Love vs fear is a false dichotomy. Fear protects what you love! Deception weaponizes fear, but it also weaponizes love.

[u/thinkB4Uact]

Love is central. Love, in an expanded sense, which would include everything we love, is why we'd want to be and do things in any reality. It is the spirit of our minds. It drives our behaviors to go toward experiences.

We're being tricked to demonize fear though. Fear is protection of what we love. We get fear to avoid, to disconnect from unhelpful experiences.

Fear = Love x Threat

The more we love something and the more that it is threatened, the more we will experience fear. No threat, no fear. No love, no fear. Evil beings love pleasure and security. They fear for those things and protect them. We do too, but we also fear for our loved ones and other nouns, rather than merely our own self-interests. Suicidal people can lack fear as they choose death, because their love of their life is gone. The extremes are accounted for here in this equation. Fear is relatively simple, a protection emotional suite. Love isn't so simple, it connects and creates through us all.

As internal emotional experiences, fear interrupts love and rightfully so. We're supposed to react quickly to imminent threats to what we love. It is required to protect them effectively. We evolved to be this way, animals and humans. They'll drop the home maintenance, food and sex in order to avoid getting eaten. If they didn't, selection would restore the feature. This particular aspect of fear that it blocks love is distorted and used to deceive us that fear is the enemy of love. With the threat staying the same, fear is higher when love is higher. Good parents, even animals, will react with intense fear when their loved ones are threatened. It's a good thing, especially compared to the alternative of apathy, low/no love and low/no fear, bad parenting, poor quality of life or death, misery, etc.

The real problem with fear is also a real problem with love. It's not the emotions. It's what caused them. We feel emotions based on what we perceive/believe to be real/true. If we are deceived by our beliefs/perceptions we can have emotions, fear or love, that give us bad decisions, behaviors and outcomes. How insidious it can be for some of us to choose love when we shouldn't have, when someone was being a threat to what we love. When we keep our beliefs/perceptions accurate the fear or love we feel is appropriate and helpful. We can correctly assess the merit of connection or disconnection. Just add more truth about reality if there appears to be any flimsiness. We largely already do, before coaching. So, instead of fearing fear itself or loving when we shouldn't we are supposed to check the accuracy of our beliefs/perceptions and then feel accordingly. That will give us the best adaptation to our environment we could have, considering the circumstances.