Fear is fascinating when you analyse it for what it really represents and what it has to offer. In a book or a film it can become one of the most gripping emotions, keeping you hooked and leaving you at the end with something close to catharsis. But in everyday life it is one of the most complex sensations to master.
Letting it overwhelm you is a mistake, because it leaves you at the mercy of events. Mastering it, on the other hand, has the potential to turn it into something close to extra fuel. I think of work, when a heavy payment schedule lands on my desk, taxes, liquidity, deadlines. At first I feel panic. Then, as I say, at the eleventh second I activate. The mind injects noradrenaline, reticular thinking kicks in, and it starts organising, building, moving every single piece into place.
Fear does not disappear. It changes role
Managed this way, fear does not vanish. It stays, watches you, tells you “do not underestimate this.” At that point, if you act with reason, you build the paths and actions needed and arrive at the event with greater calm. And even if not everything resolves perfectly, having faced it instead of surrendering to it still leaves you with greater awareness and inner strength.
If instead you let it overwhelm you, if you act with panic and irrationality, it tends to grow until it hollows you out. Managing it differently does not mean being happy and carefree. It means being in a state of wellbeing. Wellbeing is that state where, even in the face of problems and complexity, the mind is satisfied with how it handled things, has understood its mistakes, and allows itself the rest it deserves.
Often though we forget this. And even after managing things correctly, if imperfectly, we let fear swoop back in and ruin everything.
Explaining it to children, without lying
I try to bring this approach to Marco and Amelia too. I avoid saying “don’t be afraid” or “it’s silly to be scared.” Instead I try to change the dynamic of the story. To explain that fear often comes from not knowing the variables, and that stopping, observing, and looking for those variables helps you understand the situation better.
This is where Wittgenstein becomes useful, even with them. He pointed out how overthinking leads us to build abstractions far removed from the actual situation, and how analysing language, the words we use, helps us understand what is really happening. With children it works, in their own way. And when a concrete experience follows the conversation, Dewey enters, because they have a natural ability to contextualise experience and make it their own. Sometimes I also sense Gadamer, in the fusion of horizons that happens when an adult concept meets their reading of the world and something new emerges from both.
I do not cite these philosophers to show off. I cite them because naming concepts strengthens them and deepens understanding, exactly as I wrote in the previous post.
Jung’s Shadow and the dreams
There is another thinker who has been accompanying me in this territory lately: Jung. For the past few months I have been remembering my dreams often, and my nightmares. But something was different from the past. I was not experiencing them with the usual dread, I was almost aware I was inside them. In two or three cases I woke up, but without panic, simply awake. And each time I analysed what had happened.
I kept running into the same concept: archetypes. Until I started studying Jung directly. And in the Shadow, one of his fundamental archetypes, I found something that resonated. Jung does not say to defeat the Shadow or hide it. He says to integrate it, to almost convince it, to recognise it as part of ourselves. It is not far from what I wrote about fear: do not eliminate it, manage it. Do not fight it, give it the right role.
The unconscious communicates. And learning to listen to it, even through an almost lucid nightmare, is another way of not being swept away by the common narrative that tells us to keep everything in separate compartments.
The common narrative and its cost
That narrative, I know it well. It tells you to close everything off, separate, compartmentalise. Work on one side, family on the other, fears locked in a drawer. But when I manage not to fall victim to this logic, when I allow myself to live inside the chaos instead of fighting it, I feel better. Not always. Not perfectly. But I feel the difference.
Fear will keep existing. The Shadow will keep existing. The difference will be made by how they exist, and how we choose to manage them.