Missing Without A Trace (21 page)

Important Cell Phone Smarts

Cell phones can be a very powerful and effective tool in rescuing a person who has been abducted. Unfortunately, predators know this. Still, you can do a couple of things to maintain possession of your cell phone for as long as possible:

• Leave your cell phone turned on. As long as the phone is on, we have a chance to capture the cell tower or even the precise location of the phone itself. When you or your abductor turn off the phone, we have no chance to trace it.

• PUT YOUR PHONE IN SILENT MODE. As soon as abductors become aware that a captive has a cell phone, they will turn it off or dispose of it—or both.

• Since it is a distinct possibility than an abductor will strip you, do not hide your cell phone in your clothes or shoes. The best place to hide
your phone is within your hair, if this is at all possible, because even if you are stripped, it is unlikely that the abductor will search your head. If you can tuck the phone into the hair under a ponytail or tie your phone to the hair next to your neck, your phone is least likely to be found.

• Many abductors demand that their captors turn over their phone. If you have an old cell phone that you’re not using, consider bringing it as a decoy whenever you travel alone. This way, if an abductor takes you and demands that you surrender your cell phone, you can surrender your non-operating decoy phone. This should at least buy you a little more time with your phone and, perhaps, allow you to keep your working phone with you and turned on.

When Escape Is Not an Option

The first forty-five minutes of an abduction are the most dangerous and the most volatile. During this time, you can increase your chances of survival if you make your abductor see you as a human and not as an object. To this end, you can manipulate the situation by expressing yourself to your captor:

• Being quiet makes you an easy target and a victim. Even if your abductor tells you to be quiet, do not be quiet. Talk! Make noise and communicate with your abductor. This makes you more of a challenge and the abductor will possibly release you to choose an easier target.

• The more you can get your abductor to relate to you or to value you as a person, the better your chance at survival. Try to interact with the abductor and to establish a person-to-person relationship. Just as, in the development of the Stockholm Syndrome, captives can develop positive feelings for their captors, the reciprocal of this can also happen: Captors can develop positive feelings for their captives. If you can create this situation, it can save your life.

The Stockholm Syndrome is a psychological phenomenon in which hostages develop positive feelings for their abductors and, simultaneously, they develop negative feelings toward the police and other authorities who prosecute their abductors. An important third aspect of the Stockholm Syndrome is that abductors also develop positive feelings toward their hostages! This is where the Stockholm Syndrome can be useful in saving your life if you become a victim of an abduction. At times, the Stockholm Syndrome develops very quickly and, as hostage negotiators, we are encouraged to create it in a short period of time.

In hostage negotiations, I want to create a human factor so I would try to foster a relationship between the captor and myself, as well as between the abductor and the victim. For example, we hostage negotiators press the hostage-taker or abductor to assess a captive, forcing him or her to view the victim as an individual. We also provide “family style” food and drinks, such as a pizza or sandwich fixings and two-liter-size bottles of soda with cups, instead of cans. This manipulates the hostage-taker, forcing them to interact with hostages and encouraging development of the psychological connection between them. That connection can save captives’ lives.

Therefore, if you are abducted, you should take these same sorts of measures to try to create a connection between your captor and yourself. Get the person to see you as an individual. Talk about yourself, what you do and what your life is like. Get the person to see you as an individual. Tell the person your name. Share family names, photos, stories, dreams, and goals. Tell them that you are hungry and talk about what you like to eat. Say anything about yourself as a person. And ask the abductor what his or her name is and, if you get this information, use the person’s name and see if you can get any other personal information from them.

As soon as you can, in the beginning stages, you need to determine the answers to three questions:

• Who has you?

• What do they want?

• What are they willing to do?

Determining who has you and what they want will help you determine a plan for escape and also gives you an idea of how much time you might have. If you are dealing with a sexual predator, what they want will, unfortunately, be obvious. But this also means you may have some time on your side. If a serial killer has you, you have little time; you will have to act more recklessly to make your escape. If someone takes you in the hopes of stealing money from your bank accounts and then disposing of you, your best hope is to delay the process and create more time for escape by giving them the wrong access codes.

In order to survive the process of being missing,
action
is the most important thing. More than anything else, action can impact whether you will live through the ordeal. To do nothing ensures failure, both for the missing person and for those who are searching and trying to rescue them.

Time is always critical and every hour counts. Therefore, if a loved one is missing, DO NOT wait to call the police and file a report.
There is no twenty-four-hour rule!
And, if it is you who becomes missing,
immediately
start planning your escape—and work on implementing that plan right away so you can return to your loved ones!

By Carole Lieberman, M.D
.

Ah, the stories I have heard from people sitting on my couch. How often I have wished that others could be flies on the wall and hear the tales of tragedy and triumph, suffering and survival that spill out amidst the tears and anxious laughter.

How do we find the wherewithal to go on living after we have experienced traumatic events or been brushed by people who cause us pain? Even before we are born, the emotions felt by our mother during pregnancy find their way into the womb. And once we are born, it seems like life is a minefield, with countless traumas just waiting for us to step on them. Abandonment. Accident. Bankruptcy. Breakup. Cheating spouse. Child abuse. Death of a loved one. Divorce. Failure. Illness or injury. Impotence. Incest. Infertility. Job loss. Mental illness. Man-made disaster. Natural disaster. Rape. Robbery. Terrorism. Violence. Widowhood… and so much more—a veritable alphabet of catastrophes. When they blow up our world, how do we put the pieces back together?

Our mind works like a video camera, capturing all the sights and sounds and feelings of our life—and storing them in a permanent private collection. Our mind also protects us from the stored memories that are the most painful. These repressed memories are buried in our unconscious, so that they don’t intrude into each subsequent moment of our everyday
lives. Otherwise, we would be flooded by them. But, these memories can still burst into consciousness when something triggers them: the smell of aftershave that our father wore, a photograph found at the bottom of a drawer, a visit to our hometown, old love letters from a spouse who went on to cheat, a finger-painting from a deceased child, the taste of cookies a mother used to make before she abandoned her family, the still-gaping wound in lower Manhattan where the Twin Towers once stood.

Keeping our painful memories buried takes an insidious psychological and physical toll on us. The psychological energy needed to keep them under wraps is then not available for other psychological tasks, such as being able to experience a full range of emotions and being fully present for those we care about. Over time, the stress of keeping memories buried also affects our physical health, contributing to problems from hives to high blood pressure and from cancer to cardiac arrest.

What makes it worse is when we hide behind the psychological defense mechanism of denial. We tell ourselves that we are “happy” or “lucky” that we don’t remember because the event or the person who hurt us isn’t worth it or is better forgotten, as if we can make the trauma disappear by willing it to be so. Then the work of putting the calamity in perspective, growing, surviving and thriving is made so much more complicated, like playing peek-a-boo with the pain.

When something bad befalls us, the natural reaction is to ask, “Why?” and “How did it happen?” We want to understand so that it doesn’t happen again. And we want to blame others for our misfortune. Sometimes, it is obvious who is responsible. Often, we also blame our loved ones for not protecting us from harm. Many of us blame God or the universe, and scream silently towards the heavens, “Why me God? What did I do to deserve this?” The sad little secret is that, regardless of whomever else we blame, we blame ourselves the most and feel guilty for our real or imagined trespasses that we suspect brought on the pain.

It often feels like bad things happen when things have been going
well, too well. When we’re feeling like life has finally turned around, things are looking up and we’re certain it will be rosy from now on. It’s times like these when a mine explodes and shatters our world to pieces. This teaches us to become fearful, whenever good things come into our lives, that there will be a high price to pay. When we were little and put our hand in the cookie jar or made a loud ruckus having fun with our friends, we were punished. So, now, we can’t help wondering if we are guilty of some harmless mischief that will merit a more dreadful punishment. After enough of these roller-coaster rides—the ups and downs of life—it’s tempting to give up. We’re taunted by the feeling that bad things are bound to follow on the heels of good ones, and that we are destined to lose.

As a general rule, the more nurtured and loved, and less traumatized, our childhood has been, the more psychologically hardy and resilient we grow up to be. But there are exceptions. Some people have a will to survive that surmounts even the most horrendous childhoods.

Friedrich Nietzsche, a nineteenth century philosopher, wrote, “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.”
¹
His life was filled with traumatic events: the death of his father when he was four years old, the death of his brother when Friedrich was five, career disappointments, the lack of success for his literary works, unrequited love, illnesses and injuries that caused pain and debility. And, yet, he held on to not only the will to live but also the crusade to achieve greatness. Each tragedy made him more tenacious and determined. He defined life itself as having an instinct for growth and strength. And though, ultimately, he was overtaken by madness and death, he left a legacy of writings and posthumous influence that would have made him proud.

Today, over a hundred years later, we repeat Nietzsche’s words, “That which does not kill us makes us stronger,” under our breath like a mantra, when we are struggling through tough times. We want to believe there is a reason, a purpose for our suffering. And we try to comfort others with this, as well. But there are caveats to this aphorism. We should not
deny our vulnerability, nor our past pain, even as we are making efforts to heal.

The most classic quotes about surviving adversity come from people whose lives have forced them to ponder this conundrum for themselves.

Former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt spoke from personal life lessons when she said, “You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face.”
²
By age ten, Eleanor had become an orphan. She was starved for attention and considered herself ugly. She learned of her husband’s first affair when she discovered love letters in his suitcase.

Franklin went on to have other lovers, despite having become paralyzed. Retaining her dignity throughout, Eleanor asserted, “Women are like teabags. We don’t know our true strength until we are in hot water.”

“Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain…. Accept the seasons of your heart, even as you have always accepted the seasons that pass over your fields.”
³
Khalil Gibran, best known for his poetic treatise
The Prophet
, has known pain from the time he was a young boy in Lebanon, and his father’s gambling debts and imprisonment forced his family to become homeless. His mother took him and his siblings to America. When he was approximately nineteen years old, his sister, half-brother and mother died, leaving him almost completely alone in this still unfamiliar country.

Media mogul Oprah Winfrey advises us to, “Turn your wounds into wisdom.”
⁴
And, indeed, she has done just that. Her childhood was replete with wounds, including being born to unmarried teen parents who soon split and abandoned her, living in abject poverty, being repeatedly sexually abused, becoming pregnant as a teen and experiencing her son’s death shortly after birth. Yet she has managed to surmount all of this pain to achieve immeasurable success and offer wisdom to others.

“We shall draw from the heart of suffering itself the means of
inspiration and survival,”
⁵
former Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill reassured us. Born two months prematurely, in the nineteenth century, Churchill had to fight for his own survival from the beginning. Though he begged his mother to visit him at school or to allow him to come home, she and his father kept their distance from him. Churchill also suffered from a speech impediment. From his own experience he recommended, “If you are going through hell, keep going.”
⁶

“I have heard there are troubles of more than one kind. Some come from ahead and some come from behind, But I’ve bought a big bat. I’m all ready you see. Now my troubles are going to have troubles with me!”
⁷
Who else but Dr. Seuss, also known as Theodor Seuss Geisel, could put it so humorously and make us laugh at ourselves? Yet, even this award-winning children’s book author had obstacles he had to surmount. He was born into a wealthy family who suffered a sudden change of circumstances when his father inherited the family brewery one month before the start of Prohibition. In college, he was caught hosting a party in his room where alcohol was served and the dean insisted he resign from all extra-curricular activities, including his editorship of the college humor magazine. His first wife committed suicide. And his first children’s book was rejected almost thirty times. It took years for him to attain success. Yet today, children worldwide still giggle over
The Cat in the Hat
and
Horton Hatches the Egg
.