Last week we began talking
about the difference between fear and anxiety. Real fear draws on your
animalistic instincts and causes a sincere fight-or-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 de Becker is a Danger Analyst
and, in his classic book The Gift of Fear,
has much to say about the preventability of most bad outcomes. He says there is,
“Always, always, always a pre-incident indicator (a PIN) that women ignore.”
In my books, 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 25+ years I’ve
been doing this has 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 or more 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
are you 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 against 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 awoke 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 cutoff 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 panic, 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 9-1-1, 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. “The 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 on
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, leads 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 talk
about cultural conditioning and how women feel they should be polite and at
least go out with a man once. If you’re saying yes to a psychopath, once is all
he needs.
Women also have HORRID and
NONEXISTENT breakup skills. What in the world is more important than having good
breakup skills? You are likely to date a dozen men in your lifetime 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 Glamour Shots picture of themselves for a dating
site than learning how strong boundaries can protect them. A woman who is
attracted to the bad boys doesn’t need the book, “How to Attract a Man”—she’s
already doing it. But how can she get rid of the predator she DID attract? (See
my book, Women Who Love Psychopaths.)
Women who buy our books, do
phone counseling, come to 1:1’s and retreats, all have 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 cannot 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 that we may have
missed something in our discussion about PTSD and its relationship to fight or 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’s reactions usually COMPELS people into
fight or flight.
With PTSD, I see how we have
lumped more minor reactive reactions, like PTSD-induced fight or flight, with
the real in-the-moment reactions of fear. I see them as different now. If the
woman is 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 going 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 animalistic/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 to your body. It is
smarter than your brain.
(**If we can support you in your recovery process, please let us
know. The Institute is the largest provider of recovery-based
services for survivors of pathological love relationships. Information
about pathological love relationships is in our award-winning book, Women Who Love Psychopaths, and is also
available in our retreats, 1:1s, or phone sessions. See the website for
more information.)
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