Are you brave?

Published 25 days ago • 4 min read • Somatic Therapy

Hi Reader!

This week, something pretty scary happened to me. I was accosted quite aggressively by a very threatening truck driver who actually followed me home, driving dangerously close. And throughout the whole incident, I was legitimately afraid. I had all the physical symptoms of fear: my heart was racing, my body was tense, and I had that very particular feeling of wanting to get away. It reminded me of the kind of fear you can feel as a kid when you're being bullied, or when someone is threatening or abusive — that very visceral sense of I need to get out of here.

And some of my higher functions quite clearly went offline. I couldn't think straight. I didn't think to take down his licence plate. I didn't think to drive to a police station instead of driving home. There are several things I can think of now, sitting safely at my desk, that might have been sensible things to do. But in that moment, I did what I could with the resources I had available to me.

I felt very vulnerable. I was scared. And I also did my best to protect myself. I got myself home safely, and in the end, nothing happened. The experience stayed with me, though, and it got me thinking about fear and courage.

Musings

Most of the fears we navigate in our daily lives aren't as dramatic as being followed home by an aggressive stranger (for the lucky among us who don't live with PTSD, of course). But the underlying experience can be surprisingly similar. We anticipate pain, failure, conflict, physical discomfort, and our nervous system begins preparing us for something that hasn't happened yet.

In many ways, this is the space in which anxiety lives: in the anticipation that the thing we fear might actually materialize. The pain might return. Something might go wrong. We might be rejected, lose control, or discover that we can't cope with whatever comes next.

A few months ago, I wrote about the risks that keep us growing, and about how easily we can begin avoiding not only what is dangerous, but also what is unfamiliar. Avoidance works beautifully in the short term: we don't move the painful shoulder, we don't have the difficult conversation, we don't take the risk. We feel safer. But the brain also gets very little new information about whether its prediction was actually right.

But courage doesn't begin once we know everything will be fine. It exists precisely because we don't know what will happen next.

I often tell my clients that you can't really know what it means to be courageous unless you also know what it feels like to be afraid. You can't experience strength without vulnerability. Your brain needs information about both. It learns through differences, comparison and contrast, and by becoming better at perceiving all the gradations between two apparently opposite states.

This is one of the fundamental ideas behind the somatic work I do. We explore more effort and less effort, holding and releasing, moving toward something and moving away from it. We slow things down enough to actually feel those differences, instead of having everything drowned out by the much louder message of danger.

And gradually, there are more possibilities.

I like this because it changes the question from How do I stop being afraid? to What can I do while I am afraid?

Which brings me back to the truck driver. I certainly wasn't calm. I wasn't thinking brilliantly. I didn't suddenly regulate myself into some serene state where I knew exactly what to do. I was afraid and vulnerable, and I acted with whatever capacity was available to me at the time.

Whether I was brave or not is a matter of the story I tell myself afterwards. But the fear was real, and so was my capacity to act while I was feeling it.

🎁 NeuroSomatic Practice of the Week

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🧠 NeuroMinute...

When something has previously been associated with threat or pain, the brain becomes very good at predicting it. If a movement once hurt your back, for example, the movement itself, and eventually movements that simply look like it, can begin to evoke protective behaviour. This interaction between fear, prediction and avoidance is an important mechanism in persistent pain and disability.

Avoidance makes perfect sense as a protective strategy. It can also become self-reinforcing. If I avoid the movement I believe will hurt me, I experience relief, but I also lose the opportunity to gather new information about what would have happened had I moved. That is one reason contemporary approaches to fear and pain increasingly focus on learning rather than simply trying to make fear disappear.

Research on learning also shows that new experience doesn't always erase an old fear memory. Instead, the brain can learn additional associations that compete with the original prediction: this has hurt before can coexist with this can also be safe, or I can experience this and still have choices.

And there is another thing: fear and avoidance aren't necessarily the same thing. People can learn to approach something they previously avoided even while some fear remains. A 2024 study, for example, found that rewarding approach behaviour reduced the return of pain-related avoidance after extinction, even though it did not eliminate the return of fear.

I love this distinction, I think it's full of hope. Both for those who suffer physically and for those who experience emotional pain, and also for navigating with complex or longstanding trauma.

Because perhaps the goal isn't to teach ourselves never to be afraid. Perhaps it is to become sufficiently aware of fear, sufficiently able to feel the difference between fear and actual danger, and sufficiently flexible in our responses that we can find more and more possibility of action even from within it.

Warmly,
Joana