How to Embrace Your Inner Teddy Bear Instead of Fear
My husband and I recently took our 10 month old daughter on her first trip to the Smoky Mountains. We spent a Friday night in the Smokies and then planned to spend Saturday hiking and driving around the mountains. We ended up doing two hikes Saturday and just before my husband and I started our second hike of the day, we gathered our essentials for the trail. My husband put his bear spray on his hip and I playfully flirted with him about how handsome he is, but how dorky he looked with bear spray on his hip. Even though I was joking with him about the bear spray, I was really grateful at how responsible he is when it comes to safety. He even checks the expiration dates on the bear spray to make sure they are up to date!
Later in the same day, we were roughly a mile in on our second hike of the day in the National Park when I heard another hiker yell, “Bear…Bear headed your way.” And then all of a sudden in the middle of the trail we see a big black bear about 50ish feet away from us. I have seen a bear from the safety of my car or cabin in the Smoky Mountains, but I have never seen one on a trail nor have I seen a bear of this magnitude, unless it was in a zoo. Honestly, I’d prefer to only ever see bears in the zoo! My husband said he guessed the bear was 300-350 pounds and maybe due to my fear it looked more like the size of a Grizzly bear than a black bear to me.
Ever since one of my former supervisors told me the devastating story of her daughter being killed by a bear attack, I have had a healthy fear of bears. Not only did my colleague’s six year old daughter die in the bear attack, but she and her son were attacked by the same bear and they both spent weeks in the hospital recovering from their harrowing experience. Hearing this woman’s pain and seeing the marks on her body from the attack, has always reminded me to be mindful of bears. But I also think the vicarious trauma of seeing her scars and hearing and empathizing with her story has also provided me with a little bit of a bear phobia. Bears in the wilderness are not always the cute little teddy bears my daughter plays with in her nursery!
It is funny how most everyone knows you are not supposed to run from a bear, but the impulse inside of me was to run! I wanted to protect my 10 month old daughter and be as far away from the bear as possible. My response to this bear was fear and I imagine my cortisol levels were sky high. I became tearful, but my husband was cool as a cucumber and he calmly coached me through the traumatic experience. He took the bear spray off his hip and held it in his hand, just in case it became necessary to use it. Fortunately, the bear did not seem interested in us and we retreated slowly from it. Eventually the bear was out of our sight, but I kept looking back over my shoulder and I remember telling my husband, “I am never coming back to the Smokies again.”
The irony of the whole experience is that as we were on our way home from the Smokies, my brother sent me a text with a video of a black bear roaming downtown Chattanooga. So the very afternoon we had our own bear encounter, folks in my hometown of Chattanooga were experiencing even more of a shock than us to witness a bear in the city. This bear had been tagged previously and somehow meandered all the way from the Smoky Mountains to Chattanooga.
As our family drove back to Chattanooga and I had a little more distance from the events of the day, I came back to my statement from earlier, “I am never coming back to the Smokies again.” It occurred to me how easy it is for fear to separate us from places, but also from people and life. Yes, it had been an adventurous and scary day in some ways, but we had also enjoyed the beautiful mountains, rocky creeks and waterfalls. And the truth is, I will go back to the Smokies again. I don’t want fear to keep me from the healing beauty of the Smokies. And just as I don’t want to give fear the power of keeping me from the healing balm of our beautiful National Parks, I also don’t want to allow it to have the power of separating me from others.
There is a reason that the response to fear is called the “fight or flight” response. In the days of old, the response of the amygdala to fear helped us survive the bears or tribes that wanted to kill us. The amygdala, the area in the brain responsible for processing emotions, triggers a fear response when we have a traumatic experience, such as seeing a bear. But this part of our biology is also our Achilles heel, because our fight or flight response causes us to be aggressive toward “the others,” which previously caused us to burn villages of adversaries and today leads us to harass one another on Facebook.
Politicians, religion and the media have all been guilty at times of using this biologically driven fear response to keep us disconnected from one another. While it is normal to have a fight or flight response when we see a 350 pound bear in the mountains, it is not healthy to let this biological response ruin our relationship with friends, family members, neighbors or our religious community.
Differentiation is a psychological term, coined by Murray Bowen, that refers to our ability to be emotionally connected to others and yet still exercise independence regarding our thoughts and feelings. People who are differentiated are less likely to tell others what they “should” do. And yet differentiated people don’t cut themselves off from friends and family, and they know how to stay connected to loved ones in the midst of anxiety, despite disagreements.
Instead of responding to a bear on a trail by running from it or fighting it, differentiated people are more likely to respond in a calm way when they are responding to a tough situation. In life, we are daily confronted by people who can metaphorically be a bear frothing at the mouth as they try to convert us to their political ideology. If we are differentiated, we will find a way to avoid the fight or flight response. We will refrain from attacking back, but we also won’t cut the person out of our life.
Differentiated people are able to accept others when they have different opinions about politics or religion. Right now we live in a world where fault-finding, demonizing and turf-wars are the norm. This tribalism is antithetical to building relationships. Instead of responding like an undomesticated bear, there is an alternative way of responding that invites us to stay in relationship with others and at he same time also celebrates differences and independent thinking.
The bear is the animal that scares me the most. What animal frightens us more than others? But more importantly, who frightens us? Are there people at work, in our extended community, in our worship community or even political or religious groups who we respond to with a flight or fight mentality? Instead of having the fight response of the bear ready to attack or the flight response of running away from the bear, differentiation encourages us to embrace our inner teddy bear and remain loving and connected to others, while also inviting us to be autonomous and set boundaries with those who think differently.
May we be “beary” kind to one another,
Christy
A version of this article was originally published in the Lookout Mountain Mirror. www.mountainmirror.com
