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

by Gavin De Becker

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  Some threateners are so unorganized that they modify their initial threats or spit out several alarming concepts in a row. Some say, “You’ll all be blown up within the hour,” then say, “You ought to be killed,” then say, “Your day will come, I promise.” We call these amendments value reduction statements, and callers who use them reveal themselves to be more interested in venting anger than warning of danger.

  The things people say when threatening others are intentionally shocking and alarming. Victims often describe a threat they received as “horrible” or “vicious” because it paints a gruesome picture. “I’ll cut you up into little pieces” is a popular one. So is “I’ll blow your brains out.” Again and again, however, content is far less significant than context, and the choice of alarming words usually speaks more of someone’s desire to frighten than of his intention to harm. “I’ll blow your head off” or “I’ll gun you down like a dog” may, depending upon context, portend less danger than does the simple statement, “I can’t take this any more.”

  Still, alarming words cause people to react by going into a defensive posture, psychologically speaking. Though shocking or bizarre things don’t usually put us at any actual risk, uncertainty about risk causes us alarm, and this causes a problem: When we are stunned or distracted we raise the very drawbridge—perception—that we must cross in order to make successful predictions.

  In the last thirty years, I’ve read, heard, and seen the world’s most creative, gruesome, distasteful, and well-performed threats. I’ve learned that it’s important to react calmly, because when in alarm we stop evaluating information mindfully and start doing it physically.

  For example, a death threat communicated in a letter or phone call cannot possibly pose any immediate hazard, but the recipient might nonetheless start getting physically ready for danger, with increased blood flow to the arms and legs (for fighting or running), release of the chemical cortisol (which helps blood coagulate more quickly in case of injury), lactic acid heating up in the muscles (to prepare them for effort), focused vision, and increased breathing and heartbeat to support all these systems. These responses are valuable when facing present danger (such as when Kelly stood up and walked out of her apartment), but for evaluating future hazard, staying calm produces better results. A way to do this is to consciously ask and answer the question “Am I in immediate danger?” Your body wants you to get this question out of the way, and once you do, you’ll be free to keep perceiving what’s going on.

  The great enemy of perception, and thus of accurate predictions, is judgment. People often learn just enough about something to judge it as belonging in this or that category. They observe bizarre conduct and say, “This guy is just crazy.” Judgments are the automatic pigeon-holing of a person or situation simply because some characteristic is familiar to the observer (so whatever that characteristic meant before it must mean again now). Familiarity is comfortable, but such judgments drop the curtain, effectively preventing the observer from seeing the rest of the play.

  Another time people stop perceiving new information is when they pre-maturely judge someone as guilty or not guilty. Recall the story of the woman who was certain the threats she was getting were from the man she had sued. In telling me about it, she provided details that were not necessary to the story (details I call satellites). I could hear them for what they were—valuable information—but she couldn’t hear them because she had already settled on one particular suspect, thus shutting down perception.

  The opposite can also happen, as in cases in which people exclude one particular suspect. Find the satellite in Sally’s story:

  “Someone is terrorizing me, and I’ve got to find out who it is. A few weeks ago, a car drove up the hill to my house, and the driver just stared at the front door. I flipped the porch lights on and off, and he left. It happened again the next day. Then the calls started. A man’s voice said, ‘You should move; it’s not safe there for a woman alone. You don’t belong there.’ I’m so lucky I met Richard Barnes a few days later—he’s the guy I’m selling the house to. And you know what? My house really is too remote for a woman alone.”

  What is the satellite, the unneeded detail? The name of the man she is selling to.

  “Tell me about Richard Barnes.”

  “Oh, he’s got nothing to do with this. He’s just the guy who is buying the house, and what a godsend he is. One day as I was getting my mail, he was jogging by, and we started talking. He mentioned how much he loved the bay windows at my house, and one thing led to another. He made an offer the next afternoon.”

  “What about the anonymous calls scared you?”

  “I was worried whoever it was might want to hurt me, of course.”

  “But the caller said you should move. Your moving wouldn’t serve someone who intended to hurt you. Who would be served by your moving?”

  “Nobody. [A pause.] Someone who wanted to buy my house?”

  You know where this is going. Further discussion revealed that Richard Barnes lived in a suburb more than an hour away, so why was he jogging in Sally’s neighborhood? He knew details about her house (the bay windows) that a person could gain only by driving up the long driveway. Sally had made a judgment that excluded him as a suspect and accordingly she left him out of her thinking.

  Since the motive for nearly all anonymous threats is to influence conduct, I suggest that clients ask who would be served if they took the actions that they’d take if they believed the threats would be carried out. This often leads to the identity of the threatener.

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  One popular form of intimidation that is rarely done anonymously is extortion. In common extortion cases, a person threatens to disclose information he predicts will be damaging and he offers to keep the secret if compensated. Since victims of threats—and not threateners—decide how valuable a threat will be, the way you react will set the price tag.

  The proverbial extortion threat is actually an intimidation, because it contains the words if, or else, unless, or until: “If you don’t give me ten thousand dollars, I’ll tell your wife you are having an affair.” Best response: “Hold on a moment, let me get my wife on the line and you can tell her right now.” With that reaction, the threat is turned from gold to tin. If you can convince an extortionist that the harm he threatens does not worry you, you have at a minimum improved your negotiating position. In many cases, you may actually neutralize the whole matter.

  Conversely, reacting with pleading and compliance increases the extortionist’s appraisal of his threat. A threatened harm can be so intolerable to the victim that paying for silence seems worthwhile. Often this paves the way to hear that threat another day, for the person who successfully extorts money once may come back to the reluctant bank.

  Some people, of course, choose to pay extortionists, though I rarely recommend it. Aside from what I’d call legal extortion (letters from lawyers demanding payments for a client’s unjustified claims), few extortionists can be relied upon to stick to the terms of agreements they might make. In other words, you are negotiating an agreement with someone who cannot be relied upon to honor it.

  Public figures are probably the most frequent targets for extortion and there are some lessons to learn from their experience. In a typical case, someone has potentially damaging information and now demands to be rewarded for keeping the confidence. I recall a young film star whose rise to fame brought a call from a sleazy ex-boyfriend she hadn’t heard from in years. Unless my client gave him $50,000, he threatened, he would reveal that she had had an abortion. The thought of this becoming known caused her great anxiety, and thus enhanced the value of the threat. By the time she met with me, she hadn’t slept a full night in a week. My counsel for managing such cases is always to begin with an organized appraisal of the threat. I asked my client to make a list of the people she feared would react adversely if the information were made public.

  “That’s easy,” she said.
“My parents. I don’t want them to know.” I asked that she consider calling her parents and telling them the information in her way, rather than living with the dread that they would learn it his way (or a tabloid’s way). I said she was the only person in the world who could determine the value of this threat.

  Disclosing the harmful information oneself is so radical an idea that most victims of extortion never even consider it, but within ten minutes, my client made her difficult decision, called her parents, and killed the threat. She got off the phone visibly lighter and more powerful. “I came here willing to do anything to stop him from revealing that secret. Now, I am not willing to do anything at all, because I don’t care what he says.” (My client paid nothing, and the man never revealed the information anyway. I have a few cases a year just like this one.)

  Extortion is a crime of opportunity, usually committed by amateurs who tend to first try the most roundabout approach: “You know, I saw you on the Emmy’s the other night, and you’re doing so well and everything, making so much money, and I’ve had such a rough year financially, and I was thinking about how beautiful you looked in those pictures we took that time in Mexico…” Because extortion is a bit awkward for the neophyte, he wants his victim to jump in and make it easy by saying, “I’d be glad to help you out money-wise, but I wonder, could I get those photos back? I’d hate to see them become public.”

  Victims often try to appease the extortionist, but these efforts just allow him to retain the undeserved mantle of a decent person. I suggest that clients compel the extortionist to commit to his sleaziness, which puts him on the defensive. Don’t let him simply flirt with his lowness—make him marry it by saying those ugly words. I ask victims to repeat “I don’t understand what you’re getting at” until the extortionist states it clearly. Many extortionists can’t do it and they either stumble around the issue or abandon their bad idea altogether. Making him explicitly state the extortion also helps clarify whether he is motivated by greed or malice, and this provides a road map to his desired outcome.

  Though sometimes very difficult, it is important to be polite to the extortionist, because he may be looking for justification to do the hurtful thing he threatens. With the amateur, sinking so low is difficult, and believe it or not, it’s a very vulnerable time for him. Don’t misread this as sympathy on my part—it’s just wise not to kick this guy around emotionally because if he gets angry that empowers him.

  Victims of extortion committed by someone they know are often reluctant to believe he’ll actually go through with the threatened act. You can make your own predictions as to what he’ll do, but to save time for any reader who ever faces the situation, extortionists who are motivated by malice are more likely to carry out the act than those motivated just by greed. Anyway, those motivated by malice are usually so hard to negotiate with that I usually suggest my clients not even try. Another tip: Those who say the shabby words explicitly right from the start are more likely to carry out the threatened act than those who stumble around.

  When any type of threat includes indirect or veiled references to things they might do, such as “You’ll be sorry,” or “Don’t mess with me,” it is best to ask directly, “What do you mean by that?” Ask exactly what the person is threatening to do. His elaboration will almost always be weaker than his implied threat. If, on the other hand, his explanation of the comment is actually an explicit threat, better to learn it now than to be uncertain later.

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  One of the best examples of how powerful an influence context can be comes when evaluating threats to public figures. Assumptions that might be accurate in other situations are entirely inaccurate in this one. For example, in interpersonal situations (neighbor, friend, spouse) a threat tends to actually increase the likelihood of violence by eroding the quality of communication and increasing frustration, but the very same threat conveyed to a public figure does not portend violence at all.

  Still, it is a tenacious myth that those who threaten public figures are the ones most likely to harm them. In fact, those who make direct threats to public figures are far less likely to harm them than those who communicate in other inappropriate ways (love-sickness, exaggerated adoration, themes of rejection, the belief that a relationship is “meant to be,” plans to travel or meet, the belief that the media figure owes them something, etc.). Direct threats are not a reliable pre-incident indicator for assassination in America, as demonstrated by the fact that not one successful public-figure attacker in the history of the media age directly threatened his victim first.

  While threats communicated directly to famous victims do not predict violence, those spoken to uninvolved second parties are more serious. The person who informs police that a disturbed cousin said he would shoot the governor is providing very valuable information. That’s because threats spoken to people other than the victim are not as likely to be motivated by a desire to scare the victim. Though they too are rarely acted upon, threats delivered to second parties should always be reported to law enforcement.

  The myth that those who will harm a famous person will directly threaten their victims first has led many to wrongly conclude that inappropriate communications that don’t contain threats are not significant. The opposite is actually true. Public figures who ignore inappropriate letters simply because they don’t contain threats, will be missing the very communications most relevant to safety.

  This idea that the presence of a threat lowers risk and the absence of a threat elevates risk is hard for people to grasp, perhaps because it feels counter-intuitive, but it’s true, and it’s not the only fact about threats to public figures that surprises people.

  For example, though anonymous death threats cause high concern, they actually portend less danger than accredited threats. People who send threats anonymously are far less likely to pursue an encounter than those who sign their names. There are some compelling reasons why this is so. The threatener who provides his true name is not trying to avoid attention, and is probably seeking it. Thus, he is most similar to assassins, most of whom stand at the scene of their crimes and say, “I did this.”

  Still, police have historically been intrigued by anonymous death threats and apathetic about accredited ones. Since police are usually faced with the challenge of apprehending suspects who seek to avoid detection, when they encounter one who self-identifies, a common response is “This guy would never do anything—he signed his name right here.” The thinking is that if the sender were to carry out the threatened act, apprehension would be easy. This approach fails to recognize that actual public figure attackers have rarely sought to avoid apprehension. The police misunderstanding about anonymous threats stems from how different the assassin is from almost all other criminals. Who else would actually design his offense to ensure that he gets caught? Who else would hope his act would be videotaped?

  To the modern media criminal, most notably the assassin, that is the description of the perfect crime, and a few people will dedicate their lives to committing it. You aren’t likely to ever face an assassin, of course, but you are likely to encounter people just as dedicated, people who refuse to let go.

  ▪ CHAPTER EIGHT ▪

  PERSISTENCE, PERSISTENCE

  “That’s what happens when you’re angry at people.

  You make them part of your life.”

  —Garrison Keillor

  In America, persistence is a bit like pizza: We didn’t invent it, but we’ve certainly embraced it. We promise our children that persistence will pay off. We treat it as an attribute of success and we compliment the people who hang in there against all odds. However, when persistence is unwanted, those same people we praised can plague our lives. Few situations are more confounding than dealing with people who refuse to let go. We try to predict what they might do next, we worry that they might get angry or dangerous, and we agonize over what strategies will make them stop whatever it is they feel so compelled to continue doing.

  Ima
gine that this happened to you instead of to a client of mine: You and your spouse attend a seminar, and an acquaintance there introduces you to Tommy, a preppy-looking, energetic young man. When told about the upcoming expansion of your travel agency business, the young man lights up with enthusiasm.

  This chance meeting may not sound like the start of a nightmare, but that’s exactly what it was for Mike Fedder and his wife, Jackie. Over the chatter of the seminar, Tommy told them some of his ideas about the travel business: “I’ve always been interested in unconventional travel packages, and it’s clear that people are moving away from the big hotels kind of thing, more toward camping and rafting and hiking. I have some packaging ideas that I know will double any agency’s sales. I just haven’t found the right partners to kick it off.” He told the Fedders about selling father-son vacations by marketing to lists gathered from Little League organizations.

  “I work with some of these teams, and the parents put in a lot of time with their children, so they’re obviously willing to invest money in enjoyable activities. The leagues are well organized, so the packages could be offered through their newsletters and meetings. Plus, you can get one father in a group and offer him incentives to sign up others.”