Dear Boston Bomber: Reading This Survivor's Letter Will Inspire You To Face Your Fears — And Win

Rebekah Gregory and her son. (Photo: Facebook)

“Although I was merely just a blip on your radar, (someone that happened to be standing 3 feet from your designated ‘good spot’ for a bomb), you have been so much more to me,” Rebekah Gregory writes in an open letter to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. “Because you have undoubtedly been my source of fear since April 15th, 2013.”

On that day, in the Boston Marathon bombing, Gregory sustained severe injuries to her left leg. She recalled to the court on Wednesday, “my bones were lying next to me on the sidewalk,” and “I felt that was the day I would die.”

She didn’t, although she was scarred — both emotionally and physically. After 18 surgeries, the 27-year-old mother lost half her limb. She told the court that she will continue to undergo surgeries each time a piece of shrapnel from the blast works its way to the surface.

(Photo: Facebook)

In her open letter, she recalls the horror of the attack and the source of her fears. “You are one of the men responsible for nearly taking my child, and for the permanent image embedded in my brain of watching someone die,” she writes. “Up until now, I have been truly scared of you and because of this, fearful of everything else people might be capable of.”

Until now.

Although she courageously told her story in court for the jury in the Boston bombing trial, Gregory directly addressed Tsarnaev later that night in a Facebook post. “I’m not going to lie,” Gregory wrote. “My palms were sweaty. And sitting up there talking to the prosecution did make me cry. But today, do you know what else happened? TODAY … I looked at you right in the face … and realized I wasn’t afraid anymore. And today I realized that sitting across from you was somehow the crazy kind of step forward that I needed all along.”

Why is looking our fear square in the eye a helpful strategy for overcoming it? 

According to Emanuel Maidenberg, Ph.D, director of the UCLA Cognitive Behavior Therapy Clinic and a clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA, you almost have to reverse the process of developing the fear in the first place.

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“Fear is an adaptive response to dangerous or harmful triggers,” he tells Yahoo Health. “You learn fear through conditioning, associating the fear to specific behavioral cues, people or places. For instance, if I’m on a plane experiencing turbulence, I might develop a fear of the plane, or of the sensation, or both. Learning fear is important for survival.”

(Photo: Facebook)

Maidenberg says there are many processes by which we learn fear, either as a direct response to a trigger or even just hearing about something scary. “But once we learn that fear, we automatically try to avoid exposure,” he says. “You can sometimes associate more and more triggers with the original trigger”— think the tarmac, the airport, luggage — “and it becomes a habit of avoidance. This is how phobias develop.”

To get over a fear, you have to expose yourself to it. 

Your body and mind need to assimilate to the trigger, consciously overcoming your natural inclination of avoidance to realize the source of your fear can’t hurt you anymore.

Maidenberg says you can start slowly. For instance, if we’re using the plane example, you could watch a plane crash movie before hitting the airport or taking flight. “If I am able to remain in the presence of the trigger, the physiological response eventually fades away,” he says, noting this is likely what happened to Gregory in the courtroom yesterday.

“On a physiological level, it’s habituation to the trigger that’s helpful,” Maidenberg says. “But from a cognitive standpoint, your brain also needs to process and realize there is nothing to be afraid of — not the object itself, the person, or the fear response itself. Because that fear response on its own is very scary.”

Must you face your fear head-on to squelch it? Maidenberg says yes. You might take different avenues to get there than your friend, but, ultimately, your final destination is the same: looking your fear in the eye. Big or small, “it really is the most effective way to overcome it,”he says.

Hats off to Gregory for facing a big fear in that courtroom.

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