People have asked me before what my process is for working through a challenge, and to be honest, I have not always had a good answer. Part of the reason is that I tend to move intuitively. I had never paid much attention to the process I was using.

But I am working through something in real time right now, and I thought I would carefully track the process and share it. I suspect that right now, a lot of us are coming up against places of constriction and fear that hold us back and create a kind of stuckness.

The thing I am working through is the fear of being seen. The fear of being visible.

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Characterizing the fear of being seen

The first step is to characterize the fear. When does it happen, and when does it not?

For me, this fear does not appear when I am working with someone one to one. It arrives in groups, and especially in a group I cannot see. When I sit with why, a few layers reveal themselves.

Part of it is about gauging response. When I speak with one person, I am reading how they are receiving what I say. That is not unique to a fear of visibility; it is a very human thing. We gauge because it tells us whether we are being clear, whether we are understood, so we can adapt.

In a group, that becomes a flood of input I am trying to sort through at once. I find that genuinely hard. There is also a matter of integrity in it. I do not want to share something that leads someone astray. I want to speak from the deepest truth I can access, in a way that actually helps.

But underneath all of that is something older. We humans are tribal. Our survival has always depended on the group around us. We do not exist in isolated pockets, and so there can be a very old fear humming beneath visibility: what happens if I am not accepted by the tribe? What happens to me then?

As an adult, I can rationalize my way through this. I can tell myself that putting out a video and saying something does not mean I will be cast out. It is not really a safety issue. And yet something in me keeps running the narrative anyway. Which tells me the mental understanding is not enough.

Which means I need to go looking for the wound.

The fear is never the wound

So I trace it. Those who have done energy work may know this as tracing or tracking the energy: following the thread of the feeling back through time, looking for the places it has shown up.

Interestingly, mine has not shown up often, which means it does not have much reinforcement behind it. But when I follow it back, it goes very early. It goes back to age five.

Back to age five

When I was in kindergarten, I got a report card. Back then we did not get letter grades. We got O for outstanding and N for needs improvement.

I received an N, because I was talking too much in class. Anyone who knows me now knows how strange that is, because I do not like to talk in groups at all. And yet there was a time when I did it so freely that it was considered disruptive.

I do not remember that specific report card, though I still have it, which is how I know it happened. What I do remember is the next time.

I started to cry in class, afraid of my report card, because last time I had gotten in trouble. My teacher, who was truly wonderful, noticed and pulled me into the hallway to ask what was wrong. When I told her, she was rather stunned that a child had gotten in trouble over a report card. She said she was not really supposed to do this. But she went and got it so I could see there was nothing to fear. It was all O’s.

But something had shifted in that stretch of time. According to the grades, I had stopped talking in class. I had adapted at age five. I got in trouble for talking too much, and I very quickly made myself smaller so it would not happen again. That is a wound I have carried forward to this day, and one I am still working with.

So the process moves like this. We look at the fear and characterize it. We do the mental work of recognizing that there is no real danger here in the present. And then we go deeper and find the original wound, if we can reach it. Sometimes it is pre-verbal or pre-memory, and in that case we simply work with the earliest version we can find.

Sitting with the five-year-old

The next step, for me, was to sit with the five year old. This is inner child work, and in shamanic terms it is close to soul retrieval. It means going back to that place, that time, that memory, and meeting the version of ourselves who has been waiting there.

I will not share the whole conversation I had with that little one. But I will say that together we made a plan. A plan that let me begin taking small, real steps.

Because this is the part we forget. We do not break through the fear in one heroic leap. We imagine it should happen all at once, but it does not.

We deconstruct the wall slowly. First by understanding what is there. Then by loosening the protective, defensive barrier that formed to keep us safe. Then by creating an opening and walking through it one step at a time. It is the action, the taking of the step, that integrates the wound.

The reason I am writing this, and recording the video that goes with it, is that this is my one small step.

Twenty percent experience, eighty percent integration

There is an idea that circulates in healing and inner work. Twenty percent of the work is the experience, and eighty percent is the integration.

Everything I have described so far, the tracing and the understanding and the meeting of the child, is only the twenty percent. The eighty percent is putting it into practice. And that eighty percent is many small steps that carry us through the doorway, from wounded on one side to integrated and whole on the other.

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