Break Free From the Fears You Never Asked For
I was standing in my kitchen, paralyzed by the thought of calling a client about overdue payment, when I heard my mother’s voice emerge from my own throat: “Don’t bother people. They won’t like you if you’re pushy.” The words arrived with such automatic authority that it took me a moment to realize they weren’t mine—they were hers, inherited like eye color or the tendency toward high blood pressure.
That’s when I understood: most of my fears weren’t earned through my own experience but passed down like family heirlooms, wrapped in the tissue paper of good intentions and stored in the attic of my unconscious mind.
My fear of public speaking came from my father, who believed that standing out meant standing alone. My terror of financial risk was my grandmother’s Depression-era wisdom, perfectly rational for someone who lived through economic collapse but paralyzing for someone trying to build a business in different times. My reluctance to express anger was my family’s collective agreement that nice people never make waves, even when the water is stagnant.
These fears felt deeply personal, intimately mine, earned through careful observation of the world’s dangers. But when I traced them back to their source, I found they were hand-me-downs, passed from generation to generation like recipes no one remembered the reason for making.
The revelation was both liberating and infuriating. Liberating because it meant these fears might not be accurate assessments of my current reality. Infuriating because I had spent decades being constrained by other people’s limitations, living inside boundaries drawn by people who faced different challenges in different times.
My ancestors’ fears had served them well—caution kept them alive, conformity kept them safe, avoiding risk kept them fed. But their survival strategies had become my prison walls, their protective mechanisms had become my limitations. I was living in a world that no longer existed, following rules designed for games I wasn’t even playing.
The genetic ghosts whisper constantly: “Don’t get too comfortable—something bad will happen.” “Don’t dream too big—you’ll be disappointed.” “Don’t trust too easily—people will hurt you.” These voices feel like wisdom, like the accumulated learning of generations, but they’re actually just accumulated fear, crystallized into convictions and passed down as truth.
Breaking free requires distinguishing between inherited wisdom and inherited trauma, between lessons learned and lessons assumed. It means asking: “Is this fear based on my experience or someone else’s?” “Is this caution protecting me from real danger or imagined threat?” “Am I living my life or performing someone else’s survival strategy?”
The hardest part is recognizing that questioning inherited fears feels like betraying the people who gave them to us. These fears were gifts, after all—expressions of love, attempts to protect us from the pain they experienced or witnessed. To reject them feels like rejecting the care they represented.
But maybe the deepest honor we can give our ancestors isn’t preserving their fears but learning from their courage—the courage it took to survive whatever created those fears in the first place. Maybe the real inheritance isn’t their limitations but their resilience, their ability to face what scared them and somehow keep going.
Tonight I want to inventory my fears and ask which ones I’ve actually earned through experience and which ones I’ve inherited through assumption. I want to thank the genetic ghosts for their concern while respectfully declining to let their fears dictate my choices.
Because I’m not living in their world. I’m living in mine. And my world might be safer, more forgiving, more full of possibility than the one that taught them to be afraid.