Dealing with Anxiety: How Lack of Love Creates Fear

Written by Roland Bal

Consciousness, as it moves, appears to be cyclic. We surface and feel better for a while, which might be followed by a period of relapse where we suffer from stress symptoms again. These relapses occur even when we feel that we have worked on and through a part of our lives already.

Deep-seated patterns often need to be addressed a number of times before all attachment and identification with them have been finally dissolved. This is not failure. This is how the process works.

Why Recovery Feels Cyclic

If you've been working on yourself for any length of time, you know this experience: you feel like you've finally moved through something, only to have it return weeks or months later. The same anxiety. The same fear. The same pattern.

This can be disheartening if you don't understand what's happening. But the truth is that deep patterns — especially those formed in childhood — exist in layers. Each time you address them, you're peeling back another layer. You're not going backwards. You're going deeper.

The key is to not identify with the relapse. When anxiety returns, it doesn't mean your previous work was worthless. It means there's more depth to explore. Meet it with curiosity rather than defeat.

Lack of Love and Its Relationship to Fear

Wanting to be loved, accepted, and recognized unconditionally is one of our basic needs as children. It gives us an anchored sense of belonging and safety. The lack thereof sets in motion very deep patterns of attempting to compensate — patterns that can affect our relationships in profound ways.

Being overly concerned about what other people think of you, or having unfounded fears your partner will leave you, or having excessive ambition in work or spirituality, or always trying your best to make everybody happy — these might all relate to attempts to compensate for a lack of love and acceptance.

We go through great contortions trying to fill that emptiness inside of ourselves. And this whole pattern of trying to overcome causes us to go through a lot of emotional ups and downs.

The child who didn't receive enough love learns that love must be earned. These early attachment wounds become the foundation for anxiety in adulthood — constantly performing, constantly seeking approval, constantly anxious that they're not enough. The anxiety isn't random — it's the nervous system responding to an old, unresolved wound.

How Anxiety Projects Itself

I tend to speak in public a few times a year and often get a little anxious some days beforehand. Once, the anxiety was somewhat paralyzing. Rather than getting upset with myself, I found myself curiously interested in what was going on.

Anxiety is not easy to stay with. Learning how to stay with fear — rather than project it onto external circumstances — is essential for this work. In this case, the anxiety was being projected onto speaking in public.

I really listened to that anxiety, tracking the sensation of it in my body and simultaneously asking myself: "Why? What is the deeper pattern?" When I asked that question sincerely — without escaping or trying to solve it, while staying connected to the sensations of anxiety — the answer became very clear.

I wanted to be accepted by the public, by those who listened to me. I was looking for recognition.

I have addressed these feelings a hundred times — in group work, in courses, in individual work. And in this context, it popped up again. There was still more depth to it. When the answer became clear to me — that I wanted to be accepted, to be recognized — the anxiety also started to subside.

Meeting the Deeper Pain Beneath Anxiety

Wanting to be accepted, loved, and recognized signifies that part of oneself — usually our child self — still lives with a sense of the lack of acceptance and love. It is by meeting the pain of that, and by bringing awareness to that pain without further dissociating or judgment, that this inner pain gets processed.

The anxiety, in this case, was on a more profound level: a manifestation of a more deeply held pain. Once this pain was met, the anxiety — borne of a deep sense of separation — also went.

This is the work: not to manage anxiety, but to ask what it's really about. Not to push through fear, but to listen to what it's pointing toward. The surface feeling is rarely the real issue. Beneath it is usually something much older, much more tender.

When you can stay with the anxiety long enough to feel what's underneath it — the grief, the loneliness, the longing for love — something shifts. The energy that was locked in the anxiety is freed. You don't have to keep running from it anymore.

This isn't a one-time fix. As we said at the beginning, consciousness moves in cycles. But each time you meet the deeper pain, you dissolve a little more of its hold on you. Eventually, what once felt overwhelming becomes something you can hold with compassion.