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

by Gavin De Becker

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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.

  In the original form of the word, to worry someone else was to harass, strangle, or choke them. Likewise, to worry oneself is a form of self-harassment. To give it less of a role in our lives, we must understand what it really it is.

  Worry is the fear we manufacture—it is not authentic. If you choose to worry about something, have at it, but do so knowing it’s a choice. Most often, we worry because it provides some secondary reward. There are many variations, but a few of the most popular follow.

  Worry is a way to avoid change; when we worry, we don’t do anything about the matter.

  Worry is a way to avoid admitting powerlessness over something, since worry feels like we’re doing something. (Prayer also makes us feel like we’re doing something, and even the most committed agnostic will admit that prayer is more productive than worry.)

  Worry is a cloying way to have connection with others, the idea being that to worry about someone shows love. The other side of this is the belief that not worrying about someone means you don’t care about them. As many worried-about people will tell you, worry is a poor substitute for love or for taking loving action.

  Worry is a protection against future disappointment. After taking an important test, for example, a student might worry about whether he failed. If he can feel the experience of failure now, rehearse it, so to speak, by worrying about it, then failing won’t feel as bad when it happens. But there’s an interesting trade-off: Since he can’t do anything about it at this point anyway, would he rather spend two days worrying and then learn he failed, or spend those same two days not worrying, and then learn he failed? Perhaps most importantly, would he want to learn he had passed the test and spent two days of anxiety for nothing?

  In Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman concludes that worrying is a sort of “magical amulet” which some people feel wards off danger. They believe that worrying about something will stop it from happening. He also correctly notes that most of what people worry about has a low probability of occurring, because we tend to take action about those things we feel are likely to occur. This means that very often the mere fact that you are worrying about something is a predictor that it isn’t likely to happen!

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  The relationship between real fear and worry is analogous to the relationship between pain and suffering. Pain and fear are necessary and valuable components of life. Suffering and worry are destructive and unnecessary components of life. (Great humanitarians, remember, have worked to end suffering, not pain.)

  After decades of seeing worry in all its forms, I’ve concluded that it hurts people much more than it helps. It interrupts clear thinking, wastes time, and shortens life. When worrying, ask yourself, “How does this serve me?” and you may well find that the cost of worrying is greater than the cost of changing. To be freer of fear and yet still get its gift, there are three goals to strive for. They aren’t easy to reach, but it’s worth trying:

  1) When you feel fear, listen.

  2) When you don’t feel fear, don’t manufacture it.

  3) If you find yourself creating worry, explore and discover why.

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  Just as some people are quick to predict the worst, there are others who are reluctant to accept that they might actually be in some danger. This is often caused by the false belief that if we identify and name risk, that somehow invites or causes it to happen. This thinking says: if we don’t see it and don’t accept it, it is prevented from happening. Only human beings can look directly at something, have all the information they need to make an accurate prediction, perhaps even momentarily make the accurate prediction, and then says that it isn’t so.

  One of my clients is a corporation whose New York headquarters has an excellent safety and security program. All doors into their suite of offices are kept locked. Adjacent to each entry door is a plate over which employees wave a magnetic card to gain ready access. The president of the firm asked me to speak to an employee, Arlene, who persistently refused to carry her access card. She complained that the cards scare people because they bring to mind the need for security. (Call this fear of fear.) Yes, she agreed, since many employees work late at night, there is a need for a security program, but the cards and locked doors should be replaced with a guard in the lobby because “The cards make the place seem like an armed camp, and they scare people.”

  Trying to link this fear of the cards to pain or death, I asked Arlene what it is that people fear. “The cards increase the danger,” she explained, “because their presence says there’s something here worth taking.”

  Could it be, I asked, that the cards actually reduce fear and risk since their use means that the offices are not accessible to just anyone off the street? No, she told me, people don’t think that way. “They’d rather not be reminded of the risk.” Arlene explained that metal detectors at airports conjure the specter of hijacking as opposed to reassuring people. Tamper-proof packaging does not add comfort, it adds apprehension, and, she noted, “It’s just an invitation to tamper.”

  At the end of her confident presentation about human nature and why the cards scared people, I asked if she agreed that there could be hazard to employees i
f the doors were left unlocked. “Of course I do. I was assaulted one night when I worked late at my last job. The doors weren’t kept locked there, and this guy walked right in. There was nobody else in the whole building—so don’t tell me about danger!”

  With that story, Arlene revealed who was afraid of the cards. She also clearly stated her philosophy for managing her fear: “Don’t tell me about danger.” Later, after questioning me extensively about safety in her apartment, and on the subway, and while shopping, and when dating, she agreed to use the cards.

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  Occasionally, we answer fears that aren’t calling; other times we ignore those that are, and sometimes, like physician Bill McKenna, we fall somewhere in the middle.

  “My wife, Linda, was on a business trip, so I took the girls out to dinner. We got home late; I made sure they got to sleep and then got into bed myself. As I was dozing off I heard a noise downstairs which for some reason really scared me. It wasn’t that it was loud, and I don’t even recall exactly what it sounded like, but I absolutely couldn’t shake it. So I got out of bed and went downstairs to be sure everything was all right. I made a quick walk around and then went back to bed. A half-hour later, I heard a sound so quiet that I still don’t know how it woke me; it was the sound of someone else’s breathing. I turned on the light, and there was this guy standing in the middle of the room with my gun in his hand and our CD player under his arm.”

  If Bill’s mission on his walk downstairs was “to be sure everything was all right,” as he put it, then he succeeded admirably. If, though, it was to answer the survival signal—to accept the gift of fear—he failed. When he heard that noise downstairs, if he had consciously linked the fear he felt to its possible dangerous outcomes—as his intuition had already done—he would have recognized that the stakes were high, and he might have conducted his search with the goal of finding risk as opposed to the goal of finding nothing.

  Had he responded to his fear with respect, he would have found the intruder before the intruder found his gun. If he had said, in effect, “Since I feel fear, I know there is some reason, so what is it?” then he could have brought into consciousness what his intuition already knew and what he later told me: The living room light was on when he got home, the cat had somehow gotten outside and was waiting on the porch, an unusual old car was parked near his driveway, its engine clinking as it cooled, and on and on. Only in the context of all these factors did that noise, which have been inconsequential at another time, cause fear.

  Bill McKenna and his daughters (four and five years old) were held at gun-point by the intruder for more than an hour. The man let the girls sit on the floor of the master bedroom and watch a videotape of Beauty and the Beast. He told Bill that he needed time to make what he called “the most difficult decision of my life.” He asked, “Have you ever had a really tough problem?” and Bill nodded.

  Bill told me he was alert until the intruder left, but that he did not feel any fear whatsoever. “When someone’s already got you at gun-point, it’s too late for fear. I had more important things to focus on, like keeping the girls calm by showing them that I was okay—and keeping this guy calm. Anyway, my fear had come and gone, and after a while, that guy had come and gone too.”

  Bill’s lack of dread, just like his original fear on hearing the noise, made sense. First, the burglar did not bring a gun with him, so he was not an intruder who expected or was prepared to kill. Second, his goal was fairly lightweight theft, as evidenced by the CD player he’d taken. Finally, he spoke his conscience when he said he was weighing “the most difficult decision” of his life. A man willing to kill would have little need to discuss his personal exploration of right and wrong with his intended victims. In fact, he would dehumanize and distance his victims, certainly not bring them into his deliberations.

  The intruder not only left, but he left the CD player. He did the family another favor too: He took the gun, which now won’t be available to some more dangerous intruder in the future. (Bill is not replacing it.) Bill let the girls watch the rest of the movie before putting them back to bed. They still recall the night the “policeman with the gun” visited, and it is not a traumatic story they tell. They didn’t sense fear in Bill because, just as he told me, he didn’t feel it.

  Real fear is objective, but it’s clear that we are not. Meg was afraid of being killed, and Celia was afraid of being followed, even when there was nobody there. Arlene was afraid of access cards even though they added to her safety. Bill was not afraid of an intruder even when the man was standing in his bedroom with a gun. This all proves, as I noted early in the book, that we have odd ways of evaluating risk. Smoking kills more people every day than lightning does in a decade, but there are people who calm their fear of being struck by lightning during a storm—by smoking a cigarette. It isn’t logical, but logic and anxiety rarely go together.

  I recently met a middle-aged couple from Florida who had just obtained licenses to carry concealed handguns. The man explained why: “Because if some guy walks into a restaurant and opens fire, like happened at Luby’s in Texas, I want to be in a position to save lives.”

  Of course, there are plenty of things he could carry on his belt that would be far more likely to save lives in a restaurant. An injection of adrenaline would treat anaphylactic shock (the potentially lethal allergic reaction to certain foods). Or he could carry a small sharp tube to give emergency tracheotomies to people who are choking to death. When I asked him if he carried one of those, he said, “I could never stick something into a person’s throat!” But he could send a piece of lead into a person’s flesh like a rocket.

  Statistically speaking, the man and his wife are far more likely to shoot each other than to shoot some criminal, but his anxiety wasn’t caused by fear of death—if it were, he would shed the excess forty pounds likely to bring on a heart attack. His anxiety is caused by fear of people, and by the belief that he cannot predict violence. Anxiety, unlike real fear, is always caused by uncertainty.

  It is caused, ultimately, by predictions in which you have little confidence. When you predict that you will be fired from your job and you are certain the prediction is correct, you don’t have anxiety about being fired. You might have anxiety about the things you can’t predict with certainty, such as the ramifications of losing the job. Predictions in which you have high confidence free you to respond, adjust, feel sadness, accept, prepare, or to do whatever is needed. Accordingly, anxiety is reduced by improving your predictions, thus increasing your certainty. It’s worth doing, because the word anxiety, like worry, stems from a root that means “to choke,” and that is just what it does to us.

  Our imaginations can be the fertile soil in which worry and anxiety grow from seeds to weeds, but when we assume the imagined outcome is a sure thing, we are in conflict with what Proust called an inexorable law: “Only that which is absent can be imagined.” In other words, what you imagine—just like what you fear—is not happening.

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  Donna is a twenty-nine-year-old filmmaker from New York who courageously left her job and drove to Los Angeles hoping to make significant documentaries. She used her brightness and enthusiasm to get a meeting with a prominent film executive. About ten miles from the meeting, her old car decided it wasn’t going to take her any farther, and she was stuck directly in the center of the street. Immediately, she linked being late to all of its worst possible outcomes: “I will miss the meeting, and they won’t agree to reschedule. If you keep someone like this waiting, your chances of a career are nil, so I’ll be unable to pay the rent, I’ll be tossed out of my apartment, I’ll end up on welfare,” and on and on. Because this type of imaginative linking builds a scenario one step at a time, it feels like logic, but it is just an impersonation of logic. It is also one of our dumbest creative exercises.

  A passing car carrying a man and woman slowed to look at Donna, and the man called out an offer of help. Donna waved them on. Very stressed, sh
e got out of her car and ran down the street looking for a service station, along the way adding inventive chapters to the story of her financial ruin. She noticed the same car driving alongside her, but she just kept running. Reaching a pay phone, she called the studio executive’s office and explained she’d be late. As she predicted, they told her the meeting could not be made rescheduled. The career that she envisioned ended in that phone booth.

  Donna slumped and started crying just as that same car pulled up slowly toward the phone booth. Even though these people had been following her, she wasn’t afraid. The man stayed in the car while the woman got out and tapped on the glass, saying, “Is that you?” Through tears, Donna looked up to see the face of Jeanette, a friend with whom she’d shared an apartment in college.

  Jeanette and her boyfriend rushed Donna to the meeting (she didn’t get the job) and then took her to lunch. Within a few weeks, Donna and Jeanette were partners in a new business of finding art and antiques around the world for resale in America. They became so successful that within two years, Donna had saved enough money to co-finance her first documentary film.