Chainsaws are dangerous. But properly used, they sure get the job done.

You don’t have to be afraid. It just seems that way sometimes, from old habits of thinking, brain circuitry hard-wired by trauma, or the mistaken idea that if we just keep ourselves clenched and contracted against assaults, incursions and intrusions, we’ll be protected from them.

Some fear is necessary, of course. It warns us. It’s a message from our Inner Protector to be alert and aware and ready to take corrective action. Maybe we need to set a boundary for a toxic person, speed up when a truck comes bearing down on us on the highway, or grab the handrail so we don’t stumble on the stairs. But that’s fear of the moment, specific and clearly connected to something actually happening in the here and now.

What’s deadly is unreasonable fear, the anxiety that is not based in here-and-now facts. It’s taken me all of my adult life to acquire some skills that help me feel less afraid, less hampered by anxieties and worries, and—this is key—more alive. Here’s a quick list of what I’ve learned:

1. You can run but you can’t hide. Using food, alcohol, drugs, gambling, shopping, etc, to run away from yourself and your feelings is only mildly and temporarily successful at best. What’s eating you will keep eating you even when you push it down and pretend it’s not there.

2. Living without running away is painful, possible and ultimately more rewarding than you can imagine.  But you have to hang in there through sorrow and desolation as well as fear. You may have to look at some ugly stuff.

3. Fear is just a feeling. Feelings are not facts. They’re a kind of energy. They will flow through us like electricity through a wire if we don’t grab onto them, work them up, stress about  them or make them our pets. Feelings are not dangerous; resisting them is. As the peer-to-pear self-help group Recovery, Inc. teaches, feelings will rise and fall of their own accord if we don’t attach danger to them.

4. We have to stay grounded in the present. It is impossible to overstate the importance of this. I connect with my senses when I feel a fear hijack coming on. Mindfulness meditation, where you sit quietly and keep coming back to your breath when your mind runs away with you, is great training for this.

5. The pros are there to help. I’ve been in therapy pretty much all my adult life. A good therapist is a thing of joy forever. Ditto a good spiritual counselor or director. Mental and spiritual health have to be our priority or nothing else will work.

6. The body knows. Exercise, massage, just dancing in the kitchen, these all move the energy out and around. Self-care isn’t just nice; it’s mandatory, as vital as showing up for work, not biting off the kids’ heads or paying bills.

7. Love is the answer. When we bring ourselves back to a felt-sense that we are loved, fear vanishes. I have to make this choice hundreds of times some days. When the demons are about to attack, I think of a person or situation where I felt loved, and I bring back not so much the mind memory as the actual feeling in my body. I go to that place and try to revel in the goodness that’s much truer than any terrifying tale the inner saboteur is trying to tell me.

8. Miracles are everywhere. When we look for them, when we come back to our sense of wonder at creation, we connect with the Infinite, which has all our answers.