“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

When you turned from the habit, and would have turned to food for comfort, you denied yourself this out of fear of gaining weight. Subconsciously you felt cheated. Now the comfort was needed to begin with so that you could make up for other things that you felt you did not have, and to help you cope with problems, as you are aware.

There are reasons why you chose the particular symptoms that you have, and reasons why they emerged at this particular time. Now. There was the feeling, the inner fear that you do not have freedom of motion in the economic or professional sphere—the fear, quite simply, that you were not going to make it. Some of this has to do with the symbolism you have attached subconsciously to the age of 40, and you see yourself coming closer to it. Some has to do with your assessment of your position within the firm, with your assessment of what you would get outside the firm should you leave it.

You have not expressed your bitterness in anything like an adequate fashion. In a large manner, you hide it from your wife for fear she would consider you less manly or less in charge, and would therefore feel less secure and threatened herself.

You had not wanted such a dog until you had room and a larger place, and in the past you had not gotten the dog because subconsciously you hoped you would have more land within a brief, foreseeable future. When you bought the dog, and particularly since your wife was so for the idea, you feared that she also took this as a sign that you had made your mind up to the fact, or faced the fact, that you would be where you are for some time.

You harbored thoughts of immobility. You feared you could not get ahead. You did not know what steps to take. You set up limitations in your mind. You used your imagination, a very valuable tool, against yourself. You saw yourself in the future worse off. You felt your freedom threatened until little by little these ideas began to predominate.

You were particularly frightened during vacation because of the inactivity. Old fears were aroused that you have never faced consciously. You never faced them honestly. You are terrified of inactivity, for many reasons: bodily inactivity, mental inactivity, some of this based upon fear of your mother’s disease. You must go, go, go, to prove that you can do so, and any threat to your mobility is not only strongly felt but negatively exaggerated.

This also applies symbolically, and during your vacation, and before it, was one fear that you had not come to terms with. You would consider it beneath you, and unmanly to entertain, and consciously improbable, if you left your job and did not get another—could not get another, of comparable merit indeed.

Supposing you left your job and simply could not find another, what would you do? You could not bear to sit at home. This fear subconsciously nagged at you, and it has for this reason, among other, that the symptoms were with you before vacation. This year you felt the vacation almost as a threat because of the fears that had built up during the year.

You have been concentrating emotionally, and at a certain level, upon failure. Now you translate activity into many areas. You have been frightened of your mother’s disease, and you have also translated a fear of inactivity into other than physical realms.

To protect yourself from her disease you had to move quickly physically. You also had to move quickly in the area of work. You were sensitized because of your mother’s problem to fear inactivity. Any threat to your motion or advance, even in the business area, becomes highly charged for this reason. Earlier you felt that you could strike out. There was plenty of time. Then you became frightened after the age of 35, and you began to soften up your blows. (Jane gestured widely, with a fist.) You began to hold back, become more cautious, and then slowly began to entertain thoughts of the possibility of failure.

You do have full freedom to move, both physically and in the economic world. You allowed negative patterns of thought to take an upper hand, and fears to predominate. These fears were then symbolically acted out by the body. You do have freedom in your joints, for example. I will try to put this simply.

You do not want to accept the basic fear of immobility and lack of motion. You are too afraid of the fear itself. You recognize it but you do not know what to do about it, and this frightens you further. You act this out subconsciously then, hampering the free motion of the joints, which then become stiffened through the inactivity. The stiffness then convinces you that the joints are indeed at fault; this adds to the problem, which then gives more fuel to the basic fear.

Now I can tell you what to do, and I can assure you that this works. It is up to you to follow through however. Now in your mind you now have the image of yourself with hampered motion, stiff joints. You have the fears that this image can evoke, and you must be very on guard against projecting this idea or image into the future.

Tell yourself that you are free to move ahead. Do not tell yourself you are feeling fine when you hurt; I do not mean this. You must however realize fully that your ideas are responsible. Give us a moment here. (Long pause.) You must face the fact fully that you are and have been frightened, and that fear is a natural reaction, and that there are ways of responding to it that are healthy and constructive. You can face your problems and deal with them. You are free to do so, and you should remind yourself of this fequently, for you doubted your ability to handle the problems. (Long pause.)

You must either accept your situation as it is, change it, or at least feel that you have the ability to change it. You feared that you did not have the ability as things stand. (Long pause.) You thought that you would not advance. You feared,and do,that changing your job would deny your family.

Now you are also underestimating your own worth, and you have done so consistently for some time. You would be the last to say that that is so, and the reasons are too deep-seated to go into this evening. This underestimation of your own worth leads you to place an overemphasis upon your financial worth to your family. It is in this personal area that a basic fear exists also. This is a high simplification, but you feel that your value as a person and as a man in the family situation is determined not only by your ability to provide, but increases in proportion to your financial status.