> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://cptsd-insights.ghost.io/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Pt. 3 of 3 / The Child Is Never the Lion: A Plea to Stop Passing On Our Fear - URL: https://cptsd-insights.ghost.io/pt-3-of-3-the-child-is-never-the-lion-a-plea-to-stop-passing-on-our-fear/ - Published: 2026-09-30T19:54:35.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-30T19:54:35.000Z - Author: CoreKintsugi *This is the final part of a three-part series about conditional worth, the safety we seek from our partners, and the fear we can pass on to our children.* [*Read Part 1*](https://cptsd-insights.ghost.io/the-original-overstepping-how-we-traded-unconditional-worth-for-a-lifetime-of-survival-mode/) *|* [*Read Part 2*](https://cptsd-insights.ghost.io/pt-2-of-3-looking-for-a-parent-not-a-partner-the-tragic-demands-we-place-on-love/) My partner disagrees with me. Nothing terrible has happened. They see something differently, or they think I handled something badly. But I can feel the change in my body before I have even finished listening. I want to defend myself. And, if I am honest, I want them to stop disagreeing, because their disagreement feels like an attack. That is the fear I wrote about in Part 2\. The old need for someone to tell me that I am still loved, still accepted, still safe, even when I get something wrong. The problem is that my partner cannot make that fear disappear by surrendering their own mind. They are my equal partner, not the parent I needed when I was small. Despite knowing all of this, I still feel anger rising instantly. My body, and then my mind, react as if I am in mortal danger. So I try to remember to ask myself this question: **"Where is the lion?"** This is my question to ground myself. Anger is my body preparing to fight a threat. It wants me to become the bigger threat, to make my opponent back off or get hurt. This is the evolutionary intimidation reflex we all carry, anger. So I ask: *What danger am I facing right now? Is this person actually threatening me? Or does being disagreed with feel dangerous because, as a child, I was humiliated or attacked when I made mistakes?* I do not ask this because the feeling is imaginary. It is very real. I ask because I do not want to externalize what my body remembers onto others. ## When the fear finds a child Now imagine me parenting. My child takes longer than I thought they would to get dressed. I might be late for work. Images of my boss criticizing me race through my mind. I get agitated and rush my child. Maybe I lose patience, and they see my anger. But where is the lion? It cannot be my child. My child does not know what my boss expects. They do not live by workplace schedules. They are a child doing ordinary child things. Yet in me comes that familiar surge: *This must stop. You must function. You must deliver what I need, right now.* If that surge becomes shouting, threats of consequences, or an angry face, my child learns something much bigger than “get dressed.” They learn that not fitting into their plan can turn the person they depend on into someone threatening. That their safety depends on doing things they do not yet understand, but I demand. ## Whose fear are we passing on? I do not write this from a place of having no anger. I feel anger often. I know how convincing it can be when my body decides something is wrong and wants me to make it stop. I also know what it is like to be the child on the other side of an adult’s fear. That is why I cannot accept “it’s normal for parents to get angry, and sometimes they scream” as an answer. Yes, adults have feelings. Yes, adults have histories. But a child is never a threat and should never have to feel threatened because an adult is frightened of being late, judged, criticized, or out of control. To a child, an angry or raging adult demanding that they function beyond their development and understanding feels like an existential threat. How would you feel like living and depending on someone infinitely stronger than you who explodes into anger when you didn't even know you were doing anything wrong? I do not think the answer is simply to declare our parents bad people, either. I can look at what my parents carried from their childhoods. I can look further back, at my grandparents and at ideas about how children should be raised. I can feel sadness for people who never learned to feel safe themselves. None of that changes the fact that I now live with CPTSD, but it explains a lot. **Fear travelled through their anger and became my fear.** Understanding that is vital if we want to change how we treat children. In Part 1, I wrote about the moment we connect a person’s actions to their worth. A child acts like a child, an adult externalizes their issues and reacts as though the child *is* the problem, a lion threatening their safety. Years later, that child may feel their own worth and safety threatened by a partner’s disagreement. The fear moves through us so easily that we pass it on with our anger, believing we are protecting ourselves from threats which actually come from within, which are not grounded in the present. ## What stopping it asks of us It's not about stop feeling anger. I cannot force my body to forget what it learned. But I can question the story my anger tells me before I act on it. I can step away before I externalize. When my partner disagrees with me, I can challenge myself, to remember that their disagreement does not make them a lion. When my child makes a mess, I can teach them how to clean it up. They are not a lion I need to fight or intimidate. And if I do externalize my own trauma onto someone, understanding my past is not an excuse. It is a reason to take responsibility, put things right where I can, and keep working on my inner world. That is my plea. Not to become a perfect adult. I don't want to pretend my parents were the sole perpetrators, or that our partners must heal every fear we carry. I see that as externalizing and over-simplifying a very complex construct, which lives within me and has grown over generations. I want to notice when an old fear rises within me...and remind myself, that it is mine...not my partner's...not my child's. The person disagreeing with me is not the parent whose acceptance I had to earn and who externalized their fear onto me through intimidation. The child making a mess is not my boss, or anyone else I feel I have to function for. **The child is never the lion.** And the fear I inherited does shall not become theirs. But for that to happen, I have to work hard on not making my anger part of their childhood.