Do you notice moments when you scare yourself? You may reasonably wonder why you should scare yourself at all. Why do adults scare children? For example, to warn of danger. Do not touch a hot iron or stove or a sharp knife. You can't run away from mom or dad onto the road. Sometimes they scare children in order to calm them down: if you behave badly, your uncle the policeman will take you away! Sometimes - so that they obey: why are you upsetting your father with your antics, you know he has a weak heart! 😨 In general, one way or another, parents control the child’s behavior through fear, regulating or stopping behavior that for some reason is dangerous, inappropriate or unprofitable for the parent. And, I think, fear is truly quite appropriate where it can protect the life and health of a child. But you can overdo it with it! Roger Zelazny very cleverly showed the consequences of excess fear in his story “Here Be Dragons”: the cartographer of one small kingdom surrounded by mountains wrote on all his maps in areas about which he knew nothing - “Here There Are Dragons.” And very soon the entire kingdom was surrounded - according to the maps - by dragons!😲 Of course, there could be no talk of any travel: what kind of merchant, say, in his right mind would go straight into the mouth of a fire-breathing monster? Only, probably, the most desperate and risky... But there were no such people. And when they began to find out whether anyone living in the kingdom had even seen these same dragons, it turned out that, in general, no one had. But it’s still scary to check. 👀 Fear sometimes settles in our “kingdoms” in much the same way. It's scary to want a lot; you have to be content with little. It's scary to show your weaknesses, otherwise they will take advantage of you. It’s scary to show aggression: what if it destroys the relationship or another person? But if you think about it, is this all really true? Are you and everyone around you really that fragile? Can't you really claim more? And is it true that no one can accept you for who you are? Maybe you need to audit your fears from time to time and clarify your cards? 😉 Artem Shchukin, psychologist, individual psychotherapy89242174452 (WhatsApp, Telegram)