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

  ▪ ▪ ▪

  When assassin Robert Bardo told me he was treated at home like the family cat, fed and left in his room, it occurred to me to ask him to compare his childhood with his current life in prison.

  Bardo: It’s the same in the sense that I’m always withdrawing within myself in my cell, just like back at home.

  GdeB: Are there any differences between what you do here and what you did when you were a child?

  Bardo: Well, I have to be more social here.

  GdeB: Didn’t you have any requirement at home to be social?

  Bardo: No, I learned that in prison.

  As long as there are parents preparing children for little more than incarceration, we’ll have no trouble keeping our prisons full. While society foots the bill, it is individual victims of crime who pay the highest price.

  In studying Bardo’s childhood of abuse and neglect, I could not ignore the similarity of some of our early experiences. I was also struck by the extraordinary intersection of our adult experiences, both drawn as we were to opposite sides of assassination.

  The revelation reminded me of Stacey J., a would-be assassin I know well. For years, my office has prevented him from successfully encountering the client of mine with whom he is obsessed. I came to know his family through the many times I had to call and ask them to fly to Los Angeles and take him home, or the times they called our office to warn that Stacey was on his way to see my client, or that he had stolen a car, or was missing from a mental hospital. Once, I found him slumped in a phone booth, clothes torn, bleeding from a wound on each leg, wounds all over his face, and completely crazy from a week off medication. On the way to the emergency room, he described the origins of his interest in assassination: “When John Kennedy was killed, that’s when I knew; that’s when it all started.” Stacey and I had both been profoundly affected by the same event, each of us sitting at ten years old in front of a television at the exact same moment in time. In part because of what we saw back then, we now found ourselves together, one of us stalking a public figure, the other protecting a public figure.

  In the fifteen years my office has monitored his behavior, Stacey has mellowed some, but from time to time he still requires our attention or the attention of the Secret Service (for threats he has made to kill Ronald Reagan). When I see him, some years doing well, other years doing terribly, overweight and damaged by the side-effects of medication, I think of him at ten, and I wonder about the paths of people’s lives.

  ▪ ▪ ▪

  Though I did not end up a violent man myself, I did become a kind of ambassador between the two worlds, fluent in both languages. I’m able to tell you something about how many criminals think because it’s similar to how I thought during much of my life. For example, because my childhood became all about prediction, I learned to live in the future. I didn’t feel things in the present because I wanted to be a moving target, gone to the future before any blow could really be felt. This ability to live in tomorrow or next year immunized me against the pain and hopelessness of the worst moments, but it also made me reckless about my own safety. Recklessness and bravado are features of many violent people. Some might call it daring or bravery, but as you’ll see in the chapter about assassins, “heroism” has two sides.

  As a child, I was left with the pastimes that cross time: worrying and predicting. I could see a vision of the future better than most people because the present did not distract me. This single-mindedness is another characteristic common to many criminals. Even things that would frighten most people could not distract me as a boy, for I had become so familiar with danger that it no longer caused alarm. Just as a surgeon loses his aversion to gore, so does the violent criminal. You can spot this feature in people who do not react as you might to shocking things. When everyone else who just witnessed a hostile argument is shaken up, for example, this person is calm.

  Another characteristic common to predatory criminals (and many other people as well) is their perceived need to be in control. Think of someone you know whom you might call a control freak. That person, like most violent people, grew up in a chaotic, violent, or addictive home. At a minimum, it was a home where parents did not act consistently and reliably, a place where love was uncertain or conditional. For him or her, controlling others became the only certain way to predict their behavior. People can be very motivated to become control experts because an inability to predict behavior is absolutely intolerable for human beings and every other social animal. (The fact that most people act predictably is literally what holds human societies together.)

  In sharing these few features, I do not mean to say that all men who are reckless or brave, who are calm when others are alarmed, and who seek to be in control are likely to be violent; these are simply three small pieces of the human violence puzzle to more fully inform your intuition.

  Another is that murderers are not as different from us as we’d like to think. I’ll protect the anonymity of the friend who told me about an experience she had in her twenties. She was so angry at an ex-boyfriend that she fantasized about killing him, though she knew she’d never really do anything like that. As she was driving to work one morning, an amazing coincidence occurred: her ex-boyfriend was crossing the street directly in the path of her car. His being there seemed like a signal, and as her anger welled up, this woman pushed the accelerator to the floor. The car was going about fifty miles an hour when it struck him, but having moved enough at the last moment to save his life, he was hit in the leg only. Were it not for the loudness of her car, this woman would be marked today as a common killer. Instead, she is among the world’s most famous and admired people, someone you know of whom you certainly wouldn’t have pegged as being like a murderer.

  You probably know more people who’ve tried to kill someone than you realize, as I learned again when Mark Wynn told me a story about his violent (now former) step-father: “My brother and I decided we’d had enough, but we didn’t have a gun to shoot him with and we knew we couldn’t stab him. We had seen a TV commercial for Black Flag bug spray and since it was lethal, we found our father’s wine bottle on the night-stand and filled it with the bug spray. Later, he came into the living room with the bottle and started kicking it back. He didn’t realize he was drinking poison and he finished every drop. Then we just waited for him to roll over on the floor and die.”

  What makes Mark Wynn’s story doubly interesting is that he is Sergeant Mark Wynn, a founder of Nashville’s Domestic Violence Division, considered the most innovative in the nation. Solely because his father survived, Mark is not a murderer, and though he attended “crime school,” as he puts it, he did not grow up to be a criminal. (More on why some do and why others do not in chapter 12.)

  I assure you, you’ve sat next to someone sometime whose history, if you knew it, would amaze you. They might even have committed the kind of crime we see on the TV news, the kind of act about which we ask, “Who could do such a thing?” Well, now you know… anyone could do it.

  ▪ ▪ ▪

  Though our experiences as children will affect much of what we do, a violent history does not ensure a violent future. There is a story about playwright David Mamet, a pure genius of human behavior: When told about the complaints of two famous cast members in one of his plays, he joked: “If they didn’t want to be stars, they shouldn’t have had those awful childhoods.”

  It is not an original revelation that some who have weathered great challenges when they were young created great things as adults. From artists to scientists, even to President Clinton (who, when he was a small boy was shot at by his step-father), people with secret childhoods can make the most public contributions. The boy who suffers violence and sees preventable death might grow up to help people avoid violence and preventable deaths. The boy whose father is killed by robbers might grow up to be a Secret Service Agent protecting the president (father). The girl whose mother dies of Alzheimer’s might become a world-famous neurologist. The boy who es
capes chaos by going into his imagination might grow up to enrich millions of filmgoers with that same imagination. These people are in their jobs for more than the paychecks. There are reasons we all do what we do, and those reasons are sometimes displayed.

  Unfortunately, many children of violence will contribute something else to our nation: more violence—against their children, against their wives, against you or me, and that’s why the topics of childhood and our shared humanness appear in a book written to help you be safer.

  When you can find no other common ground to aid in your predictions, remember that the vast majority of violent people started as you did, felt what you felt, wanted what you want. The difference is in the lessons they learned. It saddens me to know that as I write these words and as you read them, some child is being taught that violence has a place, learning that when it comes to cruelty, it is better to give than to receive.

  Had it not been for the reminders in my work, I might have cared about none of this, but I’ve met too many people who were brutalized as children and gave it back to society tenfold. They may have grown up looking like everyone else, but they send subtle signals that can reveal their intent.

  ▪ CHAPTER FOUR ▪

  SURVIVAL SIGNALS

  “People should learn to see and so avoid all danger.

  Just as a wise man keeps away from mad dogs,

  so one should not make friends with evil men.”

  —Buddha

  Kelly had been apprehensive from the moment she heard the stranger’s voice, and now she wants me to tell her why. More than anything else, it was just the fact that someone was there, because having heard no doors open before the man appeared, Kelly knew (at least intuitively) that he must have been waiting out of sight near the entry hall. Only as we spoke did she realize that when he said he was going to the fourth floor, he didn’t offer why. It was Kelly who had filled in the blanks, concluding that he was visiting the Klines who lived across the hall from her. Now, as we are talking, she realizes that if the Klines had admitted a guest over the intercom, she’d have heard the loud buzz of the electric lock being released, and Mrs. Kline would have been at the top of the stairs, already well into a high-volume conversation with her visitor. It was because of all this that Kelly’s intuition sent her the signal to be wary.

  Kelly tells me that she didn’t listen to herself because there wasn’t anything she saw in the man’s behavior to explain the alarm she felt. Just as some things must be seen to be believed, some must be believed to be seen. The stranger’s behavior didn’t match Kelly’s image of a rapist’s behavior, and she could not consciously recognize what she didn’t recognize. Neither can you, so one way to reduce risk is to learn what risk looks like.

  The capable face-to-face criminal is an expert at keeping his victim from seeing survival signals, but the very methods he uses to conceal them can reveal them.

  Forced Teaming

  Kelly asks me what signals her attacker displayed, and I start with the one I call “forced teaming.” It was shown through his use of the word “we” (“We’ve got a hungry cat up there”). Forced teaming is an effective way to establish premature trust because a we’re-in-the-same-boat attitude is hard to rebuff without feeling rude. Sharing a predicament, like being stuck in a stalled elevator or arriving simultaneously at a just-closed store will understandably move people around social boundaries. But forced teaming is not about coincidence; it is intentional and directed, and it is one of the most sophisticated manipulations. The detectable signal of forced teaming is the projection of a shared purpose or experience where none exists: “Both of us;” “we’re some team;” “how are we going to handle this?;” “now we’ve done it,” etc.

  David Mamet’s film House of Games is a wonderful exploration of cons and con artists that shows forced teaming at work. A young soldier enters a Western Union office late one evening; he is anxious about whether the money he needs for a bus ticket will arrive there before Western Union closes. Another man is there, apparently in the same predicament. The two commiserate while waiting, and then the man tells the soldier, “Hey, if my money comes in first, I’ll give you whatever amount you need. You can send it to me when you get back to the base.” The soldier is moved by this kindness, but the stranger brushes it off, saying, “You’d do the same for me.”

  In fact, the stranger is not in the same boat, is not expecting any money to be wired. He is a con artist. Predictably, the soldier’s money is the only to arrive, and when the Western Union office closes, he insists that the stranger accept some of his cash. The best cons make the victim want to participate.

  Kelly did not consciously recognize what her intuition clearly knew, so she couldn’t apply the simple defense for forced teaming, which is to make a clear refusal to accept the concept of partnership: “I did not ask for your help and I do not want it.” Like many of the best defenses, this one has the cost of appearing rude. Kelly now knows it is a small cost, comparatively speaking.

  Safety is the preeminent concern of all creatures and it clearly justifies a seemingly abrupt and rejecting response from time to time. Anyway, rudeness is relative. If while waiting in some line, a person steps on our foot a second time, and we bark, “Hey!” we don’t call our response rude. We might even feel we showed restraint. That’s because the appropriateness of our response is relative to the behavior that provoked it. If people would view forced teaming as the inappropriate behavior it is, we might feel less concern about appearing rude in response.

  Forced teaming is done in many contexts for many reasons, but when applied by a stranger to a woman in a vulnerable situation (such as alone in a remote or unpopulated area), it is always inappropriate. It is not about partnership or coincidence—it is about establishing rapport, and that may or may not be all right, depending on why someone seeks rapport.

  Generally speaking, rapport-building has a far better reputation than it deserves. It is perceived as admirable when in fact it is almost always done for self-serving reasons. Even though the reasons most people seek rapport aren’t sinister, such as pleasantly conversing with someone you’ve just met at a party, that doesn’t mean a woman must participate with every stranger who approaches her. Perhaps the most admirable reason to seek rapport would be to put someone at ease, but if that is a stranger’s entire intent, a far simpler way is to just leave the woman alone.

  Charm and Niceness

  Charm is another overrated ability. Note that I called it an ability, not an inherent feature of one’s personality. Charm is almost always a directed instrument, which, like rapport-building, has motive. To charm is to compel, to control by allure or attraction. Think of charm as a verb, not a trait. If you consciously tell yourself, “This person is trying to charm me” as opposed to, “This person is charming,” you’ll be able to see around it. Most often, when you see what’s behind charm, it won’t be sinister, but other times you’ll be glad you looked.

  So many signals, I tell Kelly, are in the face. She intuitively read the face of her attacker, as she is now reading mine, as I am now reading hers. University of California at San Francisco psychologist Paul Eckman says, “The face tells us subtleties in feelings that only a poet can put into words.” One way to charm is with the smile, which Eckman calls the most important signal of intent. He adds that it is also “the typical disguise used to mask the emotions.”

  University of California at Los Angeles psychiatrist Leslie Brothers says, “If I am trying to deceive someone, that person has to be just a bit smarter than I am in order to see through my deceit. That means you have sort of an arms race.”

  The predatory criminal does all he can to make that arms race look like détente. “He was so nice” is a comment I often hear from people describing the man who, moments or months after his niceness, attacked them. We must learn and then teach our children that niceness does not equal goodness. Niceness is a decision, a strategy of social interaction; it is not a character trait. People seeking to
control others almost always present the image of a nice person in the beginning. Like rapport-building, charm and the deceptive smile, unsolicited niceness often has a discoverable motive.

  Kelly nods and reminds me that her attacker was “very nice.” I tell her about a rhyme by Edward Gorey, the master of dark humor:

  The proctor buys a pupil ices

  And hopes the boy will not resist,

  When he attempts to practice vices

  Few people even know exist.

  Yes, the proctor is nice enough to buy some sweets for the boy, and he is nice in lots of other ways, but that is not a credential of his good intent.

  Way back in 1859, in a book called Self Help (which pioneered a new genre), Samuel Smiles said personality itself is “plainly a vehicle for self-advancement.” He wrote that “men whose acts are at direct variance with their words command no respect, and what they say has but little weight.” Unfortunately, this isn’t as true in our time. Unlike when people lived in small communities and could not escape their past behavior, we live in an age of anonymous one-time encounters, and many people have become expert at the art of fast persuasion. Trust, formerly earned through actions, is now purchased with sleight of hand, and sleight of words.