Godless Mom in the Bible Belt

I've been wondering something lately and since the regular readers of my brain spew are a very diverse group I'm hoping maybe I'll get some fun feedback on this one. By way of explanation though, I'm going to have to give you some background so you'll understand how I've arrived at this particular musing.

I have an extremely vivid imagination, and I don't mean in a good way. As a child I was frequently paralyzed by fear. The fears weren't logical. They were irrational, bone-deep fears of slimy things under the stairs and preternaturally strong decomposing aliens under the bed. I was terrified of opening closet doors for fear of disturbing the inhabitants within, I would never look at my reflection in the mirror in a darkened room for fear the image in the glass would come alive and crawl into my side of reality. The basement in our house was an extreme source of terror and the cellar under the front porch was even creepier than that.

These fears didn't abate when I was 10 or even 12. I avoided the basement and closets until I was at least 15 years old. At that point my mind had seriously started to reject all things illogical and unprovable and I became disgusted with the irrational fears that would take hold of me when I was alone in the dark. The fear was still very real but I had begun to look at it as a character flaw that I could correct rather than something I was destined to live with.

I had taken Psych 101 at a local college as part of the AP studies at my school and I had learned about desensitization techniques and how they are used to treat phobias. I decided that the best way to conquer my fear of monsters (for lack of a better term) was to face that fear head on and expose myself repeatedly to the things which frightened me most.

I read everything Stephen King had written and rented every scary video at Blockbuster. I moved my bedroom from the safety of the hallway upstairs into a corner room in the basement, next to the door into the sub-porch cellar. I would force myself to not only stare at my reflection in the mirror but reach out and touch that reflection and make faces at myself. I made a point of entering each and every closet in the house multiple times daily and would force myself to stand next to the bed after dark, despite that fact that my mind was certain there were oogy things living under there.

You know what? It worked. Within a few months I could comfortably call the basement my home. The mirror didn't bother me and closets were merely a place to keep clean clothes. I could stay up until midnight reading the latest Dean Koontz and I no longer had nightmares about Linda Blair in Exorcist.

Now, as an adult, I am no longer crippled by unreasonable fears. They are still there though, alive and kicking in the back of my brain. When I reach into a dark room to turn on the light, when I open the door to the attic or get up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night I can feel those fears tickling my brain and playing with my adrenalin levels.

Now I hate irrational fears and illogical behavior, especially in myself. The fact that I have to consciously rein in these fears pisses me off in a very big way. But my anger does nothing to eliminate the fears. I have learned to deal with them, I no longer let them dictate my behavior but I detest the fact that they are there at all.

Now, my little Liz has virtually no irrational fears. Her imagination is easily as vivid as mine, but the creatures that inhabit her mind are friendly and benign. She has invented a creature to inhabit virtually every nook and cranny of our home, when you ask her about them she will go into long detail about what kind of food they like and which book is their favorite. Her monsters aren't evil and malevelant, her monsters are her imaginary buddies and she freely acknowledges the fact that they don't really exist.

So this is where my musings have lead me, and I know my sample size is way too small and this is a tremendous leap in logic so please don't chastize me about it...I'm just wondering here. Could there possibly be a connection between irrational fears and teaching a child to believe in a God? Do we unwittingly encourage fear in things that go bump in the night when we encourage belief in an all powerful diety that cannot be seen. When we teach our children that there is an unseen spirit who has control over our lives and who sits in judgement of our actions is it such a leap to think that these same children may take the "unseen spirit" thing and run with it?

Do my irrational fears have their root in the fact that my parents convinced me at a very young age that I was being watched and judged by something beyond rational explanation?