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When a person intimidates others, they are often afraid themselves.

Fear of another person may reflect childhood trauma or projection of one's own shadow.

Healing starts with admitting fear, feeling it, and moving through it.

You may believe you have to walk on eggshells around certain people. You do not look forward to seeing them. You are probably afraid of them, but you have never called it fear.

A healthy adult refuses to settle for being afraid of anybody. To keep spending time with someone who threatens you, without trying to heal the relationship, is abusing your scared child within. You are saying, “I’ll put you into the bull ring where I know you will be bruised.” To wake up every morning beside someone you fear is the heaviest of all molestations of your inner child. This willingness is insidious psychically, because it means you are willing to threaten your own most vulnerable self.

Why we become intimidated by others

What is happening when someone intimidates us? Here are three possibilities:

Firstly, the other person is the one who is afraid. You are feeling the ricochet of his fear. For instance, he may fear closeness, and he might be using his intimidating manner to keep you at a distance. So he acts in a way that leads to your becoming afraid of him. Over the years, he has learned: “If I scare people with my brusque manner or pugnacity, they will not get close.”

Secondly, it could be that you are experiencing early childhood fears, somehow triggered by this person. This might especially be the case when you believe you cannot defend yourself. This may be a tip-off to a childhood scenario of powerlessness, now reappearing. Martin Heidegger said, “The dreadful has already happened.” The dreadful thing happened long ago, and now we see a recurrence of it, a replica of it, in the face of someone in our present adult world. The same childhood terrors may come up from our body, cellularly, in response to an old memory. We are suddenly feeling as defenseless as we once were.

The third possibility is that you are meeting up with the shadow, the darker side of the other person. You might even be seeing the shadow of yourself in the other person, a projection. As noted earlier, the shadow is the unconscious side of yourself that you do not want to see. If you feel strong envy toward someone you fear, you may be projecting your own positive shadow; your own unacknowledged potential. You wish for what you already have a potential for within yourself, but what you see as actively flourishing in the other person. If you feel dread, with a wish for vengeance toward someone, it may be a sign of the negative shadow coming into play. You despise in someone else what you disavow in yourself. Quite a challenging possibility.

Carl Jung said, “In the intensity of the disturbance lies the value and the energy to remedy it.” Our lively energy has within it all the programs and capacities needed to face all the stresses of life. It is not within the scope of this post to deal with pathological agoraphobia. The program for the mild agoraphobia described above is to admit fear, feel it, and act as if it were not an obstacle. This is the program we can always embrace to release our own self-restorative energy.

Power is in being the cause of the effect that you want. I want the effect of moving through it, so I stay with the cause of it—fear—all the way to the effect, freedom from fear’s grip on me. This paradox is the style of human healing.

This post is adapted from my book, When Love Meets Fear.

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