The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals that Protect us from Violence (43 page)

But Meg insists that her nightly fear will save her life, and even as she steadfastly defends the value of her terror, I know she wants to be free of it.

GdeB: When do you feel the fear?

Meg: As I park my car.

GdeB: Is it the same every night?

Meg: Yes, and then if I hear a noise or something, it gets ten times worse. So I have to stay extra alert. Living in Los Angeles, I have to stay alert all the time.

(Note her reference to Los Angeles—a satellite.)

I explain that if she’s scared to death every night, focused intently on what might happen, then no signal is reserved for when there actually is risk that needs her attention. Ideally, when there is fear, we look around, follow the fear, ask what we are perceiving. If we are looking for some specific, expected danger, we are less likely to see the unexpected danger. I urge that she pay relaxed attention to her environment rather than paying rapt attention to her imagination.

I know Meg is feeling anxious, and that is a signal of something, though not danger in this case. I ask her what risks she faces as she walks from her car each night.

Meg: Isn’t that a dumb question coming from you? I mean, there are so many risks. Los Angeles is a very dangerous city, not a place I’d choose to live.

GdeB: But you do choose to live here.

Meg: No, I have to; I’m trapped by this job. I have to live here, and it’s so dangerous, people are killed here all the time, and I know that, so I’m afraid when I walk to my apartment, terrified, actually, and I should be!

GdeB: Certainly anything could happen to anyone anytime, but since you’ve made that walk more than a thousand times without injury, the terror you feel is likely a signal of something other than danger. How do you normally communicate with yourself?

An agitated Meg says she doesn’t understand my question, but that she doesn’t want to discuss it anymore—she’ll think about it overnight. When she calls the following afternoon, she not only understands my question about how she communicates with herself, but has found her answer. She agrees that her intuition is indeed communicating something to her, and it isn’t imminent danger; it is that she does not want to stay in Los Angeles or in her job. Her nightly walk from her car into her apartment is simply the venue for her inner voice to speak most loudly.

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Every day, my work brings me into close contact with people who are afraid, anxious, or just worrying. My first duty is to figure out which it is. If it’s real fear they feel, there is important information for me to glean, possibly relevant to safety.

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:

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 being harmed by someone walking toward us on a dark street, the fear is wasted. That’s because many people will approach us—only a very few might harm us.

Surveys have shown that ranking very close to the fear of death is the fear of public speaking. Why would someone feel profound fear, deep in his or her stomach, about public speaking, which is so far from death? Because it isn’t so far from death when we link it. Those who fear public speaking actually fear the loss of identity that attaches to performing badly, and that is firmly rooted in our survival needs. For all social animals, from ants to antelopes, identity is the pass card to inclusion, and inclusion is the key to survival. If a baby loses its identity as the child of his or her parents, a possible outcome is abandonment. For a human infant, that means death. As adults, without our identity as a member of the tribe or village, community or culture, a likely outcome is banishment and death.

So the fear of getting up and addressing five hundred people at the annual convention of professionals in your field is not just the fear of embarrassment—it is linked to the fear of being perceived as incompetent, which is linked to the fear of loss of employment, loss of home, loss of family, your ability to contribute to society, your value, in short, your identity and your life. Linking an unwarranted fear to its ultimate terrible destination usually helps alleviate that fear. Though you may find that public speaking can link to death, you’ll see that it would be a long and unlikely trip.

Apply these two rules to the fear that a burglar might crash into your living room. First, the fear itself can actually be perceived as good news, because it confirms that the dreaded outcome is not occurring right now. Since life has plenty of hazards that come upon us without warning, we could welcome fear with “Thank you, God, for a signal I can act on.” More often, however, we apply denial first, trying to see if perhaps we can just think it away.

Remember, fear says something might happen. If it does happen, we stop fearing it and start to respond to it, manage it, surrender to it; or we start to fear the next outcome we predict might be coming. If a burglar does crash into the living room, we no longer fear that possibility; we now fear what he might do next. Whatever that may be, while we fear it, it is not happening.

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Let’s go one step deeper in this exploration of fear: In the 1960’s there was a study done that sought to determine which single word has the greatest psychological impact on people. Researchers tested reactions to words like
spider, snake, death, rape, incest, murder
. It was the word
shark
that elicited the greatest fear response. But why do sharks, which human beings come in contact with so rarely, frighten us so profoundly?

The seeming randomness of their strike is part of it. So is the lack of warning, the fact that such a large creature can approach silently and separate body from soul so dispassionately. To the shark, we are without identity, we are no more than meat, and to human beings the loss of identity is a type of death all by itself. In his book
Great White Shark
, Jean-Michel Cousteau calls the shark “the most frightening animal on earth,” but there is, of course, an animal far more dangerous.

Scientists marvel at the predatory competence of the Great White, praising its speed, brute strength, sensory acuity, and apparent determination, but man is a predator of far more spectacular ability. The shark does not have dexterity, guile, deceit, cleverness, or disguise. It also does not have our brutality, for man does things to man that sharks could not dream of doing. Deep in our cells, we know this, so occasional fear of another human being is natural.

As with the shark attack, randomness and lack of warning are the attributes of human violence we fear most, but you now know that human violence is rarely random and rarely without warning. Admittedly, danger from humans is more complicated than danger from sharks; after all, everything you need know about how to be safe from sharks can be spoken in five words: Don’t go in the ocean. Everything you need to know about how to be safe from people is in you too, enhanced by a lifetime of experience (and hopefully better organized by this book).

We may choose to sit in the movie theater indulging in the fear of unlikely dangers now and again, but our fear of people, which can be a blessing, is often misplaced. Since we live every day with the most frightening animal on earth, understanding how fear works can dramatically improve our lives.

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 from worry, anxiety, and panic. Even the strongest worry could not get you to fight with a shark, or follow your would-be murderer silently down a hallway.

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Recently I was asked to speak to a group of corporate employees about their safety, but as is often the case, it quickly became a discussion about fear. Before I began, several people said, “Please talk to Celia, she’s been looking forward to this meeting for weeks.” Celia, it turned out, was eager to tell me about her dread of being followed, a topic her co-workers had heard a lot about. When people come to me in fear (of a stranger, a co-worker, a spouse, a fan), my first step is always to determine if it actually is a fear as opposed to a worry or a phobia. This is fairly simple since, as I noted above, real fear occurs in the presence of danger and will always easily link to pain or death.

To learn if Celia was reacting to a fear signal (which is not voluntary) or if she was worrying (which is voluntary), I asked if she feared being followed right then, right in the room where we sat.

She laughed. “No, of course not. I fear it when I’m walking alone from my office to my car at night. I park in a big gated lot, and mine is always the only car left because I work the latest, and the lot is empty and it’s dead silent.” Since she had given me no indication of actual risk, her dread was not the fear signal of nature but the worry only humans indulge in.

To get her to link the fear, I asked what about being followed scared her. “Well, it’s not the following that scares me, it’s the being caught. I’m afraid somebody will grab me from behind and pull me into a car. They could do anything to me, since I’m the last one here.” She launched this satellite about working the latest several times.

Since worry is a choice, people do it because it serves them in some way. The worry about public speaking may serve its host by giving him or her an excuse never to speak in public, or an excuse to cancel or to do poorly (“because I was so scared”). But how did Celia’s worry serve Celia? People will always tell you what the real issue is, and in fact, Celia already had.

I asked why she couldn’t just leave work earlier each evening: “If I did, everybody would think I was lazy.” So Celia was concerned about losing her identity as the employee who always worked the longest. Her frequent discussions of hazard and fear were guaranteed to quickly carry any conversation to the fact that she worked the latest. And that is how the worry served her.

The wise words of FDR, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,’ might be amended by nature to “There is nothing to fear unless and until you feel fear.” Worry, wariness, anxiety and concern all have a purpose, but they are not fear. So any time your dreaded outcome cannot be reasonably linked to pain or death and it isn’t a signal in the presence of danger, then it really shouldn’t be confused with fear. It may well be something worth trying to understand and manage, but worry will not bring solutions. It will more likely distract you from finding solutions.