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Webster characterizes fear as 'an unpleasant often strong emotion caused by anticipation or awareness of danger' which puts this powerful emotion at the very core of desire for self-preservation. Sometimes this means we feel a need to protect our physical beings. Sometimes it expresses our struggle to achieve a sense of security or maintain good feelings about ourselves. As a life component, fear starts as a little trickle across our newborn minds. By adulthood, it has become grooved into our beings — bit by bit — into a powerful but silent underpinning. Thus, being afraid can feel normal to many of us to the point that calm or peacefulness may feel foreign or just plain uncomfortable.
Certainly, there are many times when fear is appropriate and useful - helping us to protect ourselves, even survive difficult times. However, because there is so little support in our society for healthy expression of fear, many of us have become controlled and manipulated by unnamed, repressed fear. In fact, for most of our lives, we work to confirm rather than relieve our fears. Unless we begin to conquer such free-floating anxiety, it can become an unassailable barrier to living life to its fullest. In other words, while fear is certainly a necessary component for the survival, it needs to be in good balance to the rest of our emotions.

Here are some ways to start identifying and defusing our fears:

1. The High Cost of Fear.
Fear has many faces and, while there are universal dangers or threats that can spark terror in all of us, fear is unique to and defined by each of us, individually. The degree to which we live 'in' fear - instead of accessing it when appropriate - determines how much we rob ourselves of rich experiences that can make life meaningful. Fear can seriously inhibit our creativity, work performance, relationships, the very way we live. A fear-based life can cripple our ability to compete and can result in unnecessary self-defense and paranoia. It can lead us to becoming prisoners of negative thoughts that present a dim and uncertain future. It produces false courage which is just one disguise of fear. Intimidation, aloofness or withdrawal are often masks for fear. And, because our bodies cannot tell the difference between the real or the imaged, unwarranted fears cause as much physical damage as the real thing. In his book "Waking the Tiger," Peter Levine talks about how the repression of fear creates an energetic blockade in the body/mind that affects all areas of function. That many symptoms develop around the 'freezing' or repression of this necessary emotion, both physical and psychological, which will be relieved only upon the successful resolution and expression of it. Certainly fear is necessary for our survival but, this powerful emotion must curbed for it to be healthy.