What Fears Control You?

Hello everyone, this is Stalilingus! How are you doing, my manipulators? Is everything going well? I hope so. Today, I’d like to share some thoughts about our fears. This is a very useful and fascinating article—enjoy reading!

Fear: A Universal Feeling

Fear is a feeling familiar to every single person. Each of us has faced situations where fear became a serious obstacle in something important. Maybe you had a typical student experience where you did poorly on an exam because you forgot everything out of fear, or maybe fear stopped you from approaching someone you liked, and you regretted it for a long time afterward.

For some, fear prevents them from speaking in public, which can slow down career growth. Most often, people turn to psychologists when their fears become destructive (unreasonable and obsessive fears, phobias, panic attacks, nightmares, etc.).

Repressed and Unconscious Fears

But if your fears don’t bother you, that doesn’t mean you’ve gotten rid of them or that you don’t have any. People don’t usually brag about their fears; they try to forget, avoid, or suppress them, not think about them. Nevertheless, everyone has fears, and just because you don’t know about them doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

The main fears are usually unconscious, so you might not realize that it’s fear causing you anxiety or holding back your development. As a result, you might not even notice that it’s not you controlling your behavior, but your unconscious fears.

Where Do Unconscious Fears Come From?

Fear accompanies the growth and development of a child, and later, an adult—at every new stage of development, a new fear appears, connected to learning new skills or entering unfamiliar “territory,” which must be overcome.

In adulthood, the fears that hinder and slow down development are usually those for which no defenses were developed in childhood—fears the child couldn’t overcome. A child can only do this with the help of adults. For a child’s survival, care and communication with loved ones are crucial, and the threat of losing them feels as dangerous as losing life itself.

Your unique set of “hindering” fears was shaped by childhood events that threatened your connection with loved ones (divorce, illness, or death of a parent), as well as situations you perceived as life-threatening and that weren’t explained by adults (injuries, surgeries, disasters, etc.).

Therefore, your parents’ personalities, how they interacted with you in childhood, and their own repressed fears play a key role in the origin of your unconscious fears.

Main Forms of Fear

The well-known German psychoanalyst Fritz Riemann identified the main types of fears that have the greatest impact on a child’s personality development. It turns out that behind many different fears, there may be one or several core fears that shape your character traits.

There are four main types of fear, each corresponding to one of the four basic human needs:

1. The need for individuation, for separateness (the right to be different from others, to maintain your uniqueness, individuality, and independence). The corresponding fear is the fear of being engulfed by another person, fear of merging, fear of self-sacrifice, fear of losing your freedom and autonomy, fear of intimacy.
2. The need to be part of a whole, of society. The corresponding fear is the fear of being rejected, not accepted, fear of loneliness, fear of expressing your own opinion that differs from others, etc.
3. The need for constancy, stability. The threat to this need creates the fear of change, instability, disorder, freedom, and risk.
4. The need for change, for development. The fears associated with this need are the fear of responsibility, necessity, and routine, which are experienced as lack of freedom and finality.

Personality Types Based on Fear

Each of us has all these basic forms of fear to some degree. But if one of them dominates, it forms a one-sided personality based on one of the main unconscious fears. Fritz Riemann identified four personality types corresponding to the main fears:

1. Fear of losing oneself in contact with others, fear of intimacy—schizoid personality.This core fear forms at the earliest stage of life—if an infant experiences alienation, abandonment, emptiness, or, conversely, an overload of impressions they can’t process, instead of trust and interest in the world, they develop basic distrust and self-absorption. This can happen due to the loss of parents, frequent changes in caregivers, unwanted pregnancy, or lack of emotional contact with the mother.
2. Fear of being rejected or abandoned—depressive personality.Depressive personalities have a strong desire for close, trusting relationships, a passionate wish to love and be loved, and a tendency toward self-sacrifice. Fear of independence, deep feelings of worthlessness and guilt can develop either from mothers who are overly attached and focused on the child, not allowing them to show independence, or from mothers who are overly demanding, constantly rejecting, critical, or neglectful of the child’s needs.
3. Fear of change—obsessive personality type.These personalities are characterized by caution, planning, and a desire to avoid surprises. The drive for perfection and perfectionism plays a key role, so every action is accompanied by doubts. This type forms during toilet training and other rules that limit the child’s spontaneous behavior. The stricter the parents were during this period, the more the child learned to suppress impulses, increasing the likelihood of developing this personality type. Obsessive personalities fear change, freedom, and risk the most.
4. Fear of constancy—histrionic (hysteroid) personality.Histrionic personalities fear restrictions, traditions, patterns, and order—the very things that are important to obsessive personalities. They tend to quickly and thoughtlessly satisfy their desires without worrying about consequences (“here and now,” “after us, the deluge”). In love, it’s important for them to be the center of attention, to constantly affirm their significance—not for self-sacrifice, as with depressive personalities, but for the thrill of influencing their partner. Their relationships are marked by frequent quarrels and reconciliations, and high demands on their partner. Psychoanalysts trace the origin of this fear to ages 4–6, when a child becomes aware of their gender and, in a healthy family, imitates the same-sex parent. In single-parent families, in cases of parental conflict or family violence, a fear of the inevitability of one’s role and of accepting life’s conditions develops, which is overcome by retreating into an illusory life, refusing to accept a role, or rejecting rules and constancy.

How to Overcome Your Key Fear

The more you work on yourself and understand yourself, the closer you get to your core fear. The main feature of key fears is that, because they arise so early in life, we didn’t understand, name, or become aware of them, but they were closely tied to our survival and now operate automatically, outside our control. That’s why the first step toward change is to recognize your fear, admit it exists, learn why it was vital for you in childhood, how it might still be useful, and when it gets in your way and needs to be overcome.

Stalilingus