Courage, hope, determination, even aggression – such traits drive us forward, and are allied to the fight rather than the flight, freeze or flop responses. Yet they have also been cut out of many contemporary rewards. Drawing on his recent work around ‘resparking’, Graham Music considers the role of the dopaminergic system, the nature of the ‘internal lifegiver’ and the centrality of risk in therapy as he stands up for the often misunderstood or miscategorised fight response.