What is fear?
I wonder what makes some of us more fearful than others. We seem to be born with a certain propensity towards being fearful or not. And, of course, being 'brave' is easy when you're not really afraid of anything. Being brave is much, much harder when you're worried about most things but you go ahead and do them anyway.
Being fearless is different to being brave. Being fearless is an automatic reaction to rational danger. I've always been a fearless sort of person, but I'm not terribly brave. Being brave requires us to confront our own clawing, irrational creations. To confront our very selves.
Which is ironic, when you think about how many times you encourage your anxious child to be 'brave'. What a lot we ask of them!
I have a theory that non-sleeping children tend to be more anxious than their sleeper counterparts. I used to think that the not-sleeping bit made them a bit more tetchy in the daytime because they were overtired and irritable. But these days I think the opposite is true. I think they can't sleep because their overactive imaginations have conjured up all sorts of scary things that keep them up at night. That mean they don't want to be away from the safety net of a warm, loving cuddle. I do believe that anxiety and insomnia are related as early as babyhood.
Isn't it rather odd that our own brains conjure up such nasty stuff as to make us afraid? Isn't that what these irrational fears are, after all? Our own brains playing tricks with our sense of safety. There's no monster under the bed, but try telling that to the insomniac preschool set. And sometimes, try telling that to their equally wide-awake mumma...
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I rewound this post at the Fibro on 5.3.2011
