Fight, Flight, Freeze, or Help
People say our natural reactions to fear are fight, flight, or freeze. It seems to me like all of these options lead to more suffering and fear in the future. The only way I have found that seems to alleviate fear without passing it on is trying to help.
To help means that you don’t run away or ignore the situation, since it will still be there when you or someone you love gets back to it. It means that even if someone wants to fight you, you don’t fight back unless you are in certain immediate danger. You empathize with everyone around you even if they are scaring you. You recognize that things or people that scare you are missing something. You recognize that as long as you can string two thoughts together, you always have an ability to try come up with a solution where everyone can be ok.
I recognize that, even though that is the ideal, there are many people and animals in situations where they don’t know how to help or have the free time to think about it. For them to try to help more than they do can get them killed or hurt. But I feel like many of us, especially in the first world, are not in that type of situation as often as you would think by how scared everyone acts and how much pain we cause others. It is only a legacy of suffering. We would do better if we tried to help more with the end goal being the eradication of the necessity of fear for every living thing.
When our natural reaction to fear becomes a desire to help, we won’t have to fear even fear itself.