The Gift of Fear Read online

  Though fewer than fifty of our twenty-thousand cases have been reported in the news, and though most of our work is guardedly nonpublic, we have participated in many of the highest stakes predictions that individuals and nations ever make. To be the best at this, we have systematized intuition, captured and tamed just a tiny part of its miracle.

  You have some of that miracle, and through an exploration of high-stakes predictions—those involving the outcome of violence or death—you’ll learn ways to have a safer life. After discussing how intuition works for you and how denial works against you, I’ll show that fear, which can be central to your safety, is frequently misplaced. I’ll explore the role of threats in our lives and show how you can tell the difference between a real warning and mere words. I’ll identify the specific survival signals we get from people who might harm us.

  Since the signals are best concealed when an attacker is not known to us, I’ll start with the dangers posed by strangers. This is the violence that captures our fear and attention, even though only 20 percent of all homicides are committed by strangers. The other 80 percent are committed by people we know, so I’ll focus on those we hire, those we work with, those we fire, those we date, those we marry, those we divorce.

  I’ll also discuss the tiny but influential minority whose violence affects us all: assassins. Through the story of a man who didn’t quite complete his plans to kill a famous person (though he did kill five other people), I’ll provide a look at public life you’ve never seen before.

  In chapter 15, you’ll see that if your intuition is informed accurately, the danger signal will sound when it should. If you come to trust this fact, you’ll not only be safer, but it will be possible to live life nearly free of fear.

  ▪ CHAPTER TWO ▪

  THE TECHNOLOGY OF INTUITION

  “Technology is not going to save us. Our computers,

  our tools, our machines are not enough. We have

  to rely on our intuition, our true being.”

  —Joseph Campbell

  “I walked into that convenience store to buy a few magazines and for some reason, I was suddenly… afraid, and I turned right around and walked out. I don’t know what told me to leave, but later that day I heard about the shooting.”

  Airline pilot Robert Thompson is telling me about dodging death right here on the ground. I ask him what he saw, what he reacted to.

  “Nothing, it was just a gut feeling. [A pause.] Well, now that I think back, the guy behind the counter looked at me with a very rapid glance, just jerked his head toward me for an instant, and I guess I’m used to the clerk sizing you up when you walk in, but he was intently looking at another customer, and that must have seemed odd to me. I must have seen that he was concerned.”

  When free of judgment, we inherently respect the intuition of others. Sensing that someone else is in that special state of assessing hazard, we are alerted, just as when we see the cat or dog awaken suddenly from a nap and stare intently into a dark hallway.

  Thompson continues. “I noticed that the clerk was focused on a customer who was wearing a big, heavy jacket, and of course, I now realize that it was very hot, so that’s probably where the guy was hiding the shotgun. Only after I saw on the news what kind of car they were looking for did I remember that there were two men sitting in a station wagon in the parking lot with the engine running. Now it’s all clear, but it didn’t mean a thing to a me at the time.”

  Actually, it did then too,” I tell him. Combining what amounted to fear on the face of the clerk, with the man in the heavy coat on the hot day, with the men in the car with its engine running, with Thompson’s unconscious knowledge of convenience store robberies from years of news reports, with his unconscious memory of frequent police visits to that store, which he’d driven past hundreds of times, and with countless other things we might never discover about Thompson’s experience and knowledge, it is no wonder he left that store just moments before a police officer happened in and was shot dead by a man he surprised in the middle of a robbery.

  What Robert Thompson and many others want to dismiss as a coincidence or a gut feeling is in fact a cognitive process, faster than we recognize and far different from the familiar step-by-step thinking we rely on so willingly. We think conscious thought is somehow better, when in fact, intuition is soaring flight compared to the plodding of logic. Nature’s greatest accomplishment, the human brain, is never more efficient or invested than when its host is at risk. Then, intuition is catapulted to another level entirely, a height at which it can accurately be called graceful, even miraculous. Intuition is the journey from A to Z without stopping at any other letter along the way. It is knowing without knowing why.

  At just the moment when our intuition is most basic, people tend to consider it amazing or supernatural. A woman tells a simple story as if it were mystical: “I absolutely knew when the phone rang that it would be my college roommate, calling after all these years.” Though people act as if predictions of who is calling are miraculous, they rarely are. In this case, her old roommate was reminded of her by reports of the explosion of the space shuttle. Is it a miracle that both women happened to watch the same news event along with a billion others? Is it a miracle that their strongest association with space travel was the angry belief they shared in college that women would never be astronauts? And a woman astronaut died in the space shuttle explosion that morning, and the two women thought of each other, even after a decade.

  These non-critical intuitions, which at first impress us, are often revealed to be somewhat rudimentary, especially in contrast to what the mind delivers when we might be in danger.

  In A Natural History of the Senses, author Diane Ackerman says, “The brain is a good stagehand. It gets on with its work while we’re busy acting out our scenes. When we see an object, the whole peninsula of our senses wakes up to appraise the new sight. All the brain’s shopkeepers consider it from their point of view, all the civil servants, all the accountants, all the students, all the farmers, all the mechanics.” We could add the soldiers and guards to Ackerman’s list, for it is they who evaluate the context in which things occur, the appropriateness and significance of literally everything we sense. These soldiers and guards separate the merely unusual from the significantly unusual. They weigh the time of day, day of the week, loudness of the sound, quickness of the movement, flavor of the scent, smoothness of the surface, the entire lay of the land. They discard the irrelevant and value the meaningful. They recognize the survival signals we don’t even (consciously) know are signals.

  After years of praising intuition as the cornerstone of safety, I just recently learned to my surprise and appreciation that the root of the word intuition, tuere, means “to guard, to protect.” That is what it did for Robert Thompson. Shaken by his narrow miss, he later wondered why the police officer did not intuit what he did. It may be that the officer saw different things. Thompson saw only one car in the parking lot, but the officer saw two, likely giving the appearance of a business patronized by a few customers. Though the clerk’s face had sent Thompson a fear signal, the police officer probably saw relief in that same face as he entered the store. It is also likely that the seasoned officer suffered the disadvantage that sometimes comes with being expert at something. He was operating with the accurate but (in this case) misleading knowledge that armed robberies are less frequent in the daytime than at night.

  Many experts lose the creativity and imagination of the less informed. They are so intimately familiar with known patterns that they may fail to recognize or respect the importance of the new wrinkle. The process of applying expertise is, after all, the editing out of unimportant details in favor of those known to be relevant. Zen master, Shunryu Suzuki said, “The mind of the beginner is empty, free of the habits of the expert, ready to accept, to doubt, and open to all the possibilities.” People enjoying so-called beginner’s luck prove this all the time.

  Even men of science rely on intuition, both
knowingly and unknowingly. The problem is, we discourage them from doing it. Imagine that you go to see a doctor, a specialist in some particular malady, and before you even sit down in his examining room, he says, “You’re fine; please pay my receptionist on the way out.” You might understandably feel that the opinion he rendered intuitively was not worth paying for, though it might be the exact same diagnosis you would get after his poking and prodding you with fancy equipment. A friend of mine who is a doctor has to prove his scientific acumen to patients before they’ll accept his intuition. “I call it the tap dance. After I do a few steps, patients say ‘Okay, I see you can dance,’ and then they believe me.”

  The amateur at the convenience store teaches us that intuition heeded is far more valuable than simple knowledge. Intuition is a gift we all have, whereas retention of knowledge is a skill. Rare is the expert who combines an informed opinion with a strong respect for his own intuition and curiosity. Curiosity is, after all, the way we answer when intuition whispers, “There’s something there.” I use it all the time in my work because it can unlock information that clients are hiding from themselves.

  Often I will carry a conversation back to details a client provided but then rushed past. I am particularly interested in those that are not required elements of the story, those that might seem unimportant but for the fact that they were mentioned. I call these extra details satellites, shot off into space, later to beam back valuable information. I always follow them.

  A client who recounted getting anonymous death threats after a long and contentious lawsuit felt quite certain they were from the man she had sued, but her story includes some extra details: “After the case was settled, I knew that the guy we’d sued was still really angry, but I was surprised he would stoop to sending me death threats. I was discussing the settlement one day with Tony—he used to be an intern for my lawyer but he’s not working for my lawyer anymore—anyway, I said to him, ‘I hope the case being over really ends the matter,’ and I thought it would, but then the threat letters started coming.”

  What’s the satellite in the story? I was discussing the settlement one day with Tony—he used to be an intern for my lawyer but he’s not working for my lawyer anymore… These details about a person my client made a remark to are not key elements in the story, but her inclusion of them was a signal for me.

  “Tell me about the guy who used to work for your lawyer.”

  “Oh, Tony? He got fired, one of the many casualties of the case, I guess. He was so sweet to me. He’d taken a real interest in the case, but apparently he’d let other responsibilities slide. Even after he was fired, he kept coming to court to give me support, which I really appreciated. When the case settled, my lawyer threw a party for us all, but Tony wasn’t invited. It was sad, because he called me and said, ‘I hope we can still stay in touch even though the case is over.’ [A pause.] You don’t think…?”

  My client then described several odd things Tony had done, followed by the revelation (more accurately, the recollection) that Tony had once told her he was helping an acquaintance who was getting threats from an ex-boyfriend. So an extraneous character in a story—a seemingly unimportant detail—became a suspect, and ultimately the proven threatener. On some level, my client knew all along he was the best suspect, but she denied it, preferring to indict her nasty opponent over her friendly ally.

  How many times have you said after following one course, knew I shouldn’t have done that?” That means you got the signal and then didn’t follow it. We all know how to respect intuition, though often not our own. For example, people tend to invest all kinds of intuitive ability in dogs, a fact I was reminded of recently when a friend told me this story: “Ginger had a really bad reaction to our new building contractor; she even growled at him. She seemed to sense that he isn’t trustworthy, so I’m going to get some bids from other people.”

  “That must be it,” I joked with her, “the dog feels you should get another general contractor because this one’s not honest.”

  “The irony,” I explained, “is that it’s far more likely Ginger is reacting to your signals than that you are reacting to hers. Ginger is an expert at reading you, and you are the expert at reading other people. Ginger, smart as she is, knows nothing about the ways a contractor might inflate the cost to his own profit, or about whether he is honest, or about the benefits of cost-plus-fifteen-percent versus a fixed bid, or about the somewhat hesitant recommendation you got from a former client of that builder, or about the too-fancy car he arrived in, or about the slick but evasive answer he gave to your pointed question.” My friend laughed at the revelation that Ginger, whose intuition she was quick to overrate, is actually a babbling idiot when it comes to remodel work. In fact, Ginger is less than that because she can’t even babble. (If there are dogs out there intuitive enough to detect what’s being read here by their masters, I take it all back.)

  Contrary to what people believe about the intuition of dogs, your intuitive abilities are vastly superior (and given that you add to your experience every day, you are at the top of your form right now). Ginger does sense and react to fear in humans because she knows instinctively that a frightened person (or animal) is more likely to be dangerous, but she has nothing you don’t have. The problem, in fact, is that extra something you have that a dog doesn’t: it is judgment, and that’s what gets in the way of your perception and intuition. With judgment comes the ability to disregard your own intuition unless you can explain it logically, the eagerness to judge and convict your own feelings, rather than honor them. Ginger is not distracted by the way things could be, used to be, or should be. She perceives only what is. Our reliance on the intuition of a dog is often a way to find permission to have an opinion we might otherwise be forced to call (God forbid) unsubstantiated.

  Can you imagine an animal reacting to the gift of fear the way some people do, with annoyance and disdain instead of attention? No animal in the wild suddenly overcome with fear would spend any of its mental energy thinking, “It’s probably nothing.” Too often we chide ourselves for even momentarily giving validity to the feeling that someone is behind us on a seemingly empty street, or that someone’s unusual behavior might be sinister. Instead of being grateful to have a powerful internal resource, grateful for the self-care, instead of entertaining the possibility that our minds might actually be working for us and not just playing tricks on us, we rush to ridicule the impulse. We, in contrast to every other creature in nature, choose not to explore—and even to ignore—survival signals. The mental energy we use searching for the innocent explanation to everything could more constructively be applied to evaluating the environment for important information.

  Every day, people engaged in the clever defiance of their own intuition become, in mid-thought, victims of violence and accidents. So when we wonder why we are victims so often, the answer is clear: It is because we are so good at it.

  A woman could offer no greater cooperation to her soon-to-be attacker than to spend her time telling herself, “But he seems like such a nice man.” Yet this is exactly what many people do. A woman is waiting for an elevator, and when the doors open she sees a man inside who causes her apprehension. Since she is not usually afraid, it may be the late hour, his size, the way he looks at her, the rate of attacks in the neighborhood, an article she read a year ago—it doesn’t matter why. The point is, she gets a feeling of fear. How does she respond to nature’s strongest survival signal? She suppresses it, telling herself: “I’m not going to live like that, I’m not going to insult this guy by letting the door close in his face.” When the fear doesn’t go away, she tells herself not to be so silly, and she gets into the elevator.

  Now, which is sillier: waiting a moment for the next elevator, or getting into a soundproofed steel chamber with a stranger she is afraid of? The inner voice is wise, and part of my purpose in writing this book is to give people permission to listen to it.

  Even when intuition speaks in the clearest ter
ms, even when the message gets through, we may still seek an outside opinion before we’ll listen to ourselves. A friend of mine who is a psychiatrist told me of a patient he’d heard of whom reported, “Recently, when my wife goes to bed, I find some excuse to stay downstairs until she’s asleep. If she’s still awake when I get to our room, I’ll often stay in the bathroom for a long time so that I’m sure she’s asleep by the time I get into bed. Do you think I’m unconsciously trying to avoid having sex with my wife?” The psychiatrist astutely asked, “What was the unconscious part?”

  When victims explain to me after the fact that they “unconsciously” knew they were in danger, I could ask the same question: “What was the unconscious part?”

  The strange way people evaluate risk sheds some light on why we often choose not to avoid danger. We tend to give our full attention to risks that are beyond our control (air crashes, nuclear-plant disasters) while ignoring those we feel in charge of (dying from smoking, poor diet, car accidents), even though the latter are far more likely to harm us. In Why The Reckless Survive, Dr. Melvin Konner’s exceptional book about you and me (and all other human beings), he points out that “We drink and drive without our seat belts and light up another cigarette… and then cancel the trip to Europe on the one-in-a-million chance of an Arab terrorist attack.” Many Americans who wouldn’t travel to see the pyramids for fear of being killed in Egypt, stay home where that danger is twenty times greater.