Love and fear

Many decades ago, after much thought, I concluded that two extreme feelings in life are love and fear and all other feelings or emotions are combinations of the two extremes. Love creates, fear destroys. Some religions call love a god and fear a devil.

I distinguish healthy from unhealthy fear. Unhealthy fear is a fear of something that is perceived as threatening our being, not our life, but our being which may seem like a life threat. Examples are fear of not being accepted, of being ridiculed, being unloved, ignored etc. usually by a person or persons close to us. Healthy fear is a fear of something that does threaten our life; for example, fear of being run over by an oncoming truck as it is happening.

Unhealthy fear prevents us from experiencing and trusting true love, the life force that fuels our true potential. The unhealthy fear is usually a result of negative life experiences, commonly in early life, when we were not yet fully developed emotionally and thus not able to lovingly deal with that experience or situation. We then resort to whatever behaviors help us make it through such experience. 

And most of the time we make it physically through, but emotionally scarred. What remains, though, are those fear-triggered behaviors that worked then, but prove to be unnecessary and harmful later on in life when we are capable to overcome the triggers by relying on love. Those behaviors and attitudes prevent us from using love to deal with situations in life. They create misery for us and usually also for those around us.

As much as one may wish, one can not eliminate unhealthy fear by thinking about it. What works is re-experiencing the situations that created fear-based responses in the first place and coming through them now, fully equipped and capable of healthy, constructive, love-based responses. We unlearn the harmful behaviors and thus remove them from our arsenal. We learn how to respond in a healthy way, healthy for us and for those around us. The unhealthy fears vanish as a result.