Living With Fear

As a kid, I experienced fear on a daily basis. I was bullied, and my life for a long time, was one of jumping at shadows, imagining scenarios – that often didn’t occur – and spending a lot of mental bandwidth planning my life, so as to avoid potential confrontations. It’s not a healthy way to live. Unfortunately, violence isn’t something that really gets talked about in families, and when it does, it’s often sterilized, sanitized, or presented in an unrealistic manner; oftentimes parents don’t have accurate points of reference, and defer to personal safety myths, created by those who have a desire to give answers, but don’t really understand the subject matter e.g. I was told as a kid, to ignore bullies and in response they would just go away (they don’t), that they were only bullying me because they were suffering from low self-esteem – and even if this was true, it doesn’t help in practical terms – and that telling a teacher would somehow solve the situation. Once I dealt with my situation, I soon forgot what it was like to live in a state of fear. We humans can be remarkably resilient in such matters, and harsh, judgmental critics of those who aren’t able to achieve the same as ourselves. At 18, I started working on the door, and soon forgot, what it was like to be standing in front of an aggressor, paralyzed by fear, waiting in anticipation of the inevitable shock, pain and humiliation (perhaps the worst part), which was waiting to begin. I often think that the over-confident social media posts and comments detailing what somebody would do to the other person if they were ever confronted in such a way, are made as a preemptive defense/coping mechanism, by those who ultimately fear such paralysis, if they were ever actually faced with a committed violent aggressor.

When we don’t know what violence looks like, everything can be a potential threat, or we can go the other way entirely and deny/discount any dangers and view the world through rose-tinted glasses. Without an education into violence it’s hard to occupy the healthy middle ground, where we consider and investigate individuals and scenarios in a realistic manner e.g. immigrants become scary, youths in hooded tops become scary, the person walking behind us becomes scary, nighttime becomes scary, unfamiliar places become scary, etc. We start to cultivate an unnecessary culture of fear in our lives — and fear feeds upon fear – where we start to jump at the sound of doors slamming, and create narratives behind every squeaky floorboard we hear, and as a result we start behaving like (and identifying ourselves) as victims. Because of this, we may even become one e.g. we start becoming so non/anti-confrontational with people due to a fear of violence, that those observing our avoidance of certain types of interaction, come to view us as potential targets and/or we over compensate and become aggressive at the smallest sleight; writing checks that we’re unable to cash, should we be called upon to do so. Both responses, although at opposite ends of the spectrum, come from the same place: fear.

Acknowledging and admitting fear is not a weakness; it’s a sensible first step to dealing with it – if we have particular fears and don’t deal with them then we will have them forever. For many people fear is unimaginable i.e. they can’t – don’t want to – imagine what it would be like to be assaulted and to cope with both the experience/process and the consequence(s). In certain cases, people will be indignant about having to experience fear; that they shouldn’t have to feel this way, that it shouldn’t be their responsibility to have feel this way, or think about these things, etc. and I agree with them on this, but (and there had to be a “but”), if something is debilitating and dangerous to us, we can’t expect for anyone to solve this problem on our behalf. The first step in dealing with fear is to conduct a risk analysis, identifying the assets (including ourselves) we want to protect, the threats that want to gain access to them, and the vulnerabilities we may have in protecting them. A lot of the time, our fear comes from the idea of a larger “general” threat to our safety, rather than from specific ones – when we think about and identify specific threats, they are usually much easier to manage and mitigate against. We may also realize at this point how unlikely we are to experience certain dangers – I once taught a class where a participant thought I’d neglected to teach them how to deal with the mentally ill, as this was to their mind, one of the greatest dangers to people’s safety; I asked them how many mentally ill individuals they’d had interactions with and it turned out to be zero (if I was teaching staff in a psychiatric ward, or a health care setting this would have been different – though in saying that, most staff know their patients and the danger/warning signs well). However, this process also involves us identifying our vulnerabilities, which can be harder to do because they are internal to us, and are things we’re responsible for, unlike threats which are external.

The imagined but unquantified threat is perhaps the scariest to have to deal with. When I teach defenses against knife attacks, my first question is “why” i.e. why would somebody attack you with a knife? Not threaten you, in order to get you to comply with a demand, but attack you, looking to cut, stab you, cause you harm, injury, death, etc. There has to be a reason: a motivation. Pure randomness doesn’t exist, every victim is selected for a reason – even if that reason is internal to the attacker e.g. after missing four potential victims, desperation and emotional readiness, mean that they’ll attack the next, etc. If we conclude that this is the most likely reason we’d be attacked, we can quantify this, and place it in the extremely unlikely category. If we’re running with a football firm, fighting against other fans, every Saturday afternoon, then we can understand why we may be targeted by/with a knife attack, etc. Such things can be dealt with via changes in lifestyle. If we understand the contexts in which we may have to face a gun/firearm, we can understand the different solutions that will deal with the situation e.g. a mugger, and abductor, and an active shooter are all different types of threat, despite their similar presentations. We have to manage both our “fear” and our responses differently for each and recognize the different likelihoods of experiencing each one.

For a large part of my early life, fear was a constant companion. I didn’t manage it well, and I developed a fatalistic attitude towards being the victim of violence – and even if perhaps this was a “realistic” viewpoint, it wasn’t a healthy one, as I came to discount precautions and safety rituals, which despite not working all of the time, did have their moments of success. I still experience fear, but it’s a healthy fear, that is appropriate for the situations I am in, rather than something I live with, and allow to over-ride my other emotions.