The Gift of Fear
   Gavin de Becker
  1997 Little, Brown & Co. Boston USA
   ISBN: 0316235024


True fear is a survival signal that sounds only in the presence of real danger; this book shows us how to protect ourselves from becoming victims of violence.

As De Becker writes: “We all see the signals because there is a universal code of violence” yet because we have mollified ourselves, lulled ourselves into a torpor, we override the signals. De Becker has written a strong, lively, informative handbook to start the process of reclaiming what we, in our complacency, tend to call extrasensory perception and isn't at all.

“Because of my sustained look at violence...I am called an expert. I may have learned many lessons, but my basic premise...is that you too are an expert at predicting violent behavior...you can know when you are in the presence of danger. You have the gift of a brilliant internal guardian that stands ready to warn you of hazards and guide you through risky situations.”

What De Becker writes about, gleaned from his own early experience with violent parents, has kept our species alive these many, many millennia and what keeps us prey to our own kind.

This is not a passive read. De Becker poses problems and situations for you to perceive and act upon. He illustrates his ideas with grim statistics and recounting the personal stories of his clients. What a curious world we now live in where there is a niche for someone to start a business to teach corporations, public people, celebrities and everyday folks, what signals they didn't register in time to keep themselves safe. Sometimes the people in his stories survive and sometimes they don't.

As I read, I thought often of my years in two major cities of the world. How I learnt to walk along streets, enter buildings and homes, get change, do laundry in a public wash center and so on. I realize that while I had learnt a lot of what De Becker teaches, I had not done a refresher course in twenty years and this was it! I find myself much more observant now, much more in tune with my environment, both inside and outside my home.

“People do things, we say, “out of the blue,” “all of a sudden”, “out of nowhere”. These phrases support the popular myth that predicting human behavior isn't possible. Yet to successfully navigate through morning traffic, we make amazingly accurate high-stakes predictions about the behavior of literally thousands of people”.

De Becker suggests that we want to believe that we are infinitely complex and that's why no one can predict violent behavior: “The human violence we abhor and fear the most, that which we call “random” and “senseless”, is neither. It always has purpose and meaning, to the perpetrator, at least.”

Again and again, De Becker recounts what a client remembers during a debriefing and each time you see how much the client had already predicted and discarded, decided to ignore, to override the survival signals their internal alarm system was sending out. The mystery of why we do that takes a lot of unraveling.

This is a remarkable book, with a good Recommended Reading section, a thorough Index and seven Appendixes to aid you. I'm glad to have The Gift as a refresher course. I hear the clearer now, remember sharper and walk a lot more smartly, watching the world I live in with greater awareness and interest.

When I was done I wanted to shake Gavin De Becker's hand and thank him.
(04/12/99)

Rebecca