Fear of your own fear is even more problematic than the original fear itself. (Whoever said “nothing to fear but fear itself” was not into healing and dealing!)

The initial stage to transforming the effect of any old emotion within the self is acknowledging that it’s your emotion. We can easily become confused and say the trigger of the emotion is the owner of the emotion, or that we would never be feeling this emotion if it weren’t for them triggering it. We want to change their behavior so our fear can go back to the quiet slumber of denial that it was in before getting stirred to life. But if you’re feeling afraid, the fear is yours.

Acting outwardly in the world to quell the feelings of fear inside is acting out the emotions instead of feeling them. All that does is delay the resolution of the fear, which will draw another situation to be afraid about, another situation to trigger itself. In the long term, acting out emotions won’t resolve them.

A woman worries that her son will contract the prostate cancer that he is genetically predisposed to. She spends significant energy trying to manage his health by giving him information and pressuring him to see a doctor. Some may say this is purely mother love. It is, but this is also worry taking action that can be seen as a terror, deeply buried, of her own mortality. She subconsciously fears death. When we have subconscious feelings, it is standard practice to project them onto someone else close to us because we don’t always recognize that the feelings we’re having are really ultimately about us. The person being projected onto is the mirror for what we cannot easily see about ourselves.

We all fear death to one extent or other, even if we don’t consciously know it, because we have died many times before and we don’t want to experience those feelings of being snuffed out again. Parts of our beings, the emotional, physical parts, hold encoded memories of these deaths buried deeply in the subconscious. These are parts of us that aren’t spirit. These parts do not rise to “heaven” between lives, and these parts have and hold the memory and terror of death.

Projection is a hallmark of our misunderstanding about emotions. Only resolving emotions fully allows us to take personal responsibility for them in any kind of real, gut-level way. It’s nearly impossible to not project an unfelt, unacknowledged emotion. With experience it gets easier to know even in advance of expressing the charge of the emotion that it is really ours.

You can also ask your Higher Power, Spirit, Deeper Self, or whatever term suits you for the Divine to give you guidance in a form you can hear on how to deal with your feelings. This could be a “sign”, a dream, an inner voice or some other way that is just right for you. Remember to watch and listen for an “answer”, something you can recognize as help.

If after all this you are convinced that the fear is not yours, perhaps it isn’t. You could then ask Spirit to remove any fear that is not your own and put it where it belongs. If nothing changes, then you can rest assured the fear is yours, and it will require you to release its backed-up charge from having been denied for so long, in order to transmute it into love and trust.

One last suggestion, if none of the above works: try a therapy group that encourages emotionality. Go into it with an intent of resolving issues you normally project onto others, with a curiosity to discover what your strong feelings about others says about you. Shop around for a group that feels right to you; you are worth the effort. If you have a strong intent to change your emotional patterns then you’re likely to find the help you need.