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

“It’s probably nothing.” Too often we chide ourselves for even momentarily giving validity to the feeling that someone is behind us on a seemingly empty street, or that someone’s unusual behavior might be sinister. Instead of being grateful to have a powerful internal resource, grateful for the self-care, instead of entertaining the possibility that our minds might actually be working for us and not just playing tricks on us, we rush to ridicule the impulse. We, in contrast to every other creature in nature, choose not to explore—and even to ignore—survival signals. The mental energy we use searching for the innocent explanation to everything could more constructively be applied to evaluating the environment for important information.
     
    Every day, people engaged in the clever defiance of their own intuition become, in mid-thought, victims of violence and accidents. So when we wonder why we are victims so often, the answer is clear: It is because we are so good at it.
     
    A woman could offer no greater cooperation to her soon-to-be attacker than to spend her time telling herself, “But he seems like such a nice man.” Yet this is exactly what many people do. A woman is waiting for an elevator, and when the doors open she sees a man inside who causes her apprehension. Since she is not usually afraid, it may be the late hour, his size, the way he looks at her, the rate of attacks in the neighborhood, an article she read a year ago—it doesn’t matter why. The point is, she gets a feeling of fear. How does she respond to nature’s strongest survival signal? She suppresses it, telling herself: “I’m not going to live like that, I’m not going to insult this guy by letting the door close in his face.” When the fear doesn’t go away, she tells herself not to be so silly, and she gets into the elevator.
     
    Now, which is sillier: waiting a moment for the next elevator, or getting into a soundproofed steel chamber with a stranger she is afraid of? The inner voice is wise, and part of my purpose in writing this book is to give people permission to listen to it.
     
    Even when intuition speaks in the clearest terms, even when the message gets through, we may still seek an outside opinion before we’ll listen to ourselves. A friend of mine who is a psychiatrist told me of a patient he’d heard of whom reported, “Recently, when my wife goes to bed, I find some excuse to stay downstairs until she’s asleep. If she’s still awake when I get to our room, I’ll often stay in the bathroom for a long time so that I’m sure she’s asleep by the time I get into bed. Do you think I’m unconsciously trying to avoid having sex with my wife?” The psychiatrist astutely asked, “What was the unconscious part?”
     
    When victims explain to me after the fact that they “unconsciously” knew they were in danger, I could ask the same question: “What was the unconscious part?”
     
    The strange way people evaluate risk sheds some light on why we often choose not to avoid danger. We tend to give our full attention to risks that are beyond our control (air crashes, nuclear-plant disasters) while ignoring those we feel in charge of (dying from smoking, poor diet, car accidents), even though the latter are far more likely to harm us. In Why The Reckless Survive , Dr. Melvin Konner’s exceptional book about you and me (and all other human beings), he points out that “We drink and drive without our seat belts and light up another cigarette… and then cancel the trip to Europe on the one-in-a-million chance of an Arab terrorist attack.” Many Americans who wouldn’t travel to see the pyramids for fear of being killed in Egypt, stay home where that danger is twenty times greater.
     
    While we knowingly volunteer for some risks, we object to those imposed on us by others. Konner notes that we seem to be saying, “If I want to smoke myself to death, it’s my own business, but if some company is trying to put