What Do You Do With Your Fear?

So here it is three weeks since the election and it seems like the hits just keep on coming.  Everybody responds to shock and fear differently.  I know folks who are motivated to take action everyday and some folks who are managing anxiety every day.  Some folks are waking up angry every morning and others are withdrawing into the comfort of their homes and loved ones.  Some days I find myself in all the stages of grief: imagining that I will wake up and it will all be a bad dream, blaming everyone for all of it, imagining that someone will come along and save us all, or rationalizing that it won’t really be that bad.  After all, as a nation we have survived predatory Presidents in the past.  And then I remember that not all of us have survived and the fear kicks in once again.  Studies show that prolonged fear and anxiety are not sustainable.  So this begs the question: what do you do with your fear? 

Given that it is a natural emotion, given that it is a useful tool for gathering information about your environment in order to respond accordingly, what does one do with it?  When the dark terror haunts you in your dreams, when the sense of security and safety that once enveloped you disappears into thin air and you long for the days of innocence and hopefulness you never realized that you had.  What do you do with fear?  When, as you slowly realize that the institutions you were trained to trust implicitly as you would trust your own family don’t actually care about you and in fact may be threatening your very existence?  What do you do with your fear?  It is not sustainable to live in constant fear.  The rush of cortisol that comes with stress and an activated nervous system is not meant to constantly flow through your body.  Heart disease, inflammation, stress and anxiety, all of these result from hyper-vigilance.  It doesn’t seem an accident that black men suffer the highest rates of heart disease.  But what do you do with your fear, when that fear is grounded in reality?  Or when it is grounded in very real potential reality?

Step 1: ground yourself in reality.  Evaluate how real or imminent is the threat.  Is the thing you’re afraid of happening in this moment?  Don’t mistake this for lulling oneself into apathetic state of blissful ignorance.  Horrible things have happened to innocent people as a result of inaction.  However, good decisions are rarely made when one is in active panic.  Effective actions are rarely made when one is blinded by fear.  So evaluate: what is the actual threat?  Rumors can spread like wildfire among terrorized people.  Before you can take conscious action, you have to become conscious.  What is the threat?  How do you know?  On what basis is it an actual threat?

Step 2: Breathe.  Get yourself grounded in the here and now.  Take deep breaths and touch something around you: the chair you are sitting on, the bed you’re lying in, the person you are with.  Remind yourself, “The thing that I am afraid of happening is not happening at this very moment.” 

Now I realize that, depending on the threat you are frightened by, it may actually be happening right now.  Water protectors are being hosed by police, black and brown people are being targeted and white supremacists are taking over the executive branch of our government.  The point of this exercise is not to deny reality but rather to regulate your nervous system and bring you back on line so that you can focus on how you would like to proceed and take action.  Effective action comes from a place of calm, clear-headedness, rather than a place of fight or flight. 

Note: the fight or flight response does have its place: when you are under active, immediate threat, it is your brain’s way of immediately saving you from danger.  It doesn’t allow you the time to evaluate the situation to determine the best course of action.  Instead, your amydala, the part of the brain where your emotions live, takes over and your prefrontal cortex, where advanced thinking and planning live, is taken off line.  In order to get your thinking and planning brain back on line, you must soothe your emotional brain and calm your nervous system by grounding yourself in the here and now: this very place at this very moment. 

Step 3: Take action.  Fear has a funny way of taking over when we aren’t taking active steps to address the threat.  It is a vicious cycle: we are immobilized by fear and the inaction makes the fear worse.  The sad reality is that we will likely never eradicate racism, poverty, war and disease.  The battle for equality and justice is a long-term battle.  Once we accept that we will always suffer setbacks, the less likely we will be derailed by them and thrown off course, and the more capable we will be of overcoming them, of transforming them into opportunities. 

This is not to minimize all the hurt, frustration and anger that naturally arise when we experience injustice.  Rather, it is a reminder of the Buddha’s First and Second Noble Truths: that life is suffering and suffering comes from attachment.  We suffer from the expectation that things should be different from how they exactly are.  And the Third Noble Truth: that freedom comes from non-attachment.  This is a hard pill to swallow (and probably why the Buddha, unlike us, was considered an enlightened being).  However, I don’t take this to mean that we should just accept things as they are, and therefore give up the struggle.  Rather, I take it as acknowledging that the fight is just that: a fight, where some of the blows will hurt.  As Trevor Noah’s boxing coach told him (as he reported on NPR’s “Fresh Air): “Acknowledge that you are going to get hit and figure out how to fight properly.”  Accepting this means that I am not derailed by outrage and upset but rather, clear-headed in my commitment to social justice and liberation for all people, I carry on the fight that I am not sure I will ever win in my lifetime.  That I don’t dissolve into despair but that I take solace in being on the enlightened side of history and that I am in good company.  As Dr. King said, “the arc of history is long but it bends towards justice.”  There is freedom in accepting things as they are.  Acceptance allows me to be free from fear and being free of fear allows me to take measured, conscious and wise action. 

Step 4: Acknowledge your victories.  No matter how “small”, no victory is worthless in the struggle against fear.  Were you able to calm yourself for a few minutes?  Were you successful in talking yourself off the ledge?  Were you able to call the person that was successful in talking you off the ledge?  Were you able to simply acknowledge your fear?  Were you able to hold it close and soothe it like a mother does her terrified child?  What actions were you able to take today in spite of your fear?  Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the ability to take action in spite of it.  Acknowledge your victories and use them as a stepping-stone to the next victory.  Remember that while we celebrate the leadership of Dr. King, Gandhi, Rosa Parks, Archbishop Romero, Angela Davis and Harriet Tubman, it is the small acts of revolutionary kindness that a specific person extended to us in our time of need that we keenly remember years later.  As Elizabeth Eckford, one of the Little Rock Nine that desegregated Central High School in Little Rock, Ark in 1957 said, “you could be somebody’s hero, just by speaking up.”