A while back on social media it was a thing for people to post about their relationship status saying “It’s complicated.” Frankly, I never really understood that, but then I never really understood the curating one’s life on social media, so I am likely a poor guide for that.

A complex relationship on the other hand, is something totally normal and human and healthy. By complex, I mean a relationship that has multiple aspects, components, connections. This is really how we interact with each other and the world around us. This is also how we relate to ourselves, our thoughts, feelings, perceptions.

Ok, by way of disclaimer, I am not a psychology master, I don’t even play one on TV. But let’s consider the above the model of understanding for this conversation, acknowledge that all models are flawed but some are useful, and apply it to our relationship with fear.

When communities seek to address security challenges, whether they are work communities or neighbourhoods, they are seeking to address two symptoms: the risk of harm from a threat, and the impact of fear on the community. Fear can prevent people from taking a risk that would otherwise benefit them or others. Fear increases stress which is generally considered to lower our analytical capabilities, exhaust our energy, and prevents us from thriving.* Think on a time when you felt fear, this is likely not a time when you were up for making significant life choices, or writing your symphony, or learning a new skill. More likely you were processing fight, flight, freeze, and looking for a way out of the situation.

But fear shows up in many scenarios, you could be afraid to talk to the person you are attracted to, afraid that traffic will be slow, afraid your favourite team will lose the game, afraid that attack hamsters will swarm out of the bush ahead of you. We process fear in response to many situations, which is part of the complexity of our relationship with it. Consider this, could you really feel joy about your team winning if there was no risk they could lose?

Another part of the complex relationship is that fear also shows up as a friend and advisor. Fear is that feeling in the back of your mind that says “there is something here that is not safe.” It can prompt us to look around, consider more deeply where we are going or what we are doing, evaluate if there is a threat we have overlooked. All of which help to keep us alive and away from harm. Unfortunately, our friend is sometimes wrong, and triggers just because. With fear, it is useful to think of it as a friend who sometimes makes overly merry with the beer barrel. Acknowledge it is there, evaluate what it is telling you, and assess if it is useful, or if it is inebriated.

What then is the relationship between fear and a healthy security program? Whatever approach you adopt for your community should not seek to eliminate fear. Not only is that not achievable, but it would deprive the community of one of our more valuable tools as a human being. Rather, a healthy security program aims to provide the tools and mechanisms to address fear, to help members to identify what is worthwhile being afraid of (and how to address it) and what we can identify as fear’s drunken advice that holds us back from doing the things we want to do. What does that look like? Again, there is no cookie cutter solution. It starts with conversation: what are the things your community has fear about, and why? Do these things actually happen, what sort of probability do these threats have? Taking the time to have an open conversation, to drag the fears into the light and see what they really represent, is crucial to building a good security approach as part of your healthy community.

*For those of you who are cynical/have an aversion to the word thrive given the pop-sugar pseudo-psychology use of the phrase, I get it. Here think of it as more is the community a healthy ecosystem that supports healthy relationships and the ability to take intelligent risk choices.