A child can be terrified of what is under the bed.
The fear is real.
Completely real.
Their heart is racing. Their body is braced. They may be absolutely certain that something is there.
Turning on the light doesn’t make the fear they felt imaginary.
It only gives them more information.
Somewhere along the way, this gets harder to understand when we’re adults.
We start believing there are only two possibilities. Either the thing we felt was true, or we were wrong to feel it.
If you thought someone was angry and they weren’t, you overreacted.
If you felt left out and later learned you weren’t intentionally excluded, you were being too sensitive.
If your body told you something was wrong and everything turned out okay, you shouldn’t have trusted it.
So we go back and rewrite the feeling.
I shouldn’t have felt that way.
But you did.
Something happened inside you.
Maybe it was about what was happening in front of you.
Maybe it was about something that happened twenty years ago.
Probably, sometimes, it’s both.
The strange thing about being human is that we don’t experience life as it is.
Not exactly.
We experience what is happening now alongside everything that has taught us what things mean.
A closed door is just a closed door until you’ve been shut out.
Silence is just silence until someone has used it to punish you.
Someone needing space is just someone needing space until you’ve loved someone who disappeared.
And then the present gets crowded.
Not with things that aren’t real.
With things that were.
Maybe that’s why the feeling can be so convincing.
Your body isn’t lying to you when it reacts.
It may be remembering.
It may be noticing.
It may be protecting.
It may even be right.
You just don’t always know which one yet.
There is something almost relieving about that.
You don’t have to choose between trusting yourself and questioning the story.
You don’t have to call yourself dramatic because you felt afraid.
You also don’t have to make someone dangerous because your body became scared.
You don’t have to dismiss the feeling.
You don’t have to obey it either.
Maybe you can just turn on the light.
Not to prove there was never anything under the bed.
Not to make yourself foolish for being afraid.
Just to see what else is there.
Because sometimes the light shows you that you were right.
Sometimes it shows you something entirely different.
And sometimes it shows you that what you were so certain was happening now…
was something that happened a long time ago.
The feeling was still real.
It just wasn’t the whole story.
Embracing Shadows, Illuminating Hope,
Chelsey Fjeldheim, LCSW
Empowering Souls on the Path of Healing
Copyright © 2026 Chelsey Fjeldheim, Courage Speaks Counseling
