The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals that Protect us from Violence by Gavin de Becker Read Free Book Online

guy who used to work for your lawyer.”
     
    “Oh, Tony? He got fired, one of the many casualties of the case, I guess. He was so sweet to me. He’d taken a real interest in the case, but apparently he’d let other responsibilities slide. Even after he was fired, he kept coming to court to give me support, which I really appreciated. When the case settled, my lawyer threw a party for us all, but Tony wasn’t invited. It was sad, because he called me and said, ‘I hope we can still stay in touch even though the case is over.’ [A pause.] You don’t think…?”
     
    My client then described several odd things Tony had done, followed by the revelation (more accurately, the recollection) that Tony had once told her he was helping an acquaintance who was getting threats from an ex-boyfriend. So an extraneous character in a story—a seemingly unimportant detail—became a suspect, and ultimately the proven threatener. On some level, my client knew all along he was the best suspect, but she denied it, preferring to indict her nasty opponent over her friendly ally.
     
    How many times have you said after following one course, knew I shouldn’t have done that?” That means you got the signal and then didn’t follow it. We all know how to respect intuition, though often not our own. For example, people tend to invest all kinds of intuitive ability in dogs, a fact I was reminded of recently when a friend told me this story: “Ginger had a really bad reaction to our new building contractor; she even growled at him. She seemed to sense that he isn’t trustworthy, so I’m going to get some bids from other people.”
     
    “That must be it,” I joked with her, “the dog feels you should get another general contractor because this one’s not honest.”
     
    “The irony,” I explained, “is that it’s far more likely Ginger is reacting to your signals than that you are reacting to hers. Ginger is an expert at reading you, and you are the expert at reading other people. Ginger, smart as she is, knows nothing about the ways a contractor might inflate the cost to his own profit, or about whether he is honest, or about the benefits of cost-plus-fifteen-percent versus a fixed bid, or about the somewhat hesitant recommendation you got from a former client of that builder, or about the too-fancy car he arrived in, or about the slick but evasive answer he gave to your pointed question.” My friend laughed at the revelation that Ginger, whose intuition she was quick to overrate, is actually a babbling idiot when it comes to remodel work. In fact, Ginger is less than that because she can’t even babble. (If there are dogs out there intuitive enough to detect what’s being read here by their masters, I take it all back.)
     
    Contrary to what people believe about the intuition of dogs, your intuitive abilities are vastly superior (and given that you add to your experience every day, you are at the top of your form right now). Ginger does sense and react to fear in humans because she knows instinctively that a frightened person (or animal) is more likely to be dangerous, but she has nothing you don’t have. The problem, in fact, is that extra something you have that a dog doesn’t: it is judgment, and that’s what gets in the way of your perception and intuition. With judgment comes the ability to disregard your own intuition unless you can explain it logically, the eagerness to judge and convict your own feelings, rather than honor them. Ginger is not distracted by the way things could be, used to be, or should be. She perceives only what is. Our reliance on the intuition of a dog is often a way to find permission to have an opinion we might otherwise be forced to call (God forbid) unsubstantiated.
     
    Can you imagine an animal reacting to the gift of fear the way some people do, with annoyance and disdain instead of attention? No animal in the wild suddenly overcome with fear would spend any of its mental energy thinking,