“”Tell me what you fear and I will tell you what has happened to you.” ~D.W Winnicott
In the 1970’s, towards the end of his career, pediatrician turned psychoanalyst, D. W. Winnicott, published a paper addressing the idea that the thing you are most afraid of has already happened. He witnessed his patients go to great lengths to avoid certain feelings or situations and what he realized was that their fear was in fact not disproportionate to their past experiences; rather, it was how they adapted. Winnicott suggested that many of the things we avoid in the present are not random or irrational—they are often connected to experiences from our past that felt overwhelming, confusing, or emotionally unsafe at the time. When something was “too much” for us earlier in life, we didn’t have the resources to fully process it. So instead, we adapted. We learned to turn away, shut down, distract ourselves, or went to great lengths to stay in control.
Those patterns can stay with us.
According this, the very catastrophe or distressful feelings or experiences that we have organized our entire lives around avoiding- rejection, abandonment, loss of control, grief, chaos, fighting- actually occurred. Winnicott called the avoidance, “the fear of breakdown.” For example, something overwhelming happens to you in early childhood- a betrayal of familiarity, physical abandonment, psychic abandonment, grief, or a fracture in a relationship. When you are young, you do not have the emotional or intellectual maturity or awareness to process it as an event and the impact it had. PS- We also don't have this ability when we are in the midst of trauma as an adult. However, it gets imprinted into your body and as a result, your nervous system has organized itself around avoiding the visceral feeling of this experience again and again and again. This is known as somatic remembering. This is also the insight that underlies EMDR therapy, as many of you have experienced.
We fear something because we’re afraid to feel it- we would only know that we’re afraid to feel something if we already experienced that feeling. In other words, you can’t be afraid of a feeling you’ve never encountered. The good news is, this is proof we’ve already lived through it and were okay. This instantly titrates the intensity of the very thing we’ve been trying to avoid. If you have done EMDR with me, you will often hear me remind you that what we are targeting has already happened, it’s not happening anymore.
As adults, we might notice ourselves avoiding certain feelings, conversations, relationships, or even opportunities. On the surface, it can look like procrastination, control issues, relationship difficulty, anxiety, or disinterest. But at a deeper level, it may be a form of protection—our mind and body trying to keep us from re-experiencing something that once felt unmanageable (similar to my favorite saying, “if it’s hysterical, it’s historical”).
This perspective invites us to approach avoidance with curiosity rather than harsh judgment. Instead of asking, “What’s wrong with me?” we might ask, “What might this part of me be trying to protect me from?” Find the emotional theme underlying your avoidance or your intense internal response and ask yourself, what did this mean for me in the past? What were the implications?
In therapy, part of the work is creating a space where those once-overwhelming experiences can be approached more safely, at your own pace, and with support. Over time, what once had to be avoided can become something that is understood, integrated, and no longer as threatening. This is also where EMDR comes into play, as it is part exposure therapy while teaching the nervous system to have a different/more neutral response to something that once felt unmanageable and then to file it away, once and for all.