"What are you, or were you afraid of?"
I used to be afraid of a lot of things. Now, I am only afraid of one. But, it took me a long time to both identify and understand my fears. It wasn’t until I began to question everything about myself, like "why do I think the way I do?" or "why do I do the things that I do?", that I began to truly understand that not only was fear controlling my life, but it was also destroying it. So, is was at that point that I made the decision to declare war on all my fears, and began to look within myself.
The purpose of this internal-war was not just to control my fears, but rather the objective was to eradicate all my fears. But, in order to do that, I first had to identify every single one of my fears, which meant that I would have to be brutally honest with myself.
Then, once the fear was identified, I could track it back to the way to its origins. As it turns out all of my fears originate from early childhood traumatic exposure. I grew up in a home that a mother that was a strong believer that if you 'spare the rod spoil the child'. So, for a young anxious kid with too much energy, that was a serious problem. I can easily remember the countless times that my mother hit me until she got tired of it. It seems to me like violence was my mothers one and only option to not only discipline her kids but also her way to release her own frustrations due to her own shortcomings. As a result of that, not only did I become extremely afraid of her, but I also developed the fear to any situation that could lead to violence.