“The reason why I can’t become emotionally and mentally independent is that I am afraid I will lose my safety if I do so.” If this resonates with you then you will find two interpretations around this in this article to help you with your own self-observation.

I am bringing this fear from my childhood

The development of the self is in stages. In early life, before we get to the stage of becoming mentally and emotionally independent there are two preceding stages. They are called co-dependency and counter-dependency. As their names depict, these stages are about dependency. We are totally dependent on the outside world not only physically but more importantly emotionally and mentally. 

In these first two stages, we are dependent on our mothers, fathers, or other people who take care of us, who love us, who calm us, who mirror our feelings. This is how such highly evolved creatures like humans develop. We need the connection, the relationship. And we want to be dependent at all costs. And glitches happen in these first two stages to almost all of us. Glitches where this connection breaks (or sometimes worse). When this connection fails (speaking of neglect, abandonment, abuse, etc.) we develop fear. And all sorts of twisted beliefs and behaviors that result from this loss of connection. And our natural course of development gets blocked and we are unable to get to the next stage in our development; Independence. We need to act as independent individuals and look independent, but inside we feel that it is yet uncooked. Some of us decide to ‘forcefully grow up’ – by deciding to detach from our origins – and some of us become even more dependent. And the coping mechanisms are endless.   

So there we have it. We want to become emotionally independent and happy individuals, but we can’t. We are afraid to make that step. Our fear of losing our safety is everywhere. It is so much part of our thinking and so much in front of us that we can hardly realize it. (If it is not the fear then for most of us it is the inner image that “I still need something before I decide to become a ‘full’ individual”.) 

I am projecting my arrogance on the world around me and on God

If you look at your fear with the knowledge that you are interconnected with everything in the world and with God – or a creator or higher power; as you understand it- then the realization can be different.

Then you can come to the conclusion that your fear actually comes from your arrogance and from your mindset of thinking that you are special. The key word here is that you feel special. You feel ‘special’ as a separate and independent being and your logic in understanding the world is built from this logic. And you want to fulfill your life along this ‘logic’. If you are still reading these lines then I assume that they still resonate with you. So let’s go further.

What happens in essence is that you are afraid of God. You instinctively know that God (however you call it) exists but you are afraid that if you gave up your sense of being ‘special’ and sense of being separate would be the end for you. And there is the fear of God’s ‘behavior’. You look at God as a being who would destroy you, who would be cruel to you, who would just give you suffering, or maybe God doesn’t even exist, there is actually nothing there. This is the projection of my own arrogance on the core of my own being.  

(How much this is a different way of looking at my fear compared to the above interpretation about the ‘glitches’ in early childhood is a question. Maybe not so much. In both cases, there is a loss of connection. And that is the root cause of my fear.)