Last week we began talking about the difference between fear and
anxiety. Real fear draws on your animalistic instincts and cause a
sincere fight/flight reaction. Anxiety causes you to worry about the
situation but you aren't likely to bolt.
Anxiety can develop as a counterfeit trait to the true fear you never reacted to.
Gavin
deBecker in the classic book 'The Gift of Fear' is a Danger Anaylst and
has much to say about the preventableness of most bad outcomes. He says
there is Always Always Always a Pre-incident Indicator (a PIN) that
women ignore. In my book, I call them Red Flags--the wisdom of your body
that recognizes primitive fear and sends a signal to your body to
react. In that split second, you can run or you can rename it. Renaming
it causes your body to react less and less to the messages it does
send. Not one woman in the 20+ years I've been doing this said there
wasn't an initial red flag that she CONSCIOUSLY ignored. Almost 100% of
the time, the early red flags end up being exactly why the relationship
ended. You could have saved yourself 3, 5, 15, 20 years of a dangerous
relationship by listening to your body instead of your head!
Let's go back to more stories by Gavin....
Dorothy
says her ex-boyfriend Kevan was a fun guy with a master's degree and a
CPA. "He was charming, and it never let up," Dorothy says. "He was
willing to do whatever I wanted to do."
Eventually, Dorothy
began to feel that something wasn't right. "He would buy me a present or
buy me a beautiful bouquet of roses and have it sitting on the
table—and that was very nice, but that night or the next day he wanted
me to be with him all the time."
As Dorothy shares her story,
Gavin points out some of the warning signs—starting with Kevan's charm.
"A great thing is to think of charm as a verb. It's something you do. 'I
will charm [Dorothy] now.' It's not a feature of [one's] personality,"
Gavin says.
What happened next stunned Dorothy. "I was out
visiting my sister in California, and he was calling me, calling me, and
he asked me to marry him over the cell phone," she says. "I thought,
you're kidding. I've always said I would never get married again. And I
said,'That's the last time I'm going to talk about it.'"
After
rejecting Kevan and coming home, Dorothy says he remained persistent. He
showed Dorothy the picture of a diamond ring he wanted to buy and told
her he wanted to buy a house. "And he had it all mapped out, how it was
going to work for us," she says.
When Kevan refused to listen
when Dorothy repeatedly told him no, Gavin says it should have raised
serious red flags. "Anytime someone doesn't hear no, it means they're
trying to control you," Gavin says. "When a man says no in this culture,
it's the end of the discussion. When a woman says no,it's the beginning
of a negotiation."
After four and a half years and many red
flags, Dorothy finally broke off her relationship with Kevan. But that
wasn't the end. "He kept calling me, calling me with repeated questions.
What am I doing now? 'What are you going to do tonight?'" Dorothy says.
"And that's when I realized I am in trouble here."
On the
urging of her son, Dorothy got a restraining order on Kevan, which she
says gave her peace of mind. "And that was a huge mistake," she says.
One
night, Dorothy was asleep in her bed when she woke up to the sound of
her name being shouted. "I turned to my left shoulder, and I saw a knife
about [10 inches long]. I could see the reflection of my TV in the
blade. Then I saw that he had cut off surgical gloves, and that was
scary," Dorothy says. "I put the covers right over my head and curled
into a fetal position and started praying. He said to me, 'Are you
scared?'"
Rather than panicking, Dorothy says she got out of
bed, stood up and told Kevan he was leaving. As she walked calmly out
the door, he followed her to the parking lot. "So I said, 'You're
leaving now,'" she says. "He turned, went down the street, and I didn't
see him again." Dorothy immediately called 911, and police later
arrested Kevan. He was convicted and is serving a four-year prison
sentence.
Gavin says when Dorothy stood up, spoke firmly to
Kevan and walked out, she was accepting a gift of power by acting on her
instincts. "Fetal position is not a position of power, but you came out
of it with a great position of power. And the pure power to say to him,
'You're leaving now,' is fantastic," he says. "Of all the details in
that story, the one that stayed with me the most is that you saw the
reflection of your little television set on the bedside table in the
knife. And what that told me was you are on—you are in the on position. …
You were seeing every single detail and acting on it."
Just
like ignoring your intuition, Gavin says the way women are conditioned
to be nice all the time can lead them into dangerous situations. "The
fact is that men, at core, are afraid that women will laugh at them. And women, at core, are afraid that men will kill them."
This
conditioning and fear, Gavin says, lead many women to try to be nice to
people whose very presence makes them fearful and uncomfortable. They
often believe that being mean increases risk, he says, when in fact the
opposite is true.
"It's when you're nice that you open up and
give information, that you engage with someone you don't want to talk
to," he says. "I have not heard of one case in my entire career where
someone was raped or murdered because they weren't nice. In other words,
that's not the thing that motivates rape and murder. But I've heard of
many, many cases where someone was victimized because they were open to
the continued conversation with someone they didn't feel good about
talking to."
In my own book 'How to Spot a Dangerous Man' I
talked about cultural conditioningand how women feel they should be
polite and at least go out with them once. If you're saying yes to a
psychopath, once is all he needs. Women also have HORRID and
NON-EXISTING break up skills. What in the world is more important than
having good break up skills? You are likely to date a dozen men in your
life time and not likely to marry but one of them. What are you gonna do
with the rest of them?
In this culture with all the books on
'How to Attract Men' very little is written about how to break up. Women
spend more time on a Glamor Shots picture of themselves for a dating
site then learning how strong boundaries can protect them. Women who
are attracted to the bad boys don't need the book 'How to Attract' --
she's already doing it. But how can she get rid of the predator she DID
attract? (See our new book 'Women Who Love Psychopaths).
Women
buy our books, do phone counseling, come to retreats all with a primary
motive "Help me to never do this again." While you definitely need
insight about your own super-traits that have positioned you in the line
of fire with a psychopath, you also need most the ability to reconnect
with your internal safety signal. Everything in the world we can teach
you will not keep you safe if you ignore your body. Our cognitive
information can not save you the way your body can. That's the bottom
line. This is something you have to do for yourself.
This issue
of real fear -vs- mere anxiety is of utmost importance. It has really
struck me this week that we may have missed something in our discussion
about PTSD and it's relationship to fight/flight reactions. Gavin helps
us to see that fear happens in the moment--it's an entire body
sensation--the flash of fear followed by the intense adrenaline and
fight or flight. The intensity of the body reactions usualy COMPELLS
people into fight//flight.
With PTSD, I see how we have lumped
more minor reactive reactions like 'PTSD induced fight/flight' with the
real in-the-moment reactions of fear. I see them as different now. If
women are THAT afraid of him and compelled by real fear (as opposed to
worry 'He might harm me in the future but he isn't mad right now and not
gong to hurt me this second) she wouldn't be with him because her
animalistic reaction would be to flee.
Real fear IN THE MOMENT
demands action. Our own ability to tolerate what he is doing suggests
it's not TRUE survival fear. This is the difference between
animialistic/survival fear and our common day PTSD-reactionary fear.
Sometimes
our body has reactions to evil, or pathology. Normal psychology should
ALWAYS have a negative reaction to abnormal psychology. So your first
meeting with him should have produced SOMETHING in you. It may not have
been the true fear reaction that COMPELLED you to run away but you may
have gotten other kinds of thoughts or bodily reactions to be in the
presence of significant abnormality and sometimes, pure evil.
Listen. Your body is smarter than your brain.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Gender
Disclaimer: The issues The Institute writes about are mental health
issues. They are not gender issues. Both females and males have the
types of Cluster B disorders we often refer to in our articles. Our
readership is approximately 90% female therefore we write for those most
likely to seek out our materials. We highly support male victims and
encourage others who want to provide support to male victims to
encompass the issues we discuss only from a female
perpetrator/male-victim standpoint. Cluster B Education is a mental
health issue applicable to both genders.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
No comments:
Post a Comment