If you’ve ever wondered where your fear came from, chances are you’ve tried to think back to the moment it started. People typically expect a big, fairly obvious reason—a traumatic experience, a life-threatening situation, or a memory that clearly explains why you feel the way you do.
This is the point where most people get stuck. When we assume a fear must have a major trigger event, but we can’t identify one, we conclude that maybe we were simply born with it or it’s just part of who we are. We may also decide that, because we can’t identify if anything really happened, we shouldn’t feel fearful in the first place.
However, what if I told you that your fear may have started with something small—something your logical mind would dismiss?
Fear and the Power of Conditioning
A Russian scientist, Ivan Pavlov, discovered that if he rang a bell every time he fed his dogs, eventually they would start salivating just from hearing the bell, even when no food was present. This type of response is called classical conditioning—when two things become linked in your mind, even if they’re not actually connected—and just like Pavlov’s dogs, fear is conditioned similarly.
At some point in your past, your brain linked a neutral experience with a strong emotional reaction. Your conscious mind may have forgotten it, but your emotional brain still reacts as if that moment is happening again when you are exposed to the same stimulus.
For example:
- If you were locked in a small cupboard as a child, your brain may have associated tight spaces with fear, leading to claustrophobia.
- If a teacher embarrassed you in front of your classmates, your brain may have associated attention with danger, leading to glossophobia.
- If you saw your parent panic when they saw a spider, your brain may have linked spiders with fear, even if you never had a bad experience yourself, leading to arachnophobia.
While your brain does this as an attempt to protect you, it doesn’t often serve you and isn’t always logical.
Why You Struggle to Find Your Fear’s Root Cause
There are three main reasons why people struggle to recognise their trigger event.
The Event Seems Too Small
Most people expect to find a big traumatic moment in their past, but the event that created the fear may have been something relatively insignificant that your adult brain would now dismiss.
This is often due to cognitive dissonance—the mental discomfort that comes from holding two conflicting beliefs. On one hand, your emotions say, “This fear is real.” On the other hand, your logical mind says, “That event wasn’t a big deal.”
To resolve this conflict, people often dismiss the event rather than acknowledging its impact.
This is also known as retrospective minimisation—where your adult self looks back and downplays what happened because it doesn’t seem significant now, but your younger self didn’t have logic, they just had emotions.
It is at this point where emotional time distortion comes into play. A few seconds of fear in childhood can feel like an eternity, and even a minor event can get stored as highly significant because of the intensity of the emotion attached.
So even if, logically, it doesn’t seem like a big deal now, your brain may have hardwired the trigger as something dangerous.
You’re Looking for the Wrong Type of Event
People assume that because they fear flying, the cause must be a bad experience on a plane, which is one of people’s biggest mistakes because fear doesn’t always work like that.
This is known as the mismatch phenomenon—when the feeling of fear gets linked to something that isn’t directly related to the thing you’re afraid of.
For example:
- Someone with a fear of flying might believe it stems from a challenging experience on a plane. In reality, if the fear centres around turbulence, the root cause could lie somewhere else entirely—like a roller coaster ride, being caught in a storm, or feeling motion sick on a boat.
- Social anxiety is often linked to memories of bullying. However, it might have taken hold much earlier, like a child who got lost and felt abandoned, and they connected being alone with danger.
- A fear of water is usually assumed to come from a near-drowning. Yet, it may be less about the water itself and more about the sensation of losing control—something that might have begun with something as simple as being spun too fast on a roundabout as a child.
If you’ve been searching for the cause of your fear and can’t find it, ask yourself, a great question to consider is, “When else have I felt this same sensation—just in a different context?”
Your Adult Brain Dismisses It as Not Important
Even when people find what’s triggering their fear, they often reject it because it doesn’t seem big enough to have caused such a strong reaction.
This is also connected to schema incongruence—when an experience that shaped your fears doesn’t fit with your current self-image. If you see yourself as confident and rational now, it can be hard to accept that a moment from childhood, when you felt small or powerless, could still affect you.
Your logical override also kicks in, dismissing the event because it doesn’t make sense; however, fear isn’t rational, and your emotional brain doesn’t care about logic, it only cares about how it felt in the moment.
How to Find Your Trigger Event
If you’re struggling to uncover the origin of your fear, try the following techniques:
Follow the Feeling, Not the Logic
- Close your eyes and focus on where you feel the fear—your chest, stomach, throat?
- Ask yourself: “When was another time I felt this exact sensation?”
- Trust the first thing that comes to mind—even if it seems random.
Reverse Emotional Tracing
Instead of asking, “What caused this fear?”, ask:
- “What’s the first image, sound, or feeling that comes to mind—no matter how silly?
- ”If I had to guess, when might this have started?”
Float Above Your Past (Temporal Reimprinting Technique)
- Imagine floating above that younger version of yourself, like watching a scene from a film.
- Notice what that younger version of you needed in that moment—comfort, understanding, reassurance.
- Now imagine your older, wiser self giving them that advice.
Your Fear Isn’t Fixed
If you’ve been searching for a dramatic moment to explain your fear, it’s natural to think the root must be something big and obvious. However, as we’ve discussed, fear doesn’t always come from the loudest moments—it very often comes from quiet ones that left a deep emotional imprint.
Nor is it just about what happened; it’s about the meaning your brain attached to the event, and because that meaning was created, it can be redefined.
The other important thing to remember is that you don’t need to relive everything to heal, you just need to understand the link your brain made and teach it something new.
What once felt automatic and overwhelming can become manageable. And what once felt like a fixed part of who you are can become something you can let go.
Put simply, when you change the meaning, you change the response and reclaim your power. And from that place, fear no longer runs the show—you do.
