S2 EP301 – Most Fear Cannot be Trusted

Hi everyone, and welcome to the Inner Bonding Podcast. I’m Dr. Margaret Paul, and today I’m speaking about the two different kinds of fear and what fear you can trust, and what fear you can’t trust.

To say that fear can’t be trusted may seem like a bold statement, especially because fear often feels so real, so urgent, so convincing. Fear can flood our bodies, tighten our chest, race our hearts, and whisper to us that something terrible is about to happen. And because the sensation is so strong, we often assume that fear must be telling the truth.

But much of the fear we feel is coming from the programmed false beliefs of the wounded self and the resulting controlling behavior. And it’s this kind of fear can’t be trusted.

Today we’ll explore:

• Why fear from the wounded self feels so convincing
• The difference between real danger and emotional fear
• How fear distorts reality
• How fear collapses our capacity to love
• How to gently move beyond fear into truth, clarity, and inner safety

This will be a journey into understanding yourself more deeply, and into reclaiming the parts of you that fear has held hostage.

Let’s start with this question: What is fear really?

Fear is a survival mechanism. It’s designed to protect us from actual danger like from a from physical or a financial threat – from something that could truly hurt us.

But most of the fear we experience today is not about survival. It’s emotional fear. It’s fear rooted in the false beliefs we assumed from childhood experiences, such as fear of disapproval and rejection, fear of humiliation, fear of being wrong, fear of making mistakes and failing, fear of being too much, not enough, unlovable, or unworthy.

This emotional fear is not based on what’s happening in the present moment. It’s based in what we once believed we needed to do to stay safe – trying to control others and outcomes by pleasing others, shrinking ourselves, staying silent, achieving more, or hiding vulnerability.

Because fear is wired into the nervous system, it feels true. It feels urgent.
It feels like a warning. But the fear that’s generated by the self-abandoning and controlling behavior of the ego wounded self is not an indication of truth. This fear is an indication that we are telling ourselves lies from our young or adolescent wounded self. This fear cannot be trusted to guide us into what is right and loving to ourselves. Instead, this fear is our inner child alerting us to the fact that we are abandoning ourselves with ruminating and making up all the bad things that can happen. This fear often originates from hearing ourselves say, “What if….?” “What if I get sick?” “What if I end up alone?” “What if my partner yells at me or leaves me?” “What if my partner cheats on me?” “What if I lose my job?”

Of course any of these happening can cause actual fear of real and present danger, but the fear I’m referring to is the fear that comes from projecting into the future with “What if….?” The bad thing isn’t actually happening, but you are scaring yourself by imagining it happening.

When this is the fear you feel, you can’t trust what it’s telling you about the future, but you can trust that it’s telling you that you are abandoning yourself.

Take a breath. Think of a fear you carry today – fear of rejection, failure, conflict, loss. Ask yourself: “Is this fear truly about now, or is it me projecting into the future?” 

One of the things that’s very important, and why I’m doing this podcast, is to learn to differentiate between the voice of your ego wounded self and the voice of your higher guidance. 

A common question I hear from many people is, “How do I know when a message is coming from my wounded self or from my guidance?”

Brianne, one of my clients, told me the following story:

“I was in the process of investing a large sum of money with someone whom I thought was an honest man. Just as I was ready to transfer the money, I got a feeling of extreme dread, which I SO wish I had listened to. I ignored the feeling, telling myself that I was being silly, and transferred the money. I ended up losing all the money. I didn’t know at that time that the feeling was coming from my guidance instead of from my wounded self.”

It is very important to learn to distinguish between the fear and anxiety that comes from our own thoughts and the feeling of dread that comes from our guidance letting us know about real and present danger.

As I said, fear and anxiety are often the result of something you are telling yourself that’s not true. The anxiety may be extreme, as in panic attacks, but it generally starts with a thought about something bad about to happen. The mind is quite capable of making up all kinds of disasters, which leads to the feeling of anxiety and even terror. But just because the feeling is severe does not mean that the thought is accurate. The fear and anxiety are letting you know that you are off track in your thinking – that you are telling yourself a lie.

“Brianne,” I asked, “was the feeling of dread different than your everyday anxiety?”

“Yes. It was a deeper solid dark feeling, not at all like when I get anxious. It was a feeling of something being really WRONG. When I’m anxious, I can usually trace the anxiety to something I just thought, but this feeling came up all by itself, without my thinking anything. It wasn’t like the panicky feeling that I get when I’m thinking about bad things happening. The panicky feeling makes me feel kind of scattered and off kilter, while this feeling was…like solid and dark. I don’t know exactly how to describe it. It wasn’t fluttering around like my regular fear and anxiety. It was like a dark heavy rock in the pit of my stomach.

“After I lost the money, I realized that this feeling was my guidance. After that, I started listening to it. I had a situation after that when I got the same feeling and listened to it. My mother was having an expensive piece of furniture refinished. When the man came to pick it up, I got the same feeling. I told my mother that this was a bad man who was going to steal her furniture. She didn’t believe me, but she got his license plate and had him sign a contract. It turned out I was completely right. She was able to get the furniture back only because of the license plate. So now I am very grateful for that feeling, but I sure wish I had trusted it before investing the money.”

Our guidance is here to warn us of real and present danger, and it is up to us to be open to learning and to trust our feelings. 

It is very important to learn to distinguish the difference between the frequency of anxiety and fear from the wounded self, and the frequency of the dread that comes directly from guidance. Anxiety is our inner guidance’s  way of letting us know that we are off track in our thinking and behavior, and dread is our guidance’s way of letting us know that something is truly wrong or dangerous.

If you start to really attend to your feelings – Step One of Inner Bonding – you will learn the difference between your wounded self scaring you and your guidance giving you important information.

Fear coming from the wounded self has a very specific voice. It’s insistent. It’s repetitive. It’s urgent. It can be dramatic and it often speaks in absolutes such as, “You can’t,” “They won’t,” “You’ll fail,” “You’ll be alone,” “You’re not safe.”

The voice of the wounded self that causes fear might whisper and be background noise, or it may be very loud. When you feel your stomach tighten and nothing bad is happening in the moment, you might want to notice where your tight stomach is coming from regarding your thoughts. 

The wounded self often tried to control your life by telling you the worst possible outcome and insisting that it’s inevitable.

Truth, on the other hand, has a very different voice. It’s calm. It’s grounded. It’s steady. It can be heavy and dark like Brianna’s dread, and it’s giving you important information. It never uses panic or pressure, and it never attacks your worth.

The truth from your guidance can come to you with a feeling of dread like it did with Brianna, or there can be a sensation that something is off regarding a person or situation. This is what you want to learn to discern and trust. 

Fear from the wounded self comes from the past being projected onto the present and the future. Fear from your guidance comes from the present regarding what’s actually happening.

When we learn to distinguish these two voices, much changes.

Learning to trust the way your guidance is communicating with you is very important. I’ve consistently made good decisions when I listened to my guidance, but I’ve consistently made bad decisions, and sometimes very bad decisions, when I didn’t listen to my guidance and trusted my wounded self or trusted someone else instead. 

One of the biggest problems with fear coming from the wounded self is that it distorts reality and how we see the world.

Fear coming from the wounded self says things like: “They’re judging you, saying bad things about you.” “You’re going to get into trouble if you don’t do this right.” “You’re too broken to ever have a loving relationship.” 

This fear creates stories that seem true because they match old wounds – not because they reflect reality.

This fear limits your options, narrows your perspective, and makes your world small. It sees only danger, not possibility. You limit your ability to manifest what you want in your life.

And when this fear is driving your choices, your life becomes about avoiding pain rather than being loving and creating joy.

Imagine how different life could feel if fear from your wounded self wasn’t at the wheel.

When you indulge your wounded self in telling you lies that cause fear, you create a low frequency, and you cannot manifest what you want from a low frequency. Focusing on what you don’t want rather than on what you do want can keep you stuck in never getting what you want.

When you shift your intent from controlling coming from the false belief that this is what makes you feel safe, to loving yourself and accessing the truth from spirit, your frequency is often high enough to manifest what you want. Spirit co-creates with you, and are you co-creating what you don’t want or what you do want? Thoughts are creative, so it’s important to be aware of what you are drawing to you. The more you operate from love and truth, the more you manifest what you want rather than what you don’t want.  

As I said, you do need to trust the fear that’s intuitive, that is rooted in the wisdom of your higher self.

If a car is speeding toward you, fear mobilizes you to move. If someone is dangerous, fear from your guidance signals you that you need boundaries or distance or some other loving action, as Brianna had her mother take when her guidance told her that the man would steal the furniture and she needed his driver’s license and a contract.

The emotional fear coming from your wounded self can sometimes feel similar to the fear of real and present danger – even when the threat is only imagined, so it takes discernment to distinguish the difference

Unfortunately, the body doesn’t distinguish between the fear of real and present danger, and the fear that comes from the false beliefs of the wounded self. The body may go into the same stress response to a tiger or the fear of people not liking you or judging you during a presentation as a speaker. The difference is that with real and present danger you likely go into fight or flight – the natural reaction to real danger. But the fear coming from the wounded self doesn’t dissipate – it stays there, hurting your body.

Emotional fear reacts as if everything is a tiger, except that there is no tiger to run from or no attacker to fight. This is why emotional fear cannot be trusted – it mislabels the fear coming from false beliefs as danger. 

One of the big problems with this is that fear from the wounded self and love cannot occupy the same space. 

When emotional fear from the wounded self runs your life:

• You protect instead of connect
• You close instead of open
• You control instead of learn
• You react instead of respond
• You abandon yourself instead of caring for yourself

Fear from the wounded self says,
“Don’t be vulnerable. It’s not safe.”
“Don’t speak your truth. You’ll be rejected.”
“Don’t take risks. You’ll fail.”
“Don’t open your heart. You’ll get hurt.”

But here’s the paradox: Everything your soul desires requires openness to your guidance. Love. Creativity. Connection. Joy. Intimacy. Purpose. Freedom – all come from being open to learning with your higher guidance rather than listening to your wounded self.

None of these can thrive in the presence of fear from the wounded self.

The wounded self believes it keeps you alive, which is a major false belief. It’s love, not fear, that brings aliveness to your life.

Let’s explore how to move beyond fear from the wounded self and into an inner sense of safety.

It’s important to see fear coming from the false beliefs and self-abandonment of the wounded self for what it is. This fear is coming from your inner child letting you know that you are abandoning yourself in some way. Just becoming aware of this is very powerful.

Instead of trying to numb the fear with various addictions, do a compassionate Inner Bonding process to discover how you are treating yourself and what you are telling yourself that is causing the fear.

As a loving adult with an intent to learn, you can practice seeing the fear from the standpoint of this common acronym:

False
Evidence
Appearing
Real

I find that remembering this helps me to recognize that the fear isn’t actually about something bad happening, or something bad that’s going to happen, but that the fear is my inner child letting me know that I’m scaring her from my wounded self by projecting something bad into the present or the future. The wounded self knows nothing about the future, so whatever it says isn’t based on clairvoyance, but rather on the attempt to control. 

The wounded self often believes that projecting bad things in the future will protect you from disappointment or failure. But this is one of common false beliefs that brings about fear. Don’t forget, your wounded self wants safety, and it believes that predicting bad things will somehow keep you safe, but all it does is create fear.

Sometimes the wounded self is causing fear to avoid the deeper existential painful feelings of life, especially helplessness over others and outcomes. We hate to feel helpless over others and events, even if this is the reality, and sometimes the wounded self would rather cause fear than feel the deeper feelings of loneliness, heartbreak, grief, or helplessness.

It’s important to ground yourself in the present moment, becoming aware that, most of the time in this present moment, you are safe. Wounded fear lives in the past and the future. Your safety lives in the now.

Through your Inner Bonding process, you open to something higher than wounded fear. Whether you call it spirit, love, truth, higher self, or guidance – it doesn’t matter. There is a deeper wisdom inside you that can dispel the fear when you access this wisdom. The wounded self loses its fear-producing power when you are accessing your higher wisdom, your source of truth.

Close your eyes if you can, and take a slow, deep breath. Imagine the fear as a small, trembling child standing in front of you. See the fear in their eyes.

Now imagine yourself as a wise, loving adult. Kneel down to your scared inner child and gently say: “I’m here and spirit is here and in this moment we are safe.” This is inner safety, which is different than outer safety. 

Outer safety is about the safety of your body, while inner safety is about the safety of your soul. Obviously, scary things can happen to your body, and you don’t always have control over this. But we can have control over inner safety by practicing putting our loving adult in charge rather than our wounded self. Our inner child feels inner safety when we learn to show up for our feelings as a strong loving adult.

From a spiritual perspective, fear coming from the wounded self is an absence of love – not a presence of truth.

When we’re connected with our essence – our inner child, and with spirit, the higher intelligence within us, fear dissolves. Not because circumstances change, but because our perception changes.

Spirit speaks in wisdom, clarity, peace, and encouragement. Fear generated from the wounded self speaks in panic, pressure, lies, and limitation.

When you align with your higher self, fear becomes something you can observe rather than obey.

You begin to understand that:

• You are not alone
• You are guided
• You are held
• You are supported
• You are loved

And from that place of connection, fear loses its grip.

Right now, take a breath and quietly say to yourself: “I am not alone. I am guided. I am safe.” Let the truth settle into your being. Remembering to say this to your inner child throughout the day can bring much inner peace.

So you might want to remember this: Most fear cannot be trusted, not because you’re flawed or broken or there is something is wrong with you, but because most of it doesn’t come from real and present danger. It comes from the wounded self – from the programmed false beliefs that govern the wounded self.

You are not your fear. You are the one who notices the fear coming from the wounded self. You are the presence who can heal it. You are the love that fear has been trying to protect you from losing.

You always have the option to choose love and truth to create inner safety. You have the choice to choose love, not fear, as your guide.

I invite you to learn to connect with your spiritual guidance with my 30-Day video home-study course, Unlocking Your Inner Wisdom. This course will help you trust your guidance rather than your wounded self.

Thank you for joining me today.

I’m sending you love and blessings on your healing journey.