A few months ago a colleague and I met with a man who is a conspiracy theorist and survivalist.  I won’t get into his theories on global conspiracy, but I will say that we spent over an hour listening to tips on having land up north, stocking food, buying firearms and hard currency and collecting gas and water in reserve.  At the end of our time together, the man turned to me and said ‘you’ve barely said anything the whole time we’ve been here.’  What I didn’t say out loud but did think was ‘that’s because I’m so depressed I don’t know if I should go dig a bunker or hit the pub for the rest of the night.’

For the next few days I found myself almost paralyzed with fear.  The world is ending, mass anarchy is coming, we’ll all end up killing each other…  Nothing was too outrageous to keep me awake and terrified.  On the upside, my usual fears of losing my job, being stricken by an incurable disease and having to write an exam for a course I’d never taken seemed tame by comparison.

A couple of weeks later when equilibrium had returned, I remembered the house we lived in when I was young.  A previous owner had built a bomb shelter under the basement.  My dad turned it into a darkroom and spent many happy hours developing family pictures in a place where someone had undoubtedly imagined eating tinned food and bottled water while the world above imploded.

Fear is part of the human condition.  Certain points in time – both individual time and global time – engender more fear than others. This point in our global time is one in which fear seems to be a constant companion for many of us.  Beyond that, there is an atmosphere of fear; as another colleague said recently, we live our days in an ambient anxiety. 

During a visit to Toronto a couple of years ago leadership and communications guru Margaret Wheatley revealed an interesting study.  Psychologists at USC, during a particularly stressful time at the university, noticed a trend that would lead them to a breakthrough in how we deal with fear.  What they saw during this stressful period was a group of women in the department who would regularly gather to talk and help each other.  This was in stark contrast to many of their male colleagues who would spend as little time as possible at the university or lock themselves in their office. 

As they began to investigate, their first discovery was that all previous research on fear was based on test groups that were primarily male.  So our classic ‘fight or flight’ responses were indicative of only part of the population.  Pursing their studies further over time, they uncovered a third response that was more typically ‘female’.  They called this tend and befriend: gathering together to take care of each other. 

When I heard Wheatley talk about this research I was fascinated.  A third natural response to fear!  What could this mean for us in times of severe stress?  Fear is so often internal and abstract, and, the harder we work to get over it, the more deeply it seems to imbed itself in us.  Given this tendency, in what ways could we use tending and befriending to help ourselves?

When you think about it, we are naturally wise: we talk over a beer, we spend time on a walk with a friend, we offer our company to someone who is alone and ill.  But in times of real fear, we can actually be more intentional about how we are with each other in order to help each other.  To be at its most effective, tending and befriending encompasses some active elements. 

So how can we tend and befriend these days?

Our first step is to externalize our fear – to have a real conversation about it with someone who will really listen.  That means sitting with one more people and telling them you want to talk about your fears.  But because fears are often abstract, we need to dig down and hear ourselves articulate the specific things we’re afraid will happen.  For example, someone may start out saying that they are afraid they’ll lose their job, their house, their car.  But when we dig down deep and ask what those fears are really about, they may discover that the real fear isn’t losing everything, it’s the fear of feeling that they have failed at their life.  Hearing this out loud means being able to deal with a specific issue.    What’s important to note here is that as a listener it isn’t about convincing the other person that there’s nothing to be afraid of or about fixing them or their fear.  It’s just about being there to listen with them as they talk about it openly.

Another helpful exercise is to picture the fear outside ourselves.  For example, on a particularly difficult day recently a client was so tired of feeling afraid that she decided to picture her fear as an object standing in front of her.  She could see it, devilish and smiling and wanting to come back inside her.  Instead she mentally poked it in the stomach . Sharing this story helped her to move from feeling that she was being consumed by fear, to recognizing that she is not her fear. She is powerful and capable in the face of it. 

Finally, the opportunity to be together, to talk, to listen to support, in other words, to tend and befriend, enables us to recognize that we’re not alone.  When we talk together about  fear, we recognize that in fact we aren’t alone – we’re together in the concern, and very likely in the solution.

Sometimes it really is about overcoming our fear – that adrenalin-filled moment when we take our first dive off the dock, or open our mouths to give our first speech.  Sometimes it’s about using our fear to drive us to positive action.  And sometimes it’s about being compassionate with ourselves in our fear and turning to each other.  When we open up and speak what’s really in our hearts and minds, when we listen with care and a belief in the other person’s abilities, we tend and befriend and allow ourselves to move to the other side of fear into possibility. 

In every dark moment there is a complementary pair of light.  Here is to the light that exists in your life right now.

Elizabeth Lancaster is a certified professional coach who works with individuals and teams to help them turn their dreams into action.  She is a faculty member at Adler International Learning, an international coaching and communication school based in Toronto and Director of Context Management Consulting.  www.contextconsulting.com   

elizabeth.lancaster@contextconsulting.com

Worry gives a small thing a big shadow

- Swedish Proverb