Don’t Be Afraid
Courage is the power of the mind to overcome fear.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
The other day I was telling my friend about my son’s recent wisdom tooth extraction and she told me a tragic story. A friend of her friend’s kid had a wisdom tooth extraction and died while napping by suffocating from the bleeding. That story stayed with me for the whole day after that, I was strangely frightened in retrospect. This is something I’ve noticed over my years as a mother, women love to tell each other tragic tales of children dying.
Children get crushed by tree branches, hit by cars, drown in pools. Fathers drive over children in driveways or forget to drop them off at daycare and leave them in cars on hot summer days. Babies and children are pretty tough, but they are very vulnerable to maltreatment. Sometimes I imagine in horror what it must have been like in the olden times when there was no antibiotics or vaccines. In 1880, nearly 35% of American children died before age five.
Even in these modern times, when the mortality rate for children under 5 is less than 1%, mothers are most afraid that our children will die. Motherhood transforms women’s awareness of danger because of very real biological changes that occur in their brains. The amygdala, which is the part of there brain that alerts us to danger, becomes larger and more sensitive to potential dangers during pregnancy and postpartum. Worry and fear are a normal part of motherhood, Homo sapiens would probably not exist without it After all, we are responsible for keeping a helpless infant alive until they can do it for themselves.
And so, as a mother, I am afraid of anything that could kill my children. It’s natural that mothers would be very sensitive to stories about how children get killed, because we are more aware of danger and must protect their children from harm. Maybe we tell each other these tales both as warnings and also as a way of expressing solidarity. But maybe, sometimes it is just exciting to talk about scary things that happened to other people. Like gossip, we can’t help ourselves, it’s one of the ways that we learn important things about the world. It’s also entertaining and exciting to experience danger when we are not actually in danger ourselves.
There is a psychological mechanism called a “protective frame” and it is what makes it possible for people to enjoy fear. There are three categories of protective frame. The first, a safety frame, is when we know we are safe when we are watching a horror movie or hearing a ghost story, that the evil cannot hurt us. The second frame involves a sense of detachment, we know its not real. And the third involves our sense of control, we can get a good thrill from.a scare when we feel confident about overcoming the danger.
There is the thrill of ghost stories, the tingly pleasure we get from being frightened when there’s nothing to actually be frightened of. Ghost stories and telling scary stories have other benefits as well. They can be a way to make sense of death and loss and the unknown, a way to introduce children to death without the intense emotions around a real death.to talk about death. These tales are also bonding activities, helping to draw people together over there shared experience of imaginary danger. There is also an element of folklore to many of these cautionary tales, sometimes when you hear the same story from many people and the danger winds up being exaggerated and reinforces the cultural message.
Even though our human experience of fear is wrapped up in a complex cultural framework, fear is natural and biologically based. All animals experience fear, it is an evolved emotional response that enables them to perceive and evade potentially life threatening risks, such as predation. When the amygdala is stimulated due to possible danger, the fear response is activated and our brain makes quick decisions about what we will do next in order to get away with minimal harm. These processes happen automatically because when we are in danger, there is often no time to sit and weigh our options.
While fear is an instinctual and innate survival mechanism, what we are specifically afraid of depends on the individual. While some fears are closer to instinct, such as a fear of snakes or heights, most specific fears are developed through experience, observation, and conditioning. Parents play an important role in teaching their children what to fear. Children pick up some of their most common fears not just from having negative experiences, but by watching and listening to their parents. In this way, what we are exposed to as young children creates what we fear as adults.
If you’ve ever known a dog that freaks out during 4th of July or goes insane around trucks, what you are witnessing is the result of thE dog not having been socialized. puppies have what is called a socialization window. Between 4 and 12 weeks of age, puppies need to be exposed to as many novel and different experiences as possible, because anything that they are introduced to as puppies (in a calm and matter of fact way) will not frighten them as adults and reduces the likelihood of future fear-based aggression, reactivity and anxiety For example, my Labrador came from a breeder who specialized in bird dogs, and she had been being exposed to the sound of gunshot starting when she was 4 weeks old.
Dogs have to be socialized during a very short period of weeks in order to avoid lifelong fear. Humans do not have a specific phase in their lives when they are socialized which then closes; they can unlearn their fears through a variety of methods throughout their lives. But early experiences, especially those between birth and 7 years, have a great influence on their foundational social capabilities such as language, emotional bonding, and behavioral norms.
Humans have a natural tendency towards xenophobia, the fear of or prejudice against people considered to be other. Some people believe that certain characteristics of prejudice are inflexible, like those based on gender or ethnicity. But social psychologist Henri Tejfel discovered in the 1970s that people can form in-groups within a matter of minutes, based on completely arbitrary and made-up characteristics. In addition, one of humanity’s most unique traits is its ability to form cooperative groups easily. We cooperate with strangers regularly and have used language and shared goals to form large and complex societies for millennia.
Fear is easy, it’s automatic. But humans have the capability of not reacting instantly from fear but of creating a gap between stimulation and action. We can override our emotional instincts and make rational decisions based on complex considerations. Our cognitive flexibility is rooted in neuroplasticty, our brain’s capacity to adapt to new information by forming new neural connections. You can teach an old dog new tricks. When we become conscious of our biases we have the power to correct them. All we really need is the will.