Words that don't mean the same thing: scary but not dangerous

When I was in third or fourth grade, I was walking down the hallway to the bathroom and a friend, who was on her way back to the classroom, decided to hide behind a doorway and jump out to scare me. And scare me she did. I screamed so loud that several teachers from nearby classrooms came out to see what had happened (and then to reprimand us when they figured it out).

This memory is so incredibly vivid for me because the fear was so intense. My brain didn’t know or care that it was just my friend playing a (not very funny) joke on me. My brain responded in the same way it would have had it been a vicious wild animal behind that door. We’ve all set off the smoke detector in our houses by burning something on the stove or even creating too much steam from taking a long hot shower. The smoke detector doesn’t know that the threat isn’t real. It reacts in the same way it would if your house was on fire. The fear that I felt when my friend scared me was very very real - my alarms were blaring at full volume - even though there was no real threat. The situation was scary but not dangerous.

Scary but not dangerous. That became a powerful mantra for me in recovery. The fear I felt about eating was very real; my brain processed the food as an actual threat - except that it wasn’t. It was scary but not dangerous. Sitting still instead of engaging in compulsive movement? Scary but not dangerous. Allowing my body to change shape and size? Scary but not dangerous. Tolerating the waves of emotional distress without engaging in self-harm? Scary but not dangerous. You get the idea. [The great irony of course is that my eating disorder and self-harm behaviors were very very dangerous but didn’t scare me at all.]

Scary but not dangerous was a helpful way of framing it because it didn’t discount my experience of the fear. It didn’t label it as irrational or stupid or even disordered. It acknowledged that my brain was reacting to something that it perceived as a real threat and that in that context the level of fear I felt made total sense. AND it acknowledged that the danger was not real and I didn’t need to act on the flight or fight instinct. What I needed to do was just the opposite. I needed to train my brain to no longer interpret nourishment and rest as threats. And the only way to do that was to validate and sit with the very real fear AND to act on the knowledge that the danger wasn’t real at all.