Issue #1 Article#7

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The Fear of Death: A Case Study by Pietro Abela


I wish to express my profound thanks to John (whose name has been changed for the purposes of this article) and his parents, for being so willing to allow me to share these experiences.

In ARC classes I have often theorized that as individuals it is our inclination, drive, even our mission to grow emotionally and spiritually and that the family is one of the foundational catalysts in this process. However healthy the family, there will always be issues. Chaos will always arise from harmony, and it is this chaos, this challenge to belief and structure that advances mankind.

I recently had the honour to work with John, a ten year old boy who is a highly sensitive person, very tuned into his own emotional issues, and who lives in a healthy family environment. Now it would take a book to define a healthy family. All I wish to say on this for the purpose of this article is that in John’s family emotional issue is acknowledged, members work to take responsibility for their own issues and emotional communication is encouraged.

For some years John, being a very psychic boy, had felt the presence of a ghost in his house. Although spiritual phenomenon is to be validated and can be linked profoundly with physical and emotional symptoms, it is important to approach it with caution, since it can be a distraction for an internal issue. It is often easier to focus on the external issue than the internal. This is true of many emotional issues where a person might blame the world around them for their predicament rather than look for causes inside themselves. In a mild way, this turned out to be the case for John. Melanie worked with him towards helping him learn he is bigger and stronger than the ghost and that if John ordered the ghost to go it would.

In the days before his next session Max was reporting intense fears of his own imminent death. And the ghost had gone. This meant that the ghost was indeed a distraction and he was now contacting the next line of defense; in this case, the fear of his own death. In the session, John very quickly perceived that the parts that feared his death lived in his solar plexus. Thus his consciousness changed. If he could observe the parts, there is now potential for the observer to become useful in creating a different experience. This observer part was prepared to let in a more relevant truth; that he was safe and he wasn’t necessarily going to die. And so he was encouraged to inform these parts, when they spoke to him in this manner, that this was just their perception and that there was a bigger part of him that now knew he wasn’t going to die, and this part was now taking charge.

John worked at this for a while. He came to recognize that the parts were really intent on re-gaining their power so they were still being persistent, but he was holding his own with them, though challenged.

In his next session, we utilized the observer Self that was now more prominent and traced down the parts using the following dialogue:

Pietro: “How would it be to ask the parts in the solar plexus, what if you died?”
John: “I wouldn’t be able to see my family.”
Pietro: “What if you could no longer see your family?”
John: “I would be alone.”
Pietro: How would it be for that part to be alone?”
John: Very scary.”

A colleague of mine, Donna Martin, observed in working with her clients there is invariably an emotional issue beneath the issue of death. This too has been my experience in working with death issues. The most common issue lying beneath death fear is the fear of being alone or being left alone. Personally I question in my more contemplative moments whether the fear of death actually exists at all. I wonder whether it is a mask for something else and whether any of us actually fear death, and instead fear what we perceive to be the consequences of what we fear death to be.

If a person has a chronic death fear I become suspicious about their relationship with their father. Primal feelings very much count in the general scheme of emotional growth. On a primal level the father is the protector. If the father is not present or, worse still, if the father is abusive towards the child where the protective force actually turns against the child, the child will not feel safe. Then, irrational fears such as fear of death, of being alone will become prominent. This is often the seat of addictions and phobias, where the child develops compulsive behaviours to distract them from the intensities of the fears around their survival and retains these into adulthood. The child might, for example, take matters into their own hands and learn to survive themselves and thus become control freaks armed with the fear that if it all depends upon them and if they lose control or their regimented lifestyle, they will end up destitute. There are lots of case scenarios associated with this.

What was different for John is that there were lots of instances of healthy bonding between him and his father. Because of this it momentarily surprised me to learn that John might have safety issues with his father. I was prepared to explore other possibilities, until he revealed that he undergoes a lot of emotional pain when his father leaves to go out of town to work, which can occur every other week for periods up to a week at a time. Now on the days before he leaves John experiences sadness and anger. The only omission on his father’s part is that he doesn’t give the space for John to express these emotions (not being aware of them), thus John holds his feelings inside each time he leaves. He is sad, but he is especially angry. And when, with this knowledge on the table, we did some rehearsal of what needed to be expressed to Dad, the anger strongly came forth. John has been complaining for sometime now of tiredness and fatigue. When a person has congested, non-expressed anger fatigue is a symptom they often suffer from. The key to John’s physical and emotional condition is for him to be allowed to tell his father how he feels about him going away and his father to create the time and space to hear him out. Then there would be less likelihood of emotional congestion and more vitality.

What is interesting here is that this is not abuse; this is not even abandonment. It is a segment of John’s life where his father is not present. When his father is home he is very present for his son. Yet even with these other healthy factors in place John still experienced non-safety emotional symptoms. It suggests to me that even if the family is considered to be functional, issues will still arise. Our hope and expectation is, that the father in hearing him out in this way, will be able to be present to John's feelings. In addition, it would be helpful for the father to personally contact his son when he is out of town and exclusively speak to him allowing John to have access to him more times more often when he is away from home. With these in place it is highly likely that the issue will ease.

I had full expectations to have to act as mediator between father and son. When I asked John if he would like me to be there when he spoke to his father of this, he replied, “No, I can handle this, I can speak to my dad myself.” When he said this, I knew all was going to be fine.

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