The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals that Protect us from Violence (6 page)

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, “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 something over on me with asbestos or nerve gas, I’ll be furious.” We will tolerate familiar risks over strange ones. The hijacking of an American jet in Athens looms larger in our concern than the parent who kills a child, even though one happens rarely, and the other happens daily.

We deny because we’re built to see what we want to see. In his book
The Day the Universe Changed
, historian James Burke points out that “it is the brain which sees, not the eye. Reality is in the brain before it is experienced, or else the signals we get from the eye would make no sense.” This truth underscores the value of having the pieces of the violence puzzle in our heads before we need them, for only then can we recognize survival signals.

We certainly care enough about this topic to learn the signals: A Harris poll reveals that an overwhelming majority of Americans perceive the greatest risks in the areas of crime and personal safety. If this is true, then we must ask some new questions about violence and about ourselves. For example, is it reasonable that we know more about why a man buys a particular brand of shaving lotion than about why he buys a gun? And why are we fascinated when a famous person is attacked by a stalker, which happens once every two or three years, yet uninterested when a woman is killed by a stalking husband or boyfriend, which happens once every two hours? Why does America have thousands of suicide prevention centers and not one homicide prevention center?

And why do we worship hindsight (as in the news media’s constant rehash of the day, the week, the year) and yet distrust foresight, which actually might make a difference in our lives?

One reason is that we don’t have to develop our own predictive skills in a world where experts will tell us what to do. Katherine, a young women of twenty-seven, asks me (the expert) a question nearly all women in our society must consider: “How can I can tell if a man I date is turning into a problem? Is there a checklist of warning signs about stalkers?”

Instead of answering her question directly, I ask her to give me an example of what she means.

“Well,” she says, “I dated this guy named Bryan, who got sort of obsessed with me and wouldn’t let go when I wanted to stop seeing him. We met at a party of a friend of mine, and he must have asked somebody there for my number. Before I even got home, he’d left me three messages. I told him I didn’t want to go out with him, but he was so enthusiastic about it that I really didn’t have any choice. We dated for about a month. In the beginning, he was super attentive, always seemed to know what I wanted. He remembered everything I ever said. It was flattering, but it also made me a little uncomfortable. Like when I mentioned needing more space for my books, he showed up one day with shelves and all the stuff and just put them up. I couldn’t say no. And he read so much into whatever I said. Once he asked if I’d go to a basketball game with him, and I said maybe. He later said, ‘You promised.’ Also, he talked about serious things so early, like living together and marriage and children. He started with jokes about that stuff the first time we went out, and later he wasn’t joking. Or when he suggested that I have a phone in my car. I wasn’t sure I even wanted a carphone, but he borrowed my car one day and just had one installed. It was a gift, so what could I say? And, of course, he called me whenever I was in the car. And he was so adamant that I never speak to my ex-boyfriend on that car phone. Later he got angry if I spoke to my ex at all. There were also a couple of my friends he didn’t like me to see, and he stopped spending time with his own friends. Finally, when I told him I didn’t want to be his girlfriend, he refused to hear it. He basically insisted that I stay in a relationship with him, and when I wouldn’t, he forced me into a relationship of sorts by always calling, showing up, sending gifts, talking to my friends, coming to my work uninvited. We’d only known each other for about a month, but he acted like it was the most important relationship of his life. So what are the warning signs of that kind of guy?”

Katherine had, of course, answered her own question [more on date-stalking in
chapter 11
]. My best advice might not have been satisfying to her: “Listen to yourself.” Experts rarely tell us we already know the answers. Just as we want their checklist, they want our check.

Perhaps the greatest experts at day-to-day high-stakes predictions are police officers. Those with experience on the streets have learned about violence and its warning signs, but unchecked denial can eclipse all that knowledge. Police survival expert Michael Cantrell learned this many times in his career.

When Cantrell was in his fourth year as a policeman, his partner, whom I’ll call David Patrick, told him about a dream he’d had in which “one of us gets shot.”

“Well, you should pay close attention to that dream,” Cantrell responded, “because it isn’t going to be me.”

Patrick brought up the topic again, announcing one day: “I’m sure I will be shot.” Cantrell came to believe him, particularly given Patrick’s lax officer survival strategies. On one of their rides together, they’d pulled over a car with three men inside. Though the driver was cordial, Cantrell intuitively felt danger because the other two men just stared straight ahead. He was dismayed that his partner wasn’t alert to the possible hazards and seemed more interested in getting a pipe lit as he stood at the side of the patrol car. Cantrell asked the driver to get out of the car, and as the man opened the door, Cantrell saw a handgun on the floor and yelled out “Gun!” to his partner, but Patrick still did not respond attentively.

They survived that hazard, but unable to shake the feeling that his partner’s premonition was an accurate prediction, Cantrell eventually discussed it with his supervisor. The sergeant told him he was over-reacting. Each of the several times Cantrell asked to discuss it, the sergeant chided him, “Look, in all my time with the Department, I’ve never even drawn my gun, and we haven’t had a shooting here for as long as I can remember.”

On one of Cantrell’s days off, Patrick sat with other officers at the patrol briefing listening to the description of two men who had been involved in several armed robberies. Within a few hours, Patrick (riding alone) observed two men who fit the description discussed in the briefing. One of them stood at a pay phone but didn’t appear to be talking to anyone. The other man repeatedly walked over and looked in the window of a supermarket. Patrick had more than enough reason to call for backup, but may have been concerned that he’d be embarrassed if it turned out these weren’t the wanted criminals. The men saw Patrick and they walked off down the street. He followed alongside in his patrol car. Without calling in any description or request for assistance, he waved the men over. Patrick got out of his car and asked one of them to turn around for a pat-down. Even though Patrick had seen enough to be suspicious, even though he recognized and consciously considered that these might be the two wanted men, he still continued to ignore the survival signals. When he finally registered a signal of great danger from the man next to him, it was much too late to act on. Out of the corner of his eye, Patrick saw the slowly rising handgun that, an instant later, was fired into his face. The man pulled the trigger six times as Patrick fell. The second man produced a gun and shot Patrick once in the back.

After the two criminals ran off, Patrick was able to get to his radio. When the tape of that radio call was played for Cantrell, he could clearly hear blood gurgling in Patrick’s mouth as he gasped, “I’ve been shot. I’ve been shot.”

Amazingly, Patrick recovered and went back to police work for a short while. Still reluctant to take responsibility for his safety or his recklessness, he later told Cantrell, “If you’d been with me, this wouldn’t have happened.”

Remember that sergeant who accused Cantrell of overreacting? He had decided there was a low level of risk based on just two factors: that he had never drawn his gun during his career, and that none of the department’s officers had been shot in recent memory. If this second factor were a valid predictor, then the shooting of Patrick should have changed the sergeant’s evaluation of hazard. Apparently it didn’t, because a few months later, he was himself shot in a convenience store.

Cantrell has left law enforcement for the corporate world, but every week he volunteers his time to teach the gift of fear to police officers. People now listen to him when he tells them to listen to themselves.

Aside from outright denial of intuitive signals, there is another way we get into trouble. Our intuition fails when it is loaded with inaccurate information. Since we are the editors of what gets in and what is invested with credibility, it is important to evaluate our sources of information. I explained this during a presentation for hundreds of government threat assessors at the Central Intelligence Agency a few years ago, making my point by drawing on a very rare safety hazard: kangaroo attacks. I told the audience that about twenty people a year are killed by the normally friendly animals, and that kangaroos always display a specific set of indicators before they attack:

1.   They will give what appears to be a wide and genial smile (but they are actually showing their teeth).

2.   They will check their pouches compulsively several times to be sure they have no young with them (they never attack while carrying young).

3.   They will look behind them (since they always retreat immediately after they kill).

After these three signals, they will lunge, brutally pummel an enemy, and gallop off.

I asked two audience members to stand up and repeat back the warning signs, and both flawlessly described the smile, the checking of the pouch for young, and the looking back for an escape route. In fact, everyone in that room (and now you) will remember those warning signs for life. If you are ever face to face with a kangaroo, be it tomorrow or decades from now, those three pre-incident indicators will be in your head.