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

“It will come from an even grander resource that was there all the while, within you. That resource is intuition. It may be hard to accept its importance, because intuition is usually looked upon by us Western beings with contempt.”

Western culture frames intuition as a frivolous, unreliable response. However, de Becker champions it as a defense mechanism innate in all beings, honed by evolution and thus more reliable than logic. Like he did with Kelly, de Becker aims to teach the reader how to delve into intuitive signals and interpret them.

“[It] is judgement, and that’s what gets in the way of the way of your perception and intuition. With judgement comes the ability to disregard your own intuition unless you can explain it logically, the eagerness to judge and convict your feelings, rather than honor them. […] The mental energy we use searching for the innocent explanation to everything could more constructively be applied to evaluating the environment for important information.”

Expanding on Quote 2, Western culture’s reverence for logic is often internalized. Too often, people question their intuition and search for alternative explanations for suspicious behavior. Thus, de Becker urges the reader to extend the same grace to themselves as they would others’ stories of danger.

“We are competitive and territorial and violent, just like our simian ancestors. There are people who insist this isn’t so, who insist they could never kill anyone, but they invariably add a telling caveat: ‘Unless, of course, a person tried to harm someone I love.’ So the resource of violence is in everyone; all that changes is our view of the justification.”

de Becker warns against dismissing criminals as so detached from humanity that their behavior is unpredictable, as all crimes are human by nature. Perpetuators simply follow and act on their own rules and values, even if horrific. De Becker acknowledges some behavior as especially horrific, but provides evaluative, interpretive techniques to draw educated conclusions about violent individuals.

“‘No’ is a word that must never be negotiated, because the person who chooses to hear it is trying to control you. […] Declining to hear ‘no’ is a signal that someone is either seeking control of refusing to relinquish it. […] A decent man would understand her reaction or, more likely, wouldn’t have approached a woman alone in the first place, unless she really had some obvious need. If a man doesn’t understand the reaction and storms off dejected, that’s fine too. In fact, any reaction—even anger—from a decent man who had no sinister intent is preferable to continued attention from a violent man who might have used your concern about rudeness to his advantage.”

de Becker believes cultural expectations of women hinder their safety, and enable those, especially men, determined to disregard their autonomy. Women are conditioned to be gracious, to meet and reject suitors with evasive language. Thus, de Becker encourages them to be direct and apathetic toward unwanted pursuit, as safety is more important than assuaging a man’s ego or being perceived as rude.

“It is better to turn completely, take in everything, and look squarely at someone who concerns you. This not only gives you information, but it communicates to him that you are not a tentative, frightened victim-in-waiting.”

de Becker explains that a woman’s rejection of advances will never transform a respectful suitor into a violent one. Anyone who takes offense at their actions being perceived as predatory lacks awareness of the frequency with which women are targeted for violence. Charm and Niceness are adopted by those who want to disarm women and take advantage of their courtesy. Thus, a direct look can discourage would-be predators.

“The reason for creating three options is that it frees you from the need to be correct; you know that at least two of your options will be wrong, and this freedom from judgement clears a path to intuition. In practice, this turns out to be less an exercise in creativity than an exercise in discovery; what you may think you are making up you are calling up.”

The Three Possible Outcomes technique helps a person assess potential risk, which can be applied to both past and future actions. The intuitive outcome emerges as obvious when compared to its two alternatives. Thus, this technique prevents one from undermining their intuition.

“In each prediction about violence, we must ask what the context, stimuli, and developments might mean to the person involved, not just what they mean to us. We just ask if the actor will perceive violence as moving him toward some desired outcome or away from it. The conscious or unconscious decision to use violence, or to do most anything, involves many mental and emotional processes, but they usually just boil down to how a person perceives four fairly simple issues: justification, alternatives, consequences, and ability.”

A common error made by de Becker’s clients is failure to recognize the extent to which their attackers’ behavior and values could deviate from their own. While these attackers should be recognized as humans following their own logic, one shouldn’t limit their potential actions to their own imagination. Criminals rarely react rationally when they believe themselves entitled and wronged. Thus, JACA (Justification, Alternatives, Consequences, and Ability) provides greater understanding of how a perpetrator might view their predicament.

“Prediction moves from a science to an art when you realize that pre-incident indicators are actually part of the incident. […] Though we want to believe that violence is a matter of cause and effect, it is actually a process, a chain in which the violent outcome is only one link.”

de Becker explains the most accurate predictions use available time to thoroughly interpret available information. Some attacks, like Kelly’s, escalate over a relatively short period of time: The number of links in this chain are fewer, but still constitute a progression. In prolonged escalations, observers and would-be victims must adopt alertness to potential links. De Becker rejects the myth of people suddenly “snapping” or committing “crimes of passion” for this very reason.

“Though thoughts of harming you may be terrible, they are also inevitable. The thought is not the problem; the expression of the thought is what causes us anxiety, and most of the time that’s the whole idea. Understanding this will help reduce unwarranted fear. […] It’s bad, of course, that someone threatens violence, but the threat means that at least for now, he has considered violence and decided against doing it.”

While verbal and written threats are disarming, de Becker advises against losing one’s clarity of mind over them. It is important not to discount a threat, but one should also consider what their extortionist truly wants, as a threat in itself does not necessarily promise violence.

“Both promises and threats are made to convince us of an intention, but threats actually convince us of an emotion: frustration. Threats betray the speaker by proving that he has failed to influence events in any other way. Most often they represent desperation, not intentions.”

Just as those who sever contact with pursuers must resist engaging, those who are threatened must resist acting desperately. Threats are meant to disarm, to pressure a target into action. On the other hand, cordiality and impassivity communicate to an extortionist that one is not frightened of them, thus stripping them of power.

“She knew that ‘maybe’ is sometimes perceived as ‘definitely,’ that ‘like’ can be taken as ‘love,’ and that people who don’t hear you don’t hear you. […] If you tell someone ten times that you don’t want to talk to them, you are talking to them—nine more times than you wanted to. If you call him back after he leaves twenty messages, you simply teach him that the cost of getting a call back is twenty messages.”

In this quote, de Becker speaks of client Mike’s wife Jackie, whom he describes as better equipped than her husband to understand the couple’s stalker—an obsessive young man who was convinced that Mike owed him a job. As a woman, Jackie had encountered more unwanted pursuers than Mike—who ultimately learned that losing a pursuer requires making oneself unavailable, to leave them with nothing to misinterpret.

“Since this dynamic feeds on itself and gets worse, and because the longer he is there, the more he feels entitled to be there, the key is to get rid of a Scriptwriter early.”

The Scriptwriter is a combative, manipulative, and often incompetent individual in the workplace and beyond. The workplace is one of the only environments in which people are forced to interact with toxic individuals from which there is no easy escape—as they are employers and coworkers. Many Scriptwriters are enabled to continue disrupting the workplace because their resistance to change is in itself a challenge. It is for this reason, and their likely desire for retaliation, that employers must fire them with sufficient evidence to reduce collateral damage to remaining employees. 

“The primary leverage of employers is the ability to fire, but once they do it, once that power is exercised, their one shot has been fired and the gun is empty. After that, the power is in the hands of the employee. […] Remember that the value of threats is determined by our reaction.”

Gavin de Becker & Associates offer security protocols for businesses who plan to fire a Scriptwriter. As the loss of a job can upheave a former employee’s life, and thus create a false sense of justification, they may retaliate in dangerous ways. Despite this risk, Scriptwriters should always be fired: An employer should remain cordial and neutral, while precautions are made in the background.

“Though leaving is not an option that seems available to many battered women, I believe that the first time a woman is hit, she is a victim, and the second time, she is a volunteer. […] I believe it is critical for a woman to view staying as a choice, for only then can leaving be viewed as a choice and an option.”

de Becker frames remaining in an abusive relationship as a choice not to blame women, but empower them. The nature of abuse conditions a victim to believe they have few if any alternatives to their current predicament, alienating them from resources other than their abuser. Being stripped of autonomy can make someone believe they lack choices, but the ability to choose is often all that remains when so much has been taken away.

“Though leaving is the best response to violence, it is in trying to leave that most women get killed. This dispels a dangerous myth about spousal killings: that they happen in the heat of an argument. In fact, the majority of husbands who kill their wives stalk them first, and far from the ‘crime of passion’ that it’s so often called, killing a wife is usually a decision, not a loss of control.”

Spousal homicides are the most predictable and often most preventable murders in Western society, because their escalation is often witnessed by other people, from law enforcement to friends and coworkers of a would-be victim. Stalking presents an opportunity for a perpetrator to gather information about their target, and often escalates entitlement to take their life—thus making their later killing planned rather than a so-called “crime of passion.” de Becker advises making oneself unavailable to a former partner, but legal proceedings related to mutual property and custody of children can make establishing distance difficult.

“Abusers should be fully prosecuted for every offense, and I believe prosecutions are an important deterrent to further abuse, but even then the woman must be prepared for the possibility of escalation. The bottom line is that there really is only one good reason to get a restraining order in a case of wife abuse: the woman believes the man will honor it.”

de Becker has been instrumental in changing the way that law enforcement handles threats to women in particular. The ubiquity with which restraining orders are recommended and sometimes required for a woman’s fear to be taken “seriously” is ignorant. The implementation of measures like JACA is more useful in determining whether or not a restraining order would help. In many cases, a restraining order escalates the restrained party’s desire for retaliation.

“There’s a lesson in real-life stalking cases that young women can benefit from learning: persistence only proves persistence—it does not prove love. The fact that a romantic pursuer is relentless doesn’t mean you are special—it means he is troubled. It isn’t news that men and women often speak different languages, but when the stakes are highest, it’s important to remember that men are nice when they pursue, and women are nice when they reject. Naturally this leads to confusion, and it brings us to the popular practice of letting him down easy.”

de Becker encourages women to eschew cultural conditioning that forces them to be gracious, even toward rude men. Even non-violent pursuers often violate a woman’s autonomy and space without realizing it. Many pursuers not only feel owed explanations from disinterested women, but have been programmed to misinterpret and misconstrue undesirable responses. For this reason, de Becker advises against providing explanations and platitudes when rejecting advances. The desire to be left alone should be explicitly and loudly declared once.

“The content of media products matters, but the amount may matter more, whether it is watching television too much, playing video games too much, listening to too much rock music, or for that matter listening to too much classical music. It isn’t only the behavior this consumption promotes that concerns me. It’s the behavior it prevents, most notably human interaction. […] No matter what their choice of music, in the lives of too many teenagers, recognition is more meaningful than accomplishment.”

de Becker urges those assessing young people’s potential for violence not to fixate on these youth’s media interests, but rather the amount of time spent on these interests. Feelings of isolation, insignificance, and inadequacy are hallmarks of adolescents and young adults who go on to commit violence—as many believe infamy is favorable to anonymity. When social interactions are absent or limited to peers who share a destructive perspective, indifference to others—and the value of human life—is able to fester.

“[Robert Ressler] speaks of the tremendous importance of the early puberty period for boys. Before then, the anger of these boys might have been submerged and without focus, perhaps turning inward in the form of depression, perhaps (as in most cases) just denied, to emerge later […] Even at this point, says Ressler and others, these potential hosts of monsters can be turned around through the (often unintentional) intervention of people who show kindness, support, or even just interest.”

Robert Ressler and fellow FBI agent John Douglas inaugurated the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis unit in the 1970s. As part of their decades of research on violent criminal behavior, they conducted thousands of hours of interviews with incarcerated offenders. They identified early adolescence as a critical phase of development for young men, but especially those at higher risk of offense based on genetic, socioeconomic, and domestic factors. However, protective factors can rehabilitate vulnerable youths by making them feel less alone.

“Performers, politicians, and sports figures have long been admired and even loved, but that love used to be contained and distant, relegated to a part of the mind and heart reserved for people one didn’t know personally. It was, emotionally speaking, a one-way street, because feelings could be displayed to the public figure only as a part of an acceptable function, like voting, sending letters, or seeing a show.”

de Becker describes a shift which occurred in the mid-20th century, with the increase in public figures’ visibility through public appearances, radio, television, and publications. This accessibility exacerbated fans’ false sense of intimacy with public figures. In the 80s and 90s, many of de Becker’s firm’s high-stakes cases involved protecting famous clients from intrusive or dangerous fans. Since the book’s publication in 1997, the emergence of social media has made it easier for obsessive fans to access intimate information about public figures’ lives.

“[These] presentations promote the glorious aspects of assassination and other media crimes. Getting caught for some awful violence should be the start of oblivion, not the biggest day of one’s life. […] Our culture presents many role models, but few get as much hoopla and glory as the assassin.”

de Becker is critical of the regularity with which violent incidents, especially assassinations of public figures, are depicted in the media. He criticizes sensationalism as a way to increase public anxiety, and thus viewership, ratings, and revenue. The media fuels would-be assassins by making successful assassins notorious through coverage. De Becker believes these criminals should be referenced rarely and as failures to discourage copycats.

“When you honor accurate intuitive signals and evaluate them without denial (believing that either the favorable or the unfavorable outcome is possible), you need not be wary, for you will come to trust that you’ll be notified if there is something worthy of your attention. Fear will gain credibility because it won’t be applied wastefully.”

Overall, de Becker seeks to reframe the way that people think about fear. It is commonly associated with vulnerability, but he encourages recognizing and honoring the feeling as the life-saving response it is. True fear and intuition are summoned by conscious or unconscious data regarding one’s past and present.

“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.”

de Becker acknowledges worry is prevalent in Western culture, and that it is often difficult to break habits which feel protective. Worry allows an individual to delude themselves into feeling they are prepared for future harm, but it can cause more harm by blinding one to true survival signals.