I was having a conversation with my husband the other day and speaking to what the Aries Moon present in my birth chart signifies. I explained that people who have an Aries moon present at the time of their birth tend to be courageous, confident, bold and passionate.His response was ‘I don’t know, you’re pretty led by fear’. At the time the passing comment made me so incredibly sad in a way that I wasn’t yet ready to fully process. Because I immediately knew his response was a truthful one. However I also understood that being fearful was not my default setting by nature. It is a learnt reaction as a trauma response to everything that has occurred in the last few years. For me, being driven by fear and anxiety has been a survival tactic and it’s my brain’s response to constantly feeling under threat.
The truth is that trauma triggers many different responses in the body long after the traumatic event has occurred. It’s like it seeps into our consciousness and takes root there affecting every element of our beings. It alters our brain chemistry which causes us to be on constant alert and thus go into an overactive, on guard state all of the time. The result is hyper-reactivity which comes out of nowhere in which the fight or flight trigger is always just on the cusp of being activated. Such hypervigilance tends to get worse the more you feed into it with fearful thoughts and thus begins the neverending spiral. In reality this is actually a form of PTSD; whereby delayed responses to past traumatic events show up in our present.
Whilst I am aware of all of these things and I can logically understand that I don’t have to be fearful of everything, it’s become a learnt instinct which kicks in all the time. But I am absolutely not this person. I know this is not actually who I am deep down. In saying this though, if the person who knows me the best is saying this fear has become my go to and is therefore doubting my courageousness then I have a problem that needs to be fixed. It means that I’ve unconsciously allowed myself to give in to fear and doubt and I’ve unwittingly let it control my life. It’s made me realise that I need to question this behaviour when it presents itself and consider when the fear is a legitimate one or if I’m just fearful because of past experiences in general.
It’s made me understand that in order to overcome this and move back to being the person I was once, I need to make active choices every day. I need to challenge those fear based thoughts and push through them. I need to live life more intentionally and in the present moment. I have to stop being afraid of things I can’t control. Because there’s a certain amount of inevitably which makes up life in which bad things will happen whether or not I am fearful of them. So why not live audaciously in spite of them. It means that most days I will have to summon up an inner courage that will challenge me. I’ll have to stop giving into the nagging illogical thoughts which catastrophise things. But knowing that these feelings are not my default setting means that in theory all I have to do is dig deeper, realign with my inner self and listen to my heart. Because it is surely telling me to live life bravely. It’s telling me to take chances in spite of past traumas.
I’ve therefore learnt that courage is not the absence of trauma; it’s simply living with it and still pushing through. I choose to reclaim my agency to dictate what my own life looks like. I will not let fear control where I am headed in life; and I am committed to not letting trauma rewrite future chapters of my story. I now choose to acknowledge my trauma but not in a way in which it inhibits my choices. I choose to let the lessons I’ve learnt because of it, guide me towards a more resilient life. One in which I live fearlessly and am excited and hopeful instead of being fearful all the time.
I blog for Change. 