built because of fear.  We all would have had that one person in childhood who loves telling scary stories and the result will be, scary nights, fear of staying alone in the house, fear of entering a dark room alone.  Since everyone has experienced this and grown into adulthood, when that happened to our kids, we treat it as negligible and say: “nothing will happen”.  Fear of any magnitude, at any point in life should not be neglected. It may be nothing for me, but it is everything for you. Help our loved ones overcome fear by helping them gain back their confidence in what they believe and building their self-esteem. Love, Trust, Hope and Respect are the four pillars which holds any relationship strong. Don’t let fear fog these pillars and camouflage to be one of it.

When your respect comes from fear…
When your love shows fear…
When your trust lives on fear…
When your hope is built on fear…
   It is an indication that your relationship is in danger.

Fear captures everything
Fear leaves you nothing
Relationships perish when there is Fear
Relationships cherish when there is NO Fear

We all fantasise over fairy tales but when life has fear instead of a fairy, then no magic can change the Fear Tale to a Fairy Tale.