When I was living in a very abusive relationship I let the fear of the unknown keep me captive in the relationship: I would rather have faced extreme abuse than take a step into the unknown, and end the relationship. Looking back several years later, this now seems crazy.

So, in this scenario I allowed fear to run a program of thoughts through my mind: it was this fear-based program that actually supported me in making the choice to live in a very unsafe manner by continuing on in the abusive relationship. From this experience and others, I have come to see that when we put a lot of time and energy into these thoughts, we can actually make it our physical reality by creating situations that support and prove the ideas/fears in our head to be physical facts. Now this is scary…

For years I lived in fear. The abusive relationship allowed me to foster and build on this fear in myself as a young adult, although looking back, I see fear was present many years before the abuse. There was a strong fear of not pleasing my parents and schoolteachers, there was a strong fear I was not the same as other kids/teens, there was a fear of God and my priest.

So what is this fear; why was I so attracted to it?

My feeling is that fear occurs because I have ideas of what is right and wrong in my head that I form from what others say and do. I then have even more ideas of the consequences that will occur if I cannot live up to these ideas. I feel I am attracted to these ideas so I do not have to feel what actually works for myself, and then to trust this. So, basically I feel fear is just a bunch of ideas that I have collected and given importance to, that keep me trapped into living life in a certain manner. An example is when another asks me to do something that does not feel right to me and I do it in the fear they will think less of me if I don’t: or I fear they will be angry with me because I am not in agreement with them. So I will choose to please another to win favour, rather than trust my own feelings. Another great example is how I chose to stay in a harmful relationship rather than take a step into the unknown, for fear I would not be able to survive.

It is awesome to realise this, because to break this vicious cycle all I have to do is to stop giving importance to these ideas, and the fear will have no platform. Over the years I have applied large doses of just this, and the difference within me now is huge. This fear no longer plays out in my daily life as I no longer choose to believe I am stupid or that I deserve to be harmed – because all I do when I give power to this fear, is harm myself and others. The big one for me is I no longer feel others have the right to own and control me. I used to accept others had this right; thinking they knew better than me, that I owed them because of past behaviours/occurrences, or because I had wronged them in the past.

Serge Benhayon commented a few years ago… “Toni, when I first met you, you were as timid as a little bird who was scared to look at anyone, now look at you”. So I am living proof that fear, no matter how life is playing out physically or emotionally, is in essence coming from ideas running around our head that we have the power to stop if we choose to, and seek the support when required. I found this support in Universal Medicine.

by TS