I'm Natalie Lou in your listening to the baggage reclaim sessions.

Hello hello. How are you doing?

When you become aware of somebody's fear, how do you feel and behave in response?

One of our closest friends is terrified of dogs, so it means that when she comes over,

Chester is limited in where he can go, or he sometimes spends the night with our dog walker.

While it's not the most convenient thing, I don't have a problem with it because she's clearly afraid and it's the trade-off of having her visit. But when we had a barbecue last summer, our one and only, I might add, thanks to England's very ropy, unpredictable weather,

Chester did get out a couple of times because some of the younger kids were goofing about with him.

As a result, she felt a bit unsettled.

Towards the end of the evening, a heated debate opened up after a friend of my husband's started veripizing her reaction to the dog and the guys in the group including her own partner as well as M my husband. They all started chipping in with their two cents on her fear of the dog. Now the combo of her fear and a boatload of Proseco between the lot of them

meant that this did not go down well and an argument ensued.

She had said that she would like to experiment with spending more time around the dog.

Unlike the others, I hadn't taken that literally, nor had I expected that it would happen straight

away or at the party with a bunch of people, some of them who were acquaintances.

My reasoning with all of this and that is the subject of today's show is that it's not really for me to question her fear. It was about respecting that she was afraid. Even if we don't fear the same thing, we all have

experience of being afraid of something, sometimes a number of things, sometimes a lot of things, and yes

sometimes irrationally so. To claim that we're not scared of anything at all is either a lie or we're saying that the part of our

brain that handles fear isn't fully functioning. It's not for us to question or belittle another person's fear of something.

How can we say what is reasonable about someone else's fear? Even if we feared the same thing, our experience is different. We each have our own personality, characteristics, circumstances, resources, level of abundance,

backstory, hopes, fears, dreams, motivations, body, stuff, etc.

We might be able to identify with aspects of another person's experience,

aka empathy.

However, we can't claim that their experience is the same as ours or use our experience to

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