The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence

by Gavin de Becker

Distinguished psychiatrist Karl Menninger has said, “I don’t believe in such a thing as the criminal mind. Everyone’s mind is criminal; we’re all capable of criminal fantasies and thoughts.” Two of history’s great minds went even further. In an extraordinary correspondence, Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud explored the topic of human violence.

Einstein’s letter concluded that “man has in him the need to hate and destroy.” In his reply, Freud agreed “unreservedly,” adding that human instincts could be divided into two categories: “those which seek to preserve and unite, and those which seek to destroy and kill.” He wrote that the phenomenon of life evolves from their “acting together and against each other.”

Proving the opinions of Einstein and Freud is the fact that violence and homicide occur in all cultures. In their book on the origins of violence, Demonic Males, Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson say that modern humans are “the dazed surviv...

Though we live in space-age times, we still have stone-age minds. We are competitive and territorial and violent, just like our simian ancestors.

Though anthropologists have long focused on the distinctions between people, it is recognizing the sameness that allows us to most accurately predict violence. Of course, accepting someone’s humanness does not mean excusing his behavior. This lesson is probably starkest

when you spend time with the world’s most violent and dangerous people, the ones you might call monsters, the ones who committed acts you might think you couldn’t have imagined. Many of them are locked up at Atascadero State Hospital in California. I founded and fund a program there called Patient Pets, which allows patients to care for small animals. Many of these men will be locked up for life without visitors, and a mouse or bird might be all they have. I recall the way the patients reacted to the death of a particular guinea pig who had been one of the first pets in the program. When they noticed the old animal was sick, they wanted to find a way to keep her from dying, though most knew that wasn’t possible. The program’s coordinator, Jayne Middlebrook, sent me this report: One patient, Oliver, made it his job to be sure the ailing animal had everything she needed. Oliver asked to keep her in his room, “so she won’t be alone at night, just in case she decides to die then.” Eventually, the old guinea pig was unable to move and her breathing was labored. Oliver gathered several patients in my office, and the guinea pig died in his arms, surrounded by an unlikely group of mourners. There was not a dry eye in the ward as the patients said their good-byes and silently left the office. I have often shared with you the effects these events have on the patients, some of whom, moved by the death of one of the animals, cried for the first time about the harms they had committed ...

humanity that society believes these men lack (and in most situations, they do). It is true that the majority of these men are exactly where they belong; to unleash them on society would be unthinkable, but we cannot disregard their humanness, ...

So, even in a gathering of aberrant murderers there is somet...

Our judgment may classify a person as either harmless or sinister, but survival is better served by our perception. Judgment results in a label, like calling Robert Bardo a monster and leaving it at that. Such labels allow people to comfortably think it’s all figured out. The labels also draw a bold line between that “wacko” and us, but perception carries you much further.

Acts of extraordinary horror and violence happen, and we cannot learn why they happen by looking at rare behavior as if it is something outside ourselves. That idea you just conjured was in you, and thus it is part of us. To really work toward prediction and prevention, we must accept that these acts are done by people included in the “we” of humanity, not by interlopers who somehow sneaked in.

(Ressler wrote the book Whoever Fights Monsters, the title of which comes from a Nietzsche quote I have often considered: “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. For when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”)

my boy friedrich- always prescient

Aren’t you tired of this? A more accurate and honest way for TV news to interpret the banal interviews they conduct with neighbors would be to report, “Neighbors didn’t know anything relevant.” Instead, news reporters present non information as if it is information. They might as well say (and sometimes do), “The tollbooth operator who’d taken his quarters for years described the killer as quiet and normal.” By the frequency of this cliché, you could almost believe that apparent normalcy is a pre-incident indicator for aberrant crime. It isn’t. One thing that does predict violent criminality is violence in one’s childhood. For example, Ressler’s research confirmed an astonishingly consistent statistic about serial killers: 100 percent had been abused as children, either with violence, neglect, or humiliation.

The Kaczynski’s raised two boys, both of whom dropped out of society as adults and lived anti-social, isolated lives. One of them lived for a time in a ditch he dug in the ground—and that was the sane one, David, who didn’t end up killing anybody. If prosecutors are right, then the “crazy” one, Ted, grew up to become a brutal remote-control serial killer. Yet neighbors tell reporters that they saw nothing unusual, and reporters tell us the family was normal, and the myth that violence comes out of nowhere is perpetuated.

Genetic pre-dispositions may also play some role in violence, but whatever cards are dealt to a family, parents have at a minimum what Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence calls “a window of opportunity.”

That window was slammed shut during the childhoods of most violent people. To understand who these mistreated children become, we must start where they started: as regular people.

Thinking about that introspectively is the best way to sharpen your ability to predict what others will do. Ask and answer why you do what you do.

When assassin Robert Bardo told me he was treated at home like the family cat, fed and left in his room, it occurred to me to ask him to compare his childhood with his current life in prison. Bardo: It’s the same in the sense that I’m always withdrawing within myself in my cell, just like back at home. GdeB: Are there any differences between what you do here and what you did when you were a child? Bardo: Well, I have to be more social here. GdeB: Didn’t you have any requirement at home to be social? Bardo: No, I learned that in prison.

Just as a surgeon loses his aversion to gore, so does the violent criminal.

Another characteristic common to predatory criminals (and many other people as well) is their perceived need to be in control. Think of someone you know whom you might call a control freak. That person, like most violent people, grew up in a chaotic, violent, or addictive home. At a minimum, it was a home where parents did not act consistently and reliably, a place where love was uncertain or conditional. For him or her, controlling others became the only certain way to predict their behavior.

People can be very motivated to become control experts because an inability to predict behavior is absolutely intolerable for human beings and every other social animal. (The fact that most people act predictably is literally what holds human societies together.)

In sharing these few features, I do not mean to say that all men who are reckless or brave, who are calm when others are alarmed, and who seek to be in control are likely to be violent; these are simply three small pieces of t...

Though our experiences as children will affect much of what we do, a violent history does not ensure a violent future. There is a story about playwright David Mamet, a pure genius of human behavior: When told about the complaints of two famous cast members in one of his plays, he joked: “If they didn’t want to be stars, they shouldn’t have had those awful childhoods.”

lol

When you can find no other common ground to aid in your predictions, remember that the vast majority of violent people started as you did, felt what you felt, wanted what you want. The difference is in the lessons they learned. It saddens me to know that as I write these words and as you read them, some child is being taught that violence has a place, learning that when it comes to cruelty, it is better to give than to receive.

“People should learn to see and so avoid all danger. Just as a wise man keeps away from mad dogs, so one should not make friends with evil men.” —Buddha

facts

The capable face-to-face criminal is an expert at keeping his victim from seeing survival signals, but the very methods he uses to conceal them can reveal them.

Forced Teaming Kelly asks me what signals her attacker displayed, and I start with the one I call “forced teaming.” It was shown through his use of the word “we” (“We’ve got a hungry cat up there”). Forced teaming is an effective way to establish premature trust because a we’re-in-the-same-boat attitude is hard to rebuff without feeling rude.

Sharing a predicament, like being stuck in a stalled elevator or arriving simultaneously at a just-closed store will understandably move people around social boundaries. But forced teaming is not about coincidence; it is intentional and ...

Kelly did not consciously recognize what her intuition clearly knew, so she couldn’t apply the simple defense for forced teaming, which is to make a clear refusal to accept the concept of partnership: “I did not ask for your help and I do not want it.” Like many of the best defenses, this one has the cost of appearing rude. Kelly now knows it is a small cost, comparatively speaking.

That’s because the appropriateness of our response is relative to the behavior that provoked it. If people would view forced teaming as the inappropriate behavior it is, we might feel less concern about appearing rude in response.

Forced teaming is done in many contexts for many reasons, but when applied by a stranger to a woman in a vulnerable situation (such as alone in a remote or unpopulated area), it is always inappropriate.

!!!

Generally speaking, rapport-building has a far better reputation than it deserves. It is perceived as admirable when in fact it is almost always done for self-serving reasons. Even though the reasons most people seek rapport aren’t sinister, such as pleasantly conversing with someone you’ve just met at a party, that doesn’t mean a woman must participate with every stranger who approaches her. Perhaps the most admirable reason to seek rapport would be to put someone at ease, but if that is a stranger’s entire intent, a far simpler way is to just leave the woman alone.

Charm and Niceness Charm is another overrated ability. Note that I called it an ability, not an inherent feature of one’s personality. Charm is almost always a directed instrument, which, like rapport-building, has motive. To charm is to compel, to control by allure or attraction.

Think of charm as a verb, not a trait. If you consciously tell yourself, “This person is trying to charm me” as opposed to, “This person is charming,” you’ll be able to see around it. Most often, when you see what’s behind charm, it...

So many signals, I tell Kelly, are in the face. She intuitively read the face of her attacker, as she is now reading mine, as I am now reading hers. University of California at San Francisco psychologist Paul Eckman says, “The face tells us subtleties in feelings that only a poet can put into words.”

or thom yorke

One way to charm is with the smile, which Eckman

calls the most important signal of intent. He adds that it is also “the typical disguise ...

We must learn and then teach our children that niceness does not equal goodness. Niceness is a decision, a strategy of social interaction; it is not a character trait. People seeking to control others almost always present the image of a nice person in the beginning. Like rapport-building, charm and the deceptive smile, unsolicited niceness often has a discoverable motive.

niceness does not equal kindness

Kelly nods and reminds me that her attacker was “very nice.” I tell her about a rhyme by Edward Gorey, the master of dark humor: The proctor buys a pupil ices And hopes the boy will not resist, When he attempts to practice vices Few people even know exist.

yikes

Yes, the proctor is nice enough to buy some sweets for the boy, and he is nice in lots of other ways, but that is not a credential of his good intent.

Way back in 1859, in a book called Self Help (which pioneered a new genre), Samuel Smiles said personality itself is “plainly a vehicle for self-advancement.” He wrote that “men whose acts are at direct variance with their words command no respect, and what they say...

Unlike when people lived in small communities and could not escape their past behavior, we live in an age of anonymous one-time encounters, and many people have become expert at the art of fast persuasion. Trust, formerly earned through acti...

Too Many Details People who want to deceive you, I explain to Kelly, will often use a simple technique which has a simple name: too many details.

When people are telling the truth, they don’t feel doubted, so they don’t feel the need for additional support in the form of details. When people lie, however, even if what they say sounds credible to you, it doesn’t sound credible to them, so they keep talking.

#factos

When approached by a stranger while walking on some city street at night, no matter how engaging he might be, you must never lose sight of the context: He is a stranger who approached you. A good exercise is to occasionally remind yourself of where you are and what your relationship is to the people around you.

TYPECASTING Another strategy used by Kelly’s rapist is called typecasting. A man labels a woman in some slightly critical way, hoping she’ll feel compelled to prove that his opinion is not accurate.

Typecasting always involves a slight insult, and usually one that is easy to refute. But since it is the response itself that the typecaster seeks, the defense is silence, acting as if the words weren’t even spoken.

Loan Sharking The next signal I explain to Kelly is one I call loan-sharking: “He wanted to be allowed to help you because that would place you in his debt, and the fact that you owe a person something makes it hard to ask him to leave you alone.”

debt. The defense is to bring two rarely remembered facts into consciousness: He approached me, and I didn’t ask for any help.

The Unsolicited Promise For the next signal, I ask Kelly to go back to that moment when she was reluctant to let her attacker into her apartment. He had said, “I’ll just put this stuff down and go. I promise.”

The unsolicited promise is one of the most reliable signals because it is nearly always of questionable motive.