In 1998 I had one of the most terrifying moments of my life. It was 11:00 pm and my then fiancé (now my husband) was driving me home after a photo shoot session at one of our friend’s studio. We were talking about how pleased and grateful we were with the photos, completely unsuspicious about what was happening around us; a car behind us with 4 armed men inside started pursuing us aggressively, bumping our car from the side with the intention of making us lose control and stop. We had heard about car hijacking cases happening in the city; usually the car and personal possessions were stolen and in the worst cases there was abduction, rape, or people was narcotized. Of course, we thought that situation wouldn’t happen to us if we were in an area we considered safe.
If a frightening event has happened to you, you may know that everything happens in mere seconds.
25 years later after that incident, the first flashback I have from that extreme distressing night was the image of the rounded shape of a gun barrel pointed at me. The second memory I have, is of my husband leaning towards me. In an instant I thought he had been shot so in micro-seconds and anticipating the car was going to crash or flip, my first reaction was to yell: stop the car!; instead, he switched gears and sped up. Miraculously we left them behind and they chose not to further pursue us, perhaps because we were getting into a more populated area, or maybe it was just not our time.
Fear is a primitive and complicated emotion, it is hard-wired deep into our brains and programmed into our nervous system. Once fear takes over, chemicals are released into our blood stream; the emotion overpowers our physiology and can override our systems, as it should, since the sole purpose of our “software” is to protect us from danger.
My sense of fear was so strong that what followed afterwards was a phobia to going out at night; for me, the danger was always out there, and I took it out of proportion that whoever did this was on the loose, and I was not going to make myself a target again.
Looking back I am astonished that I was able to scream in the midst of that ordeal. In other less horrifying situations where I panicked I froze, or lost my voice –literally.
It is only now that I am able to evaluate what happened and realize the different reactions from my husband and me, what went through his mind at the moment, and what is the story on my end. It was a completely unexpected situation. We were both fearful, experiencing the same event. His reaction was to get away from the danger — fly or fight — mine as I shout out “stop” perhaps was a form of “freeze”, trying to protect our lives at the moment (as I see it today).
The fear we lived that night was real, visceral, and the reaction was raw, unedited and automatic, which could be compared to running away from a predator, but most of the fears humans experience nowadays are learned and irrational, and they vary from person to person. When we recognize a fear that is impacting our wellbeing, one that to other people doesn’t make sense, it is then when we have an opportunity to confront it, starting the path of becoming fearfully fearless, which for me it means facing our fears consciously, courageously and with a curious mindset, while still feeling afraid.
Many of our behavioural mechanisms, decisions and patterns in adulthood may be rooted on a learned fear that in most cases goes as far as our childhood, either from things that we experienced or simply observed; something that happened to our parents, caregivers, loved ones, or friends. Some people avoid getting vaccinated because they are scared of needles, many restrict their adventures to places that are only accessible by car or train because flying in an airplane is not bearable, others become isolated because it may be more manageable than enduring the fear of rejection, or the opposite, they remain in toxic relationships scared of ending up alone. In my case, the night meant danger and just the thought of being outside when it was dark made me anxious.
Despite their irrational nature, all these fears trigger the same defensive responses in the human body, just like if we were facing a real threat, and so being aware of our own individual irrational fears is the first step towards improving our health, and an opportunity to start editing our responses and behaviours, one step at a time.
Our path to fearlessness includes walking through the “fearful forest” first, and for that, we need to know what we have at our disposal in our “backpack”. Mental health professionals, psychologists and therapists are an excellent first source to start talking about it. Sometimes things get clearer when we talk things out loud. For example, let’s say you notice that you have developed a fear of losing your mobile phone, or maybe just leaving it behind stresses you out. If this is something affecting your behaviour and negatively impacting your life, then understanding the source of that distress can help you to manage it. These professionals use effective treatments –exposure-based therapy being one of them, to help you unlearn and re-learn conquering that fear.
Another option is to do small experiments on your own, using your curious mind, learning — knowledge is power. It worked in my case with bugs.
I was always afraid of any kind of bugs since I can remember, until a documentary made me curious. It was inspiring to see the passion of an entomologist talking about his work, and understanding the role of insects in our ecosystem. A few years ago I decided to start with wasps and learn about them. One thing I learned was that as any other animal, wasps only bite when they feel threatened or are defending their territory. My first small experiment was to change my reaction when they were flying around me, instead of knocking them down, I started observing them. Today I can report that I have let them walk on my arms and on my legs allowing them to also be curious and explore. I even let one of them drink from my glass of wine; of course I had to rescue it from the glass and funny story it got drunk and slept all night. The next day, I witnessed it waking up and flying away. I don’t recommend doing it, but the whole point is, now I learn about them and approach bugs with a curious mind, so far I have “befriended” lady bugs, house spiders, beetles and a pseudo scorpion. I am still apprehensive and fearful, but interacting with them makes me feel fearless.
Every person, every case, and each irrational fear is different, but there is a light in which we all can change the way we see and approach our fears, and about my fear of going out at night…I am still working on it.
What’s yours?
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