Make Friends With Your Fear

In Buddhist teachings you will often hear teachers suggesting you “make friends with your fear”. This is sometimes a startling phrase for people - who wants to make friends with fear?!? And what does that even mean?

Most of us treat fear as an enemy, an entity to be avoided at all costs. And of course we don’t want to be put into situations where we’re scared, it feels very unpleasant! But the fact is that fear is a part of life, one more bit of emotional information available to us, and that usually means something. When it comes up, many of us push it away - if you watch yourself closely throughout a typical day you will probably notice its physiological markers several times.

And much of the time we just push it away, distract ourselves by any available means - turn up the radio, turn on social media, eat, drink, shop, and so on. Anything to get away from this most unpleasant of emotions.

But would you ignore a child who was afraid? Or would you acknowledge that they were afraid, comfort them, and help them feel safe again?

Making friends with fear means taking a very different stance towards it. Instead of turning away from it, instead of dissociating or trying to distract ourselves, it means we instead turn towards it. We acknowledge it. We take it in as information, and if it indicates something we really need to be scared of we take steps to keep ourselves safe, to the best of our ability. If instead it’s part of an old pattern and there’s not actually anything for us to be scared of, we take steps to comfort ourselves, and return to a calmer baseline.

If you take nothing else from psychotherapy, take this - making friends with your fear, turning towards it rather than away from it, is THE single most important ingredient in leading a richer life. Turning towards your fear gives you the opportunity either to address the external forces that are stressing you out, or to start to rewire the habitualized emotional patterns that produce fear when it is not really needed. Either way, moving towards fear is the first step towards real growth and change.

I also want to acknowledge that sometimes people are living in circumstances where the fear they feel is both fully legitimate and largely out of their power to change. Nothing about this post is meant to make turning towards fear a moral rule - in these sorts of situations dissociation and/or distraction can be really useful tools! Embrace them, use them, be kind to yourself, and seek help in getting into a safer situation (please reach out if you need pointers to resources to help with this). And when you’re safe, and ready, THEN you can start working with your fear in a way that isn’t going to be so overwhelming.