(Originally posted March 16, 2020 on Facebook)
This book, first published in 1997, was written before Y2K, 911, or the conception of Gen Zs – let alone COVID-19. Yet, it remains a timely read for thinking about fear and our responses to it. Bonus: it is so old you can find free copies online (https://epdf.pub/gift-of-fear.html).
Gavin De Becker is the world’s expert on threat assessment. He was hired by countless movie stars and government officials to protect lives from stalkers and assassins. His book is full of harrowing real-life stories of people who were in danger when, either fear kicked in and they were able to find a way to survive, or they ignored their intuition to their own peril. The premise of his book, as captured in the title, is that fear is a gift and when it is respected it can save your life. But here is the kicker, and the reason the book is so relevant right now: We need to be able to differentiate between truly life-threatening situations and good old-fashioned worry.
I picked this book up last fall when I was still the Dean of Students at The King’s University. It interested me because, as a society, we seem to have forgotten how to differentiate the two. As DoS, I regularly worked with young adults who lived in a fragile emotional state of non-life-threatening fear. DeBecker asserts that what we truly fear is what we link to fear rather than what we think we fear. Read that last sentence twice then consider public speaking as an example. It’s not actually simple embarrassment that we fear. We don’t want to be perceived as incompetent, and this is linked to other fears such as not graduating or losing employment. This may be further linked to our identity – if we fail at public speaking then, perhaps, we could lose our very self! Our fears have a way of snowballing. When we realize what we really fear we can name it, and then work on changing our mindset up the chain of causality.
Back to COVID-19. Is it life threatening? Yes! But not to everyone equally. If you are reading this and you are an older adult your intuition should be telling you to isolate yourself or face a real statistical possibility of losing your life. If you are younger it is less likely that you will die from this pandemic, though evidence from China and Italy demonstrates there is a threat as some front-line workers in their 20s and 30s have died. In the case of real threats fear can help us make decisions to stay alive. As an older adult you may want to head to Lowes to work on a basement reno, and listening to the intuition in your gut that says this is a bad idea could be a life-saving decision. (No Dad, this example is not just a coincidence – please save the basement reno for fall!). For all of us there are plenty of other things to fear including loss of loved ones, loss of employment, loss of social interaction, running out of toilet paper, and on and on. If your life is in danger, listen to the gift fear is intuiting and isolate. If your fears are linked to something else please still isolate (for the sake of all our loved ones), but also consider naming your fears as this might help differentiate between fear as a gift and fear as worry. Knowing there are things we can do to make our situation better can alleviate both life-threatening fear and the worries associated with other fears. Washing your hands, practicing social isolation, looking out for your neighbors, and practicing self-care (praying, reading, meditating, exercising, etc.) are things we can do to get through these difficult weeks without finding ourselves locked in fear.
Michael Ferber 