Fear Results From Overprotection

FEAR OF FAILURE

The fear of failure is closely related to the fear of rejection. If you make a mistake or wrong decision or do not perform well, your failure could result in a significant person in your life devaluing you and throwing you back in disgust. That reflects the root meaning of the word rejection, "to throw back.

Terris second home was the church. Her father was a church music director. Her mother micro-managed Terri. Every facet of her life was ordered by her mother. As Terri and I talked, I asked her to allow the Lord to bring the source of her fear of failure to her mind. It was not easy but she prayed with me that God would show her.

Terri began to recall that as a child her mother would get as angry at her for a small childish infraction as she did for a major one. On a scale of 1-10, one being an insignificant infraction and ten being a major one, her over-critical mother reacted with the same intense anger for a level one infraction as she did a ten. Terri developed a fear of making even the smallest mistake.

This drove Terri straight into perfectionism. She became a black and white thinker. She felt she was either totally good or totally bad. She feared making the smallest mistake because she would have to face her mothers rejection. Result? Everything in Terris life had to be perfect. If anything had a small flaw, it was totally bad. Worse yet, Terri would feel she was totally bad and deserved to be rejected. She always felt she was going to fall into total ruin, it was only a matter of when not if. She became a substance abuser to numb that fear - the fear of failure and subsequent rejection. Oh, and yes, she is a believer.

FEAR OF ABANDONMENT

Children are not the only ones who can have a fear of being alone. Adults, whether religious or not, can be managed subtly by the fear of abandonment. Controllers or over protectors instill the lie into their spouses or children that they could not survive on their own without them - not just financially, but emotionally and psychologically.

The greatest destruction an overprotective parent or spouse can inflict is to cause a person to factor God out of their security system. The parent or spouse replaces God as their ultimate source of security. This lays the foundation for relational idolatry, popularly referred to as codependence. Because no human can perfectly meet the security needs of another, the fear of abandonment only increases.

Over protectors become omnipresent in their childs or spouses life. That unintentionally reinforces the lie that the spouse or child cant get along without them. Result? They marry strong, controlling mates who continue this dysfunction of inordinate dependency first learned in the home. Brenda told me that she literally believed her mom was God when she was growing up.