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

by Gavin de Becker

Men of all ages and in all parts of the world are more violent than women.

In America, a woman is killed by a spouse every four hours.

You have more brain cells than there are grains of sand on your favorite beach, and you have cleverness, dexterity, and creativity—all

the energy of violence moves through our culture.

Ordinary citizens can encounter violence at their jobs to the point that homicide is now the leading cause of death for women in the workplace.

In (sad) fact, if a full jumbo jet crashed into a mountain killing everyone on board, and if that happened every month, month in and month out, the number of people killed still wouldn’t equal the number of women murdered by their husbands and boyfriends each year.

Has the security industry earned your confidence? Has government earned it?

“No theory is too remote to explore, no person is beyond consideration, no gut feeling is too unsubstantiated.”

Above all, I hope to leave you knowing that every puzzle can be solved long before all the pieces are in place.

The human violence we abhor and fear the most, that which we call “random” and “senseless,” is neither. It always has purpose and meaning, to the perpetrator, at least.

We want to believe that human violence is somehow beyond our understanding, because as long as it remains a mystery, we have no duty to avoid it, explore it, or anticipate it.

Since everything a person does is created twice—once in the mind and once in its execution—ideas

only 20 percent of all homicides are committed by strangers.

Intuition is a gift we all have,

With judgment comes the ability to disregard your own intuition unless you can explain it logically,

We, in contrast to every other creature in nature, choose not to explore—and even to ignore—survival signals.

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.”

People sometimes say they cannot imagine what a given experience must have been like, but you can imagine every human feeling, and as you’ll see, it is that ability that makes you an expert at predicting what others will do.

Ressler’s research confirmed an astonishingly consistent statistic about serial killers: 100 percent had been abused as children, either with violence, neglect, or humiliation.