Worry into Wonder

Calming worry with wonder is a gift to the Self and to the Child. It’s a practice. 

There is an essential difference between worry and fear. A fear has a concrete reality attached to it, an identifiable object, something you can know. If you fear something but don’t know what it is you might call that an anxiety, a bodily fear response without an identifiable object. Anxiety hides something from the conscious mind, and fears are conscious.  Worry is related to the helplessness and the desire for agency around the known or the unknown.

Worry is a lifelong theme in most of our lives.  Worry stems from wanting and needing safety and survival in the world. Our quest to understand our worries—why we worry, where our worries come from, whether the worry serves us—isn’t the right starting place for restoring calm and inner balance. Rather, we first need to acknowledge and become curious about our worries, that is, transform our them into wonder.  This is true for the Child and Child Self. 

On a very fundamental and autonomic (in the nervous system) way, the Child and the Child Self will develop the habit of worry from birth when basic needs are not met. For instance, if an infant’s cries of hunger are not met, the infant will develop mistrust and worry for their 

survival.  This type of worry can stay with the Child and the Child Self for a lifetime. For instance, when we eat beyond capacity, hoard food, or resist sharing our food, we may be acting out of an unsafe feeling around survival, arising at infancy when our cries of hunger were repeatedly ignored. And, in more subtle ways, such experiences can become a worry about being intimate, vulnerable, or feeling not good enough.

A young mom came to me worried about her child’s night terrors. She did not understand why a three-year old would wake up afraid of spiders, storms, and bees. His fears were realistic: “Will the spider get me? Will the bee sting me today? Will the tree fall on me as it blows in the wind?” Not only were his fears realistic—these bad things can happen— but he knew that he did not have control over them; therefore, he worried. While it’s important for children to recognize their lack of ultimate control, it’s not healthy to develop a preoccupation with it. 

These preoccupations can come from the people who raise us, exhibited in their behavior and reaction to us and while around us. As humans it is and always will be a huge task to release the need to control things that we cannot. But we can change our worries with consciousness and wonder. 

When your Child says “The spider is scary, it’s going to eat me”, or your Child Self is frightened by creatures so small and different, a starting place is to mirror those feelings. 

You can say: 

“I can see you are afraid of the spider; you think it will harm you, and you are worried about that. I get it, I have been afraid too, and I am an adult! I wonder if the spider is afraid of us? I wonder how it feeds its babies? I wonder how it makes its web; I can’t make a web like that. I wonder if we can use string and make a web like the spider? I wonder.”

When your Child Self has to go with you into a situation, let’s say you are intimidated by your new boss and are worried that you won’t perform at your best, your Adult Self may be able to say, “There is nothing to worry about here, my work is good and my boss will recognize it.” 

Yet in such situations your Child Self needs to be assured, needs to be on the alert as well, just in case. 

So, you can say to the Child Self:

“Come along with me, I am curious, I will take the lead, I wonder what it will be like working with my new boss, but I won’t know until I get there, and that is ok.”

Calming worry with wonder is a gift to the Child Self and to the Child. It’s a practice. 

Every time I go into worry, I work all my modalities to engage the most faithful, trusting place I can inside myself. I call on all my spiritual helpers and guides, my beliefs, dreams, and experiences. But worry still will show up and I can reassure my Child or Child Self that worry is part of life.  It will not restore calm to say “Don’t worry about the spider, he’s so little, he’s so cute, he won’t hurt you, or “I love spiders!” They won’t believe it. 

You need to tell them, and yourself, that there is nothing wrong with them if they worry, and that there is something to wonder about in the present when our worry arises.  

I believe consciousness is transformative. Figuring out the reasons for our worries should come after regaining an inner balance necessary for moving forward. 

Sometimes you just need an Inner Parent to say:

“I get it, and let’s wonder about what is right now, we will leave the why, 

or what will be, for later.”