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

by Gavin de Becker

figures. Dietz was the expert we chose to run the project. From this and his other pioneering work, he assembled ten behaviors common to modern assassins. Nearly every one of them: 1. Displayed some mental disorder 2. Researched the target or victim 3. Created a diary, journal, or record 4. Obtained a weapon 5. Communicated inappropriately with some public figure, though not necessarily the one attacked 6. Displayed an exaggerated idea of self (grandiosity, narcissism) 7. Exhibited random travel 8. Identified with a stalker or assassin 9. Had the ability to circumvent ordinary security 10. Made repeated approaches to some public figure

If we had to choose just one PIN we’d want to be aware of above all others, it would be the one we call ability belief. This is a person’s belief that he can accomplish a public-figure attack.

Reporters usually refer to assassins with triple names, like Mark David Chapman, Lee Harvey Oswald, Arthur Richard Jackson. One might come to believe that assassins actually used these pretentious triple names in their pre-attack lives; they didn’t. They were Mark, Lee, and Arthur.

“In ourselves our safety must be sought. By our own right hand it must be wrought.” —William Wordsworth

“Fears are educated into us, and can, if we wish, be educated out.” —Karl A. Menninger

Not long ago, I was in an elevator with an elderly woman who was heading down to an underground parking garage after business hours. Her keys were protruding through her fingers to form a weapon (which also displayed her fear). She was afraid of me when I got into the elevator as she is likely afraid of all men she encounters when she is in that vulnerable situation. I understand her fear and it saddens me that millions of people feel it so often. The problem, however, is that if one feels fear of all people all the time, there is no signal reserved for the times when it’s really needed. A man who gets into the elevator on another floor (and hence wasn’t following her), a man who gives her no undue attention, who presses a button for a floor other than the one she has selected, who is dressed appropriately, who is calm, who stands a suitable distance from her, is not likely to hurt her without giving some signal. Fear of him is a waste, so don’t create it.

I strongly recommend caution and precaution, but many people believe—and we are even taught—that we must be extra alert to be safe. In fact, this usually decreases the likelihood of perceiving hazard and thus reduces safety. Alertly looking around while thinking, “Someone could jump out from behind that hedge; maybe there’s someone hiding in that car” replaces perception of what actually is happening with imaginings of what could happen. We are far more open to every signal when we don’t focus on the expectation of specific signals.

Precautions are constructive, whereas remaining in a state of fear is destructive.

There are two rules about fear that, if you accept them, can improve your use of it, reduce its frequency, and literally transform your experience of life. That’s a big claim, I know, but don’t be “afraid” to consider it with an open mind. Rule #1. The very fact that you fear something is solid evidence that it is not happening. Fear summons powerful predictive resources that tell us what might come next. It is that which might come next that we fear—what might happen, not what is happening now. An absurdly literal example helps demonstrate this: As you stand near the edge of a high cliff, you might fear getting too close. If you stand right at the edge, you no longer fear getting too close, you now fear falling. Edward Gorey gives us his dark-humored but accurate take on the fact that if you do fall, you no longer fear falling—you fear landing:

The Suicide, as she is falling, Illuminated by the moon, Regrets her act, and finds appalling The thought she will be dead so soon. Panic, the great enemy of survival, can be perceived as an unmanageable kaleidoscope of fears. It can be reduced through embracing the second rule:

Rule #2. What you fear is rarely what you think you fear—it is what you link to fear. Take anything about which you have ever felt profound fear and link it to each of the possible outcomes. When it is real fear, it will either be in the presence of danger, or it will link to pain or death. When we get a fear signal, our intuition has already made many connections. To best respond, bring the links into consciousness and follow them to their high-stakes destination—if they lead there. When we focus on one link only, say, fear of someone walking toward us on a dark street instead of fear of b...

People use the word fear rather loosely, but to put it in its proper relation to panic, worry and anxiety, recall the overwhelming fear that possessed Kelly when she knew her rapist intended to kill her. Though people say of a frightening experience, “I was petrified,” aside from those times when being still is a strategy, real fear is not paralyzing—it is energizing. Rodney Fox learned this when he faced one of man’s deepest fears: “I was suddenly aware of moving through the water faster than I ever had before. Then I realized I was being pulled down by a shark which had hold of my chest.” As the powerful predator took him from the surface, a far more powerful force compelled Rodney to caress the shark’s head and face, searching for its eyes. He plunged his thumbs deep into the only soft tissue he found. The shark let go of him immediately, but Rodney embraced it and held on tight so it couldn’t turn around for another strike. After what seemed like a long ride downward, he kicked away from it and swam through a cloud of red to the surface. Fear was pumping blood into Rodney’s arms and legs and using them to do things he would never have done on his own. He would never have decided to fight with a Great White shark, but because fear didn’t give it a second thought, he survived. Rodney’s wild, reckless action and Kelly’s quiet, breathless action were both fueled by the same coiled-up energy: real fear. Take a moment to conjure that feeling and recognize how different it is...

Worry is the fear we manufacture—it is not authentic. If you choose to worry about something, have at it, but do so knowing it’s a choice. Most often, we worry because it provides some secondary reward. There are many variations, but a few of the most popular follow.

Worry is a way to avoid change; when we worry, we don’t do anything about the matter. Worry is a way to avoid admitting powerlessness over something, since worry feels like we’re doing something. (Prayer also makes us feel like we’re doing something, and even the most committed agnostic will admit that prayer is more productive than worry.) Worry is a cloying way to have connection with others, the idea being that to worry about someone shows love. The other side of this is the belief that not worrying about someone means you don’t care about them. As many worried-about people will tell you, worry is a poor substitute for love or for taking loving action. Worry is a protection against future disappointment. After taking an important test, for example, a student might worry about whether he failed. If he can feel the experience of failure now, rehearse it, so to speak, by worrying about it, then failing won’t feel as bad when it happens. But there’s an interesting trade-off: Since he can’t do anything about it at this point anyway, would he rather spend two days worrying and then learn he failed, or spend those same two days not worrying, and then learn he failed? Perhaps most importantly, would he want to learn he had passed the test and spent two days of anxiety for nothing?

In Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman concludes that worrying is a sort of “magical amulet” which some people feel wards off danger. They believe that worrying about something will stop it from happening. He also correctly notes that most of what people worry about has a low probability of occurring, because we tend to take action about those things we feel are likely to occur. This means that very often the mere fact that you are worrying about something is a predictor that it isn’t likely to happen!

The relationship between real fear and worry is analogous to the relationship between pain and suffering. Pain and fear are necessary and valuable components of life. Suffering and worry are destructive and unnecessary components of life. (Great humanitarians, remember, have worked to end suffering, not pain.) After decades of seeing worry in all its forms, I’ve concluded that it hurts people much more than it helps. It interrupts clear thinking, wastes time, and shortens life. When worrying, ask yourself, “How does this serve me?” and you may well find that the cost of worrying is greater than the cost of changing. To be freer of fear and yet still get its gift, there are three goals to strive for. They aren’t easy to reach, but it’s worth trying: 1) When you feel fear, listen. 2) When you don’t feel fear, don’t manufacture it. 3) If you find yourself creating worry, explore and discover why. ▪ ▪ ▪

Our imaginations can be the fertile soil in which worry and anxiety grow from seeds to weeds, but when we assume the imagined outcome is a sure thing, we are in conflict with what Proust called an inexorable law: “Only that which is absent can be imagined.” In other words, what you imagine—just like what you fear—is not happening.

If you can bring yourself to apply your imagination to finding the possible favorable outcomes of undesired developments, even if only as an exercise, you’ll see that it fosters creativity.

I include it in this book because creativity is linked to intuition, and intuition is the way out of the most serious challenges you might face. Albert Einstein said that when you follow intuition, “The solutions come to you, and you don’t know how or why.”

wow

I discuss all this here as much more than a pet peeve. Understanding how the television news works and what it does to you is directly relevant to your safety and well-being. First, the fear of crime is itself a form of victimization. But there is a much more practical issue involved: Being exposed to constant alarm and urgency shell-shocks us to the point that it becomes impossible to separate the survival signal from the sound bite. Because it’s sensationalism and not informationalism, we get a distorted view of what actually poses a hazard to us.

Given the frenzy and the power of the various violence industries, the fact that most Americans live without being violent is a sign of something wonderful in us. In resisting both the darker sides of our species and the darker sides of our heritage, it is everyday Americans, not the icons of big-screen vengeance, who are the real heroes. Abraham Lincoln referred to the “Better angels of our nature,” and they must surely exist, for most of us make it through every day with decency and cooperation. Having spent years preparing for the worst, I have finally arrived at this wisdom: Though the world is a dangerous place, it is also a safe place. You and I have survived some extraordinary risks, particularly given that every day we move in, around, and through powerful machines that could kill us without missing a cylinder: jet airplanes, subways, busses, escalators, elevators, motorcycles, cars—conveyances that carry a few of us to injury but most of us to the destinations we have in mind. We are surrounded by toxic chemicals, and our homes are hooked up to explosive gasses and lethal currents of electricity.

Near the end of his life, Mark Twain wisely said, “I have had a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.”

You now know a great deal about predicting and avoiding violence, from the dangers posed by strangers to the brutality inflicted on friends and family members, from the everyday violence that can touch anyone to the extraordinary crimes that will touch only a few. With your intuition better informed, I hope you will have less unwarranted fear of people. I hope you’ll harness and respect your ability to recognize survival signals. Most important, I hope you’ll see hazard only in those storm-clouds where it exists and live life more fully in the clear skies between them.