Have you ever wondered why you have a deep seated fear of getting in trouble?
It doesn’t matter how old you are. You could be 20, 30, or 68 – and it is possible that you have an internal fear of “getting in trouble”. And despite your age, this fear is not unlike the fear of a small child who doesn’t want to get caught or punished.
Your intellectual self probably knows full well that you are an adult, and that “getting in trouble” isn’t something you have to fear anymore.
But try as you might, that instinct inside of you fears being seen and singled out on a deep core level.
People Pleasing…
In order to avoid getting in trouble, you people please. You avoid upsetting people. You fawn – which is to please and merge with others so as to avoid them being angry with you. Maybe you do as little as possible to be noticed, preferring the anonymity of being invisible because no one is going to scold or point the finger at someone who they can’t see.
I think this is a core wound. I think this fear of getting in trouble can mirror our childhood experiences, but I also think it goes way beyond that. I wrote a blog years ago about the Witch Wound that speaks to how the experience of our ancestors directly affects our internal fears. This is an example of the witch wound, a type of generational trauma.
In our dominant culture, our patriarchal model of society, domination of others has been used as a way of creating hierarchies of power. Power over another doesn’t just happen. We only need to look back at our history books to see that this culture of ‘Power-Over’ was created through domination. Domination that occurred through means of violence and accusation of right and wrong.
The Orignins of The Fear of Getting In Trouble
“We are right, you are wrong and it is within our authority to dominate your body and your freedom” was the belief systems that justified one nation conquering and invading another. It is used to justified genocide, imperialism, colonial oppression, slavery, the witch hunts, to name only a few of the historical truths of our ancestors and the unfortunate reality of many humans alive on the planet today. This system still exists today; this is not a thing of the past.
So, before you look at your instinct to avoid “being in trouble” as something pathological for you to rise up and “fix”, I invite you to sit with compassion of how it makes sense that you might want to avoid this. Was this something that could have been taught and passed down from great grandparents’ grandparent to parents to you?
I believe it is likely that these deep fears are encoded in our DNA, and science is able to support that claim as we learn more about epigenetics and how trauma is passed down physically through genetics.
Compassion Heals The Fear of Getting In Trouble
Before you are able to resource yourself to realize why it might be safe for you, today, to make waves or sit with conflict, we need to feel safe with our own self. And until we can be compassionate about the fears we hold, it’s really hard to do that. If we are judging ourselves for being scared, or thinking there is something wrong with us, then we are just mirroring the wounded culture – being part of the system that used lies about our worth and our value to demean us in order to dominate in the first place.
The first step in healing and coming back into our power isn’t to push harder. Domination will not heal a wound that came from domination in the first place.
We start with compassion – so I hope this helps you become curious about where this fear might truly come from. Nothing is wrong with you – you are having a normal reaction to a very abnormal condition (culture itself). Start there and see what happens when you see yourself with compassion first.
If this resonates with you and you’re looking for deeper support, you might consider exploring counseling for anxiety as a way to gently begin that process.
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