If I am a hidden child I am born into family circumstances where my natural and healthy growth and development are restrained by toxic fear – but no-one notices!
Toxic fear means that its ongoing presence is doing more harm than good [1]. This doesn’t mean that I am unhappy all the time. Because of the resilience of the human spirit I manage to find happiness somewhere and sometimes. But, overwhelmingly, my experiences inhibit my ability to thrive.
I may be growing up in a family where my parent or parents find it difficult to meet my needs – and when I express them in school I encounter an indifferent or even a punitive response – so I stop.
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In respect of toxic fear it is a sad fact that some children have experiences, (even when they are in their mother’s womb) where they feel such fear that they believe that their lives are in danger.
I ask you now; what would you do if you believed that your life was in danger?
How would you feel?
What parts of your body would you feel the fear in?
Would you fight, flee or freeze?
Or none of the three – would you flop, and dissociate – which we will describe in the Chapter on Trauma and Related Topics.
I ask you these
questions not to frighten the life out of you – but just to get you thinking
about what effect toxic fear might
have in a little baby.
[1]. I’d say most of you will be familiar with the fear that might do us some good! If we are parents we may remember this from our own childhood, adapt it, and use it well so that our own children, in turn, learn through a mixture of appropriate fear and reward what is good for them and what isn’t.