Willem Lammers
On fear, anger and grief

If you are caught in fear, you're living in a cage, frozen in the threats of perceived danger, and you can't leave that cage. When you have entered a developmental proces and you've overcome the fear, when you've seen that those threats are just frozen energy structures, your energy level rises. You start to fill and expand your personal space.

When your own personal space gets bigger, it will necessary collide with those of others, and it's not surprising that long hidden conflicts show up on the surface of your awareness. You realise that this is not how you want the world to be. All the time you have held back your needs, you were not even aware of them. Now you are aware, not only of your needs and desires in the here-and-now, but also of all those that were unfulfilled in the past.

That can make you angry. You're finally aware that you're entitled to have needs and to have your wishes fulfilled. You decide that the times have changed and that you're going to stand up and fight for what's important for you. At this point you will meet your next challenge.

You have been caught in the cage of life-long fear, you learned to adapt to the needs, desires and wishes of others, but you didn't learn the checks and balances to assess what others need in relation to what you need. Thus you haven't learned the intricate game of negotiation between two or more people.

In negotiations you have to give and take, but when you've been giving all the time you tend to think that it's now time for taking all the time. Those around you won't appreciate that, and they will let you know. They will resist to fulfill your needs because they realise it isn't about them.

There's no cooperation possible with you, you're obsessed about getting what you want, and you're not aware that some needs cannot be fulfilled anymore. Also those around you may have liked the state in which you were their faithful servant - they refuse to give up the role of the master.

This is confusing for you, and the reactions you get can push you back into the old familiar fear. However, if you examine this process thoroughly, you learn to recognise which needs and wishes can be fulfilled by those around you, and which needs you must give up.

You must learn to accept that you didn't and don't have ideal parents, siblings, teachers and bosses, and that your spouse, your friends or your colleagues are not here to compensate for those deficits. In this process, anger and grief are closely connected. Both are related to giving up fantasies about the world and its people: how they should be, could be, should have been or could have been.

Logosynthesis is a useful instrument to proceed on this path. I wrote this post because I met this issue with a number of clients recently, and it's also an aspect of The Path of Presence in the Summer Academy.