Our Fears Often Begin as Children’s Questions

There are certain fears people carry that make no logical sense on the surface.

Not everyday fears. Not practical fears. The deeper ones.

The strange ones. The persistent ones. The fears that seem irrational, even to the person carrying them.

For as long as I can remember, I had a fear that I would somehow go to jail for something I didn’t do. Or maybe for something I did unknowingly. Some mistake I didn’t realize I had made. Some invisible violation that would suddenly catch up to me.

Even writing that sounds strange to me. I’m a therapist. I follow rules almost to a fault. I have never lived some secret criminal life.

And yet the fear lived in me anyway.

Not constantly. Not loudly. But persistently.

For years, I assumed it was just anxiety. Random mental static. One of those odd things the brain does for no reason.

But later in life, I began to understand something important:

Many fears are symbolic before they are literal.

Underneath the surface fear is often a deeper emotional truth trying to organize itself into something the mind can hold.

As a child, my biological father disappeared from my life before I was even born. And like many children experiencing loss, I didn’t fully understand why.

Children are egocentric by nature. They experience themselves as the center of causality. When something painful happens, they often assume, consciously or unconsciously, that they somehow created it.

A child rarely says: “This adult relationship is complicated.” Rather, a child asks: “What did I do wrong?”

And suddenly my lifelong fear started making more sense to me. Maybe the fear was never really about jail. Maybe it was about punishment. Maybe it was about the terror that something bad could happen to me because of something I did unknowingly.

Maybe part of me had been carrying the emotional logic of a child: “If someone left, maybe I caused it without realizing it.”

And I think many people carry fears like this.

Not fears that are merely random, but fears that are emotionally autobiographical.

The person terrified of abandonment may have learned early that love could disappear unexpectedly. The person obsessed with being “too much” may have grown up feeling emotionally unwelcome. The person terrified of conflict may come from a home where anger meant danger, rejection, or chaos. The workaholic who fears failure may not actually fear poverty at all. They may fear worthlessness

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So often, the surface fear is not the real fear. It is the costume the deeper truth wears. And this is part of why insight can feel so emotional when it finally arrives. Because sometimes we realize we haven’t merely been managing symptoms. We’ve been carrying unanswered childhood questions into adult life.

Questions like: Was I lovable? Was I safe? Did I matter? Was it my fault? Could I lose everything without warning?

The adult mind develops sophisticated explanations. But underneath, many people are still trying to soothe a younger version of themselves who never fully understood what happened.

This is why curiosity matters so much in therapy and in life.

Not judgment. Not shame. Curiosity.

Because beneath many fears is not stupidity or weakness.

There is often grief there. Or confusion. Or loneliness. Or the remnants of a child trying to make emotional sense out of experiences too large for them to understand at the time. And sometimes the goal is not to completely eliminate the fear.

Sometimes the goal is to finally understand what the fear has been trying to say all along.