It’s truly amazing to watch the things that come about because of this site and what’s written here. This week has been pretty lazy for me as we’re into the last few working weeks of the year and nature’s slowed me down to help me rest and heal from all the revelations and heavy-duty mental workload. I’ve come to understand a lot of things and felt a massive change in myself in terms of the levels of nervous energy that usually accompany me wherever i go. I could have slept all day today, and those who know me will understand how unusual that is. I’m fairly apathetic about writing but i do want to talk about something.
I’ve learnt a lot recently but one thing has stuck out more than anything else - that many of us have what i call a “cardinal fear”. A crippling and paralysing institutional fear that is the root of all the maladaptive and dysfunctional behaviour we exhibit. Everything that we do that is unhealthy is a symptom of that cardinal fear rather than a problem by itself. When we deal with that fear, the other problems go away. Healing is a process of “rolling back” each problem until we get to the root issue.
When you are gardening, you need to regularly weed your flowerbed or field to make sure only the plants you want flourish. If you allow others to develop with them, they become suffocated and die. But everyone knows to properly get rid of weeds you need to pull them up from the root. If you simply rip off the part of the plant that is above the ground, it just grows back and nothing changes. Our cardinal fear is the same - whatever else happens above the soil will grow back unless we strike at the base. Our cardinal fear is our “root” fear, the root of everything. To heal and develop properly, it must be taken out there rather than dressed in bandages to leave the wound festering underneath.
This cardinal fear is almost always generated from your father and seems to set in around 5-7 years old. Something goes wrong around then. It is so subtle that for most of your life you don’t even realise it’s there at all and a lot never do. I’m not saying everyone has the same thing, but there is a unsettling similarity between those i’ve known that could be considered a strong pattern. That fear settles in very deeply and becomes so much a part of us that we can’t understand why we’re doing what we’re doing and when it even happened in the first place. We’re all so proud that none of us will ever acknowledge that anything that happened that early affected us then, or affects us now.
The types of people who i am coming to believe have a cardinal fear are alcoholics, drug addicts, psychopaths, gambling/sex addicts, schizophrenics, bullies, anorexics, bulimics, attention/drama seekers, compulsive liars, victims, game-playing manipulators, co-dependents, wife-beaters, self-harmers, violent and aggressive abusers, sufferers of depression and more. These are not labels that denigrate – these people are not “damaged”, they are brave and needing support more than anything else.
My argument is that anyone who suffers from one or more of these behaviours has a root cause to it – a terrible and destructive ingrained fear that set in when they were young and consequently drove them as they grew up into very destructive cycles. And this article is my theory.
That age between 5-7 years old is a crucial time in our cognitive development where we form our opinions and attitudes about the world around us. I think of this root cardinal fear as a massive shard of glass or a metal spike driven right down your throat like a man swallowing a sword or a scalpel left inside you after surgery. Because it has struck when we are small, that shard stays inside and we gradually get so used to it that it’s not there anymore. It’s only when we look later on in life and are fed up with there being something “wrong” with us that we can’t articulate that we begin to look for it and take the damned thing out to feel better within ourselves and solve that lifelong “problem” with ourselves.
Something happens that strikes terrible ingrained and crippling fear into us – an incident, a prolonged suffering of abuse, an illness, a problem – it becomes pathological and for no fault of our own. We are not old enough to understand what’s going on or to be able to tell anyone what we’re thinking, which makes it effectively involuntary.
My own cardinal fear is a combination of being forsaken and being hurt by those who have power over me. I decided somehow when i was young that anyone who had power or authority over me would always misuse it and hurt me, and that was because i didn’t deserve to be treated properly. Hence my problem with authority and my distant behaviour when it comes to attaching to anyone romantically, or forgiving them when they hurt me.
You see that’s the understanding of a child’s mind we need to grasp – everything is an absolute. If one person does something, everyone will, always. Everyone does this, it always happens this way – etc. We can’t recognise that type of thinking when we’re adults, but more importantly, that thinking is done in the heart, not the mind. The way we thought as a child is not how we think now.
Let’s take a more dramatic example of when a father leaves in middle childhood, around that age when a little girl is 5-7 years old. It’s very, very common in this country and probably every 3rd woman you meet comes from that kind of childhood. Up until then, the father is a source of strength, protection, power and shelter – our sense of security comes from that protection and validation comes from his delight in her of how lovely she is. Children are cruel and will bully each other for any reason whatsoever (primarily because they are mimicking what they see at home) and the father is where she finds shelter knowing she will always be safe if he is there to protect her.
Then suddenly, one day, he is gone. That protection and security disappears without warning. She doesn’t understand the ways of the world, why it would happen or even that it would happen at all in the first place. She is vulnerable, scared, upset and everything is frightening. Fear sets in everywhere as there is no safe place or refuge from all the scary things out there. Her mother is upset and bitter and more cold to her than usual, and it’s confusing and disorientating. The bullies really get their teeth in and she’s more scared than ever. Mum’s scared too, so she takes it out on her little one. She just doesn’t understand.
About then, she makes decisions about the world around her – what it is, how it works and the way things happen. Her child mind is not mature enough to fully understand so it becomes subconscious. Like all little ones, she thinks it’s her fault that Daddy isn’t there anymore. Men hurt women. Women are powerless over men and you have no control. People who love you abandon and forsake you. One minute you are loved, and then suddenly you are not and that love disappears overnight. You can wake up one day and everything is gone. Daddy left because he although he loved her and mummy, but he doesn’t anymore. People you love are there one minute and then they are gone the next. You are safe today but tomorrow you will be harmed or at risk. Daddy left because she wasn’t lovely enough and didn’t love her enough. Daddy decided she wasn’t worthy to be loved and left.
These things make no sense to us because our minds are mature as adults. But to a child, they are reality in every sense of the word. We think that way and experience them that way. That is the way life is at 7 years old.
And from that moment on, she lives her life always waiting for day that the love she experiences will disappear overnight. Abandonment and loss is round every corner. She waits for things to inevitably change suddenly without warning and crush her emotionally. She can only ever commit 99% to anyone or anything because she expects them to leave or for it to break down. When she doesn’t hear from someone, she doesn’t expect to ever see or hear from them ever again. She is always checking if things have completely changed because she is always expecting them to. She can’t rest or relax in someone’s love because it will never be permanent or unchanging. It will always be disappearing one day down the line and she will be getting hurt. That day could be tomorrow morning.
Her cardinal fear sets in slowly and invades everything she does. That fear is that she will wake up one day and the person she loves will be gone and everything will have changed without warning.
So she grows up and discovers that her beauty and sexuality lure and control men, and she invests everything into those things to try and take control over that fear. But it is never enough because they grow bored or cheat, and never appreciate her for who she is. She always has to know how much they care all the time and commands their attention at all times just to feel safe they aren’t intending on leaving overnight, as all people you care about do. That fear drives her. If they cheat or leave, it is because she isn’t beautiful enough or worthy of their love, as she suspected.
She seeks out older men, and those that have similar traits to her father, and particularly seeks protection. She desperately craves love, and has so much to give, but is driven by massive and overwhelming fear. She is filled with anger that she can never pin down or express. But it is anger created and fuelled by that terrible lifelong fear. She becomes aggressive, desolate and enraged by her powerlessness. She is trapped by herself and can’t understand why.
She punishes herself to make herself beautiful enough that they will never leave. None of them will see her in any way other than amazing. She takes that question of “Am i lovely?” to the men she loves that Dad should have answered a long time ago, but she finds no answer that fulfils her. Her fear kicks in every time she feels neutral or insecure (that they might leave), so it turns into controlling and obsessive behaviour – possessiveness, insecurity and envy, as well as extreme jealousy. But under it all is fear - one cardinal fear that goes back to the beginning when she made all those decisions about the world. She is always making the wrong choices because her decisions are driven by fear.
You can spot that cardinal fear quite easily. Just look for the extreme and irrational reaction. Taking that example, for either a man or a woman, and the time that they say “i thought i’d never see or hear from you again”. Now that isn’t rational or reasonable, and it’s a child speaking. Of course you will as they are an important part of your life. Nobody disappears overnight in the adult world unless they die suddenly, but that’s not as common as we believe. But it is their fear talking, not reality. The child in them is appearing and speaking. That cardinal fear has been woken up and is starting the mental washing machine. In mine, you just look for when i am overwhelmingly violent, emotionally speaking. It means i’m scared and hurt.
And then you realise they are actually reacting to something that happened when they were 5 years old. They aren’t addressing that situation, but their fear that’s being stirred up because of that situation. You do it too. What we imagine talks, not what is actually happening. Our fear speaks, not our eyes or ears. We are not in that moment – we are looking at it through a lens we made when we could barely pronounce polysyllabic words. And we don’t know why. We can’t remember thinking all that when we were small as it just doesn’t make sense now we are older. We don’t even remember that stuff happening.
Now imagine that fear as the root of a plant set inside someone, and the branches growing out of the trunk as the symptoms and problems they suffer. You can cut off as many of the branches as you want, but the root is still embedded in them. The same problems will keep resurfacing until the root is taken out. You can put them on medication, let them put on as much make up as they want, send them to clinics, put them on programs, send them to counsellors, the list of possibilities are endless. But the root cause is those decisions they made when they were young when that traumatic event occurred and allowed that cardinal fear to take over. Only dealing with that cardinal fear can release them.
There are so many girls like this around. All suffering inside and searching for that answer and wondering what is so “wrong” with them. All finding the wrong answers that leave them even emptier than before. The answer is that nothing is wrong with them at all, and they are perfectly healthy and reacting as they should. These people are absolutely amazing. It takes a special kind of strength and beauty to be able to live and function normally under that degree of oppression. They are to be celebrated and honoured, not cast aside. But they are also alone right now as i write this. Your job is to get off your ass and learn to see them differently.
Look inside.
Those people you think are “damaged”, “crazy” or “cold” are scared. Their anger comes from fear. Their needs and quasi-obsessive behaviours are driven by that cardinal fear, and they need release from it. Look further than their skin and what they’ve done. Understand what drives them and forgive them because it wasn’t their fault. Their responsibility is to re-learn and re-explore that mental programming, and it takes a very, very brave person to do that. They have courage unlike anything you will ever know, possess or experience. Only those who have been wounded but get back up to face that dangerous world are the ones you can count on to fight next to you or trust to have your back. What you see now is nothing compared to who they could be once they exorcise that cardinal fear.
Imagine the energy inside someone who has suffered for so long under that fear. Imagine their potential when they are released from it. Imagine their beauty, pride, strength and sheer magnificence when they are liberated to be free and beautiful – they shine unlike any other type of person on earth. They can do things that no-one else can and are more driven than anyone else. They are unstoppable and a force of energy so explosive it can blind you. Freedom after so long and a lifetime to spend releasing others from the same thing and making something of themselves. A world brimming with possibilities that used to be a place they didn’t want to be.
That’s why you believe in people and look past their faults, mistakes and strange behaviour. When you understand that their fear keeps them prisoner, they are a vulnerable human being rather than a monster that can’t be reasoned with. It is our task, mission and priority to find and recognise them, and then turn on the light in a very darkened room because they may not be able to see the light switch themselves. They may even hate you for showing them it because they were meant to do it themselves, and they may label you as someone who fancies themselves as a psychiatrist. But you have to bother, and to have faith. Only those who have had the light switched on for them can realise why you need to fight through their protest to show them, even if for 2 fleeting seconds.
Don’t fear the pain or their fight. Don’t fear their darkness or the battle that lies ahead. Don’t fear the resistance you will get for breaking the brick wall down. If you truly love someone, be it as a friend or romantically, your sacrifice means they are liberated, and greater love hath no man that he lay down his life for his friend. They won’t understand it as such, but that is the nature of sacrifice. They won’t understand why you love them or how, but your response is the same every time – just show them, without words or explanation. Their heart will figure it out.
“…but then I realized I would rather fight with you than make love with anybody else.”
