There were four of us in the park by the Ottawa River that night. We had taken the bus downtown after school, walked across the long bridge that divided Ontario from Quebec, and bought a couple packs of Mike’s Hard Lemonade from a gas station convenience store on the Quebec side. Alcohol was easy to come by there, no matter that we were not yet eighteen. Across the river, the copper rooftops of the Parliament Buildings gleamed in the summer sun.
With our backpacks clinking, we left the busy intersection at the bridge and followed a paved pedestrian path deep into the thin strip of parkland that bordered the river. We settled onto the grass with the river in front of us and the fenced-in compound of a paper-processing plant looming behind. I’d had my first kiss in this same stretch of green space the summer before, with the Canada Day fireworks exploding overhead. As we made ourselves comfortable, I looked over my shoulder towards the paper plant and noticed a man leaning against the chain-link factory fence, watching us.
Hours passed, the sun vanished, and our bottles emptied themselves. S. disappeared into the bushes to pee; when she came back, she leaned in close, giggling, boozy, and whispered, “Guys, there’s a man watching us.”
I froze. I looked over my shoulder again. It was the same man.
My buzz evaporated, leaving only muddled fear; the alcohol curdled in my gut. I don’t remember any discussion about what we did next—we just moved together, quickly, acting on a shared instinct. We packed up and moved back down the path in a tight cluster, herd animals in defensive formation. The wide, dark river was on our right; to our left, maybe sixty feet away in the night, we could see the man start to walk his side of the fence, alongside us, keeping pace. Ahead, a gate appeared in the fence, with a chain and a padlock looped through it. It was locked, right? It had to be locked. As we passed the gate, the man reached it, grasped its bars, and rattled the chain. We walked faster, and he kept pace—an eerie, silent chase.
“You should run for help,” D. said to me. “You’re the fastest.”
“I’m not leaving you guys.” I tried to sound valiant. The dark, tree-lined path ahead of me was monstrous. I wasn’t braving it alone.
“There are four of us and one of him,” S. said, like a mantra. “There are four of us…”
“That won’t matter if he has a gun,” A. whispered. We all understood that if a barrel was pointed at any one of us, the remaining three would do whatever we were told.
Without slowing, we reached into our backpacks and passed some of our collected empties among ourselves, gripping the clear glass bottles by their necks. Now each of us had a weapon.
The trees had thickened along the fence, and we could no longer make out the man shadowing us. Ahead, we could see another gate. It was forty feet, thirty feet, twenty-five feet away, and now we could see that there was no chain or padlock on this one. We didn’t wait to find out if the man would reappear there—as we drew even with it, we ran. We ran and ran without stopping, without looking back, until we were back at the intersection, back on the bridge, back in the glow of street lamps and headlights pushing back the night.
There was a lesson in the way we were driven to move that night, driven to act, but I didn’t understand it yet. Twelve years later, not yet thirty years old and still newish to Whitehorse, I experienced that drive again. At three in the morning one cold winter night, I crouched behind a Toyota Matrix in the dark of a dealership parking lot and watched a street light glint off the roof of a taxi idling at the corner. The cabbie had been following me for five blocks.
At first, when his headlights had slowed coming towards me, I’d thought he was just looking for a fare. Walking home alone from a friend’s house at that hour, in the middle of a Yukon winter, I probably seemed a likely client. But I’d waved him off, and then he’d driven past me and pulled a U-turn and shadowed me at low speed down the street. Nervous, I’d turned down another street; he followed. I started making excuses for him then—wondered if, somehow, he thought he was doing the right thing, unknowingly terrorizing me as he attempted to shepherd me safely home. But a louder voice in my head said that made no sense, something was off here, something was wrong. And I’d listened to that voice. As I’d done years earlier, I’d heeded instinct. I’d ducked into the dealership, and now I crouched in the snow, sickened by the irony: the “safe” thing to do, instead of walking the fifteen minutes home, would have been to call a cab.
The dealership was on a corner; the fenced lot had entrances on two sides of the block. The cabbie idled on Sixth, where I’d entered the maze of parked cars for sale, so I shuffled towards the Main Street entrance, sliding between Tundras and 4Runners, trying to stay hidden—feeling ridiculous, but not ridiculous enough to show myself again.
When I reached the edge of the lot, I took a deep breath and burst out onto the street and sprinted towards the lights of a hotel half a block away. Behind me, I heard the cab pull around the corner, felt his headlights spill across my shoulders as I ran.
I made it to the hotel’s double doors just as he pulled to a stop at the curb behind me. I hit the doors and bounced off. They were locked.
The cab’s front bumper was just the width of the sidewalk away from me. I turned, put my back to the useless hotel doors, sucked in a big breath, and screamed, “Stop following me!” I saw the whites of the driver’s eyes as they widened above the wheel.
Just then, two grey-bearded men, walking with the uncertainty that comes from a few too many drinks, appeared out of the darkness down the block. “Hey,” one called through the night, “what’s going on?”
The cabbie put the van into reverse, turned, and drove away, tail lights vanishing.
The two men came towards me cautiously. “I’m okay,” I said. I sat down on the smokers’ bench outside the hotel doors to catch my breath while they hovered at a polite distance, worrying. They offered to call me a taxi; they offered to walk me home. I thanked them and declined. I was two blocks from my apartment.
When I was ready, I took a deep breath, straightened my shoulders, and walked out of the pool of light at the hotel entrance, back into the dark.
Those two nights weren’t the only times in my life that I ran as hard as I could for safety, a young woman afraid and racing away from a strange man or strange men. But they stand out from the rest. I think it’s because of their ambiguity, their silence. The handful of other times that I ran, the men I was running from had said something to me that suggested I should: a shouted demand, a leering slur. These two times, though, I had made my decision based entirely on wordless clues. And despite that, I had been almost completely sure that running was the right thing to do.
In The Gift of Fear, security consultant and protector-to-the-stars Gavin de Becker writes about the power of intuition—the power of being afraid. De Becker is not a scientist, but he has spent decades working with people who were being stalked, harassed, threatened, and abused. He has extracted patterns from all his experience, and the book, packed with harrowing anecdotes, is the result.
It opens with the story of Kelly, a young woman who met a polite young man in the stairwell of her apartment building and reluctantly, despite her vague, unexplainable misgivings, accepted his help with carrying her groceries. Once inside her apartment, the man produced a gun, threatened her, and raped her. When he left the room, heading to her kitchen, she was overcome with the urge to move. She fled the apartment while his back was turned.
“She later described a fear so complete that it replaced every feeling in her body,” de Becker writes.
Like an animal hiding inside her, it opened to its full size and stood up using the muscles in her legs. “I had nothing to do with it,” she explained. “I was a passenger moving down that hallway.” What she experienced was real fear, not like when we are startled, not like the fear we feel at a movie, or the fear of public speaking. This fear is the powerful ally that says, “Do what I tell you to do.” Sometimes, it tells a person to play dead, or to stop breathing, or to run or scream or fight, but to Kelly it said, “Just be quiet and don’t doubt me and I’ll get you out of here.”
De Becker’s thesis is that we know more than we realize about the threats the world poses. We have the power, he argues, to correctly determine when we are at risk and when we are not—we just have to learn to listen to our instincts instead of drowning them out with politeness, with thoughts of what’s expected of us, with social norms. “Like every creature,” he writes, “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.”
It’s a powerful idea—an empowering idea. And in the two decades since his book was published, science has helped to fill out some of the gaps in our understanding of what de Becker generally calls intuition.
The second chapter of The Gift of Fear begins with another anecdote, one that hints at the mechanisms of intuition, how it works, how it warns us. Robert Thompson, a commercial pilot, tells the story of a night when he walked into a convenience store, planning to buy some magazines, and then felt suddenly, inexplicably afraid. Thompson turned around and walked out again with his magazines unpurchased.
The next man to walk into that same store, moments later, wasn’t so lucky. He was a police officer, and his appearance startled the man who was in the midst of holding up the store clerk at gunpoint. The officer was shot and killed.
“I don’t know what told me to leave,” Thompson told de Becker. “It was just a gut feeling.”
He paused, reassessing his own words. “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.”
Later, Thompson remembered that the customer was wearing a heavy jacket on a hot night, and that there’d been a car idling in the parking lot. In de Becker’s thesis, all those details added up, unconsciously, in “a cognitive process, faster than we recognize and far different from that familiar step-by-step thinking we rely on so willingly.”
“Intuition is soaring flight compared to the plodding of logic,” he writes.
We now know that intuition has some tangible help—like, for instance, our ability to smell fear. When I first read about Robert Thompson’s near miss, I thought immediately of Lilianne Mujica-Parodi, the Stony Brook researcher who proved the existence of human alarm pheromones by having her subjects jump out of planes. I had to wonder: Did Thompson’s senses pick up on the fear scent rolling off the clerk, and likely off the robber too? Did that cause his amygdala to trip his internal alarm systems, heightening his attention to the widened eyes and frightened face of the clerk? I have to figure that they probably did.
Mujica-Parodi wasn’t interested in human alarm pheromones purely for their own sake. Neat as alarm pheromones are, she had bigger-picture questions in mind. It turns out that her skydive-based research came about as part of a wider search for answers about how our fear can serve us, how it can be a tool rather than a burden.
Mujica-Parodi had become interested in studying fear responses in healthy individuals rather than in the far more commonly studied groups, people suffering from an excess of fear and anxiety. With funding from the US military (because, after all, it has an interest in finding out how its personnel will respond to scary situations), she started to grapple with a fascinating question: What kind of person would make the best Navy SEAL?
“It was kind of a broad problem that allowed me to think more deeply about what individual variation looks like,” Mujica-Parodi told me. “What is it that makes, let’s say, a Navy SEAL different than a normal healthy person? And then what makes them different than someone who is more anxious? And then, going further, than people who are pathologically anxious?”
The work on fear pheromones was part of her search for an answer to that broader question. So was a second, more recent experiment during which, once again, Mujica-Parodi sent a pack of first-time skydivers up in a plane. This group, though, was different: she selected her research subjects only from people who had already signed up to go skydiving of their own volition. The first batch had been selected at random; they weren’t necessarily people who wanted to jump out of a plane (and so, I suppose, they were more likely to produce plenty of fear-sweat). These later jumpers were a different breed, a group that scientists refer to as high-sensation seekers, or HSSs.
Mujica-Parodi and her colleagues wanted to know if it was possible to distinguish, physiologically, between two types of people that they labelled either “brave” or “reckless”—meaning, between people who took risks knowingly and deliberately, with a full understanding of the threat, and people who did not fully grasp the risks they were taking or the threats they faced. They hypothesized that the difference between bravery and recklessness was not merely a societal judgment rendered after the fact, based on the consequences of the risks taken, but that bravery and recklessness involved qualitatively different approaches to risk, differences that were “neurobiologically, physiologically, and cognitively distinct.”
They started by selecting thirty aspiring skydivers, and over the course of two strictly regimented days, those subjects underwent an array of tests. They filled out standardized questionnaires about their risk avoidance behaviours (or lack thereof); they had their endorphin and adrenalin levels tested; they had their amygdala activity measured by fMRI. During the plane ride up to jumping altitude, with their senses heightened by anticipation, the subjects completed a task in which they had to rapidly identify partially obscured images of human faces as being “neutral” or “aggressive.”
The results supported Mujica-Parodi’s hypothesis. The “reckless” skydivers were the least attentive to risk or threat, and in some ways their brain activity had more in common with anxious people, their opposites in threat assessment, than with the more optimally balanced “brave” subjects. The implications for her research were enormous. “The conclusion that I came to after about twelve years of research is that I had sort of a category error,” she told me. “I had been thinking about it in the wrong way.”
Before, Mujica-Parodi (and the military) had been conceptualizing the problem in a certain way: placing people on a spectrum of stress resilience, from more resilient to less resilient. Presumably, they had figured, the best Navy SEAL would be someone who was maximally resilient to fear-inducing and stressful situations—someone as close to fearless as ordinary folks (rather than the Alex Honnolds or the Patient S.M.s of the world) can get. But actually, when she dug in, Mujica-Parodi realized that what mattered most wasn’t the subject’s resilience level at all. Instead, she came to view threat detection, a different function entirely, as the key.
“The distinction between different types of people doesn’t become evident when you put a gun to someone’s head,” she told me. “If there’s an actual threat, everybody reacts essentially the same way. What distinguishes people is how they respond to a potential threat. That is, an ambiguous threat.” People who are generally more anxious can tend to see threats where they don’t truly exist; conversely, people on the opposite, reckless, end of the anxiety spectrum can sometimes ignore or disregard genuine threats. “And that’s where the kind of stress-resilience way of thinking about things breaks down,” said Mujica-Parodi. “Because the ideal Navy SEAL is not somebody who is fearless…. Ideally, you want someone who is very good at identifying threat but doesn’t identify threat where it doesn’t exist.”
Here’s the ideal, not just for a Navy SEAL, I suppose, but for anyone who wants to successfully navigate their fears: someone who can correctly identify a threat, neither under- or over-estimating its risks, and then override their initial fear response—a freezing instinct, say, which can be useful if you’re a mouse trying to evade an owl in a nighttime field, but not if you’re a person on a highway who’s about to be hit by a U-Haul truck—in order to react effectively to mitigate said threat.
Seems clear enough when you break it down, right? But most of us will spend our lives failing at the task in one way or another, underreacting or overreacting, and hopefully living to try again the next time. That’s one reason why fear memories are so powerful, why they can hang around and hurt and haunt us: they are designed to be potent, to last, to serve as shorthand when the same threat crops up again. Fear memories can enable a rapid response. Their job is too important to be easily short-circuited.
I guess I’ve been pretty lucky. Just once in my life, I have called the police because I believed I was in danger of attack by another human being. It was a few years ago, maybe a year or two after the night that I ran from the cab driver.
At first, I thought I was just dealing with a creep. I was dog-sitting for a friend, living in her house and taking care of her husky. Early one Saturday morning, the phone—the house land line—rang at 5 A.M. Thinking there might be some emergency, I struggled out of bed, half awake, and answered.
“Hello?”
“Heyyyyy,” came the long-drawn-out syllable. A man’s voice.
“Hi,” I said, uncertain.
There was a pause. Then: “I’m touching my dick.”
I hung up. Seconds later, the phone rang, and I knew it must be the same man. I unplugged the handset from the wall. Somewhere else in the house, a phone rang again, and again. I found my way through the darkness to this second phone, unplugged it too as it rang and rang, and then the house was quiet. I was unsettled, but I didn’t feel unsafe. Still, it took me awhile to fall back to sleep.
Two weeks later, I was back at home, in my own apartment. It was a Saturday morning, at 5 A.M. The phone—my land line—rang. I had forgotten about the last call, and again I struggled, half awake, to get to the phone on my desk in the living room.
“Hello?” I said.
“Heyyyyy,” said that same soft voice, and, with a rush of recognition, I hung up the phone before he could get another word out. Then I moved very quickly, unhesitating, with instincts I didn’t really know I had, taking actions I can only figure I must have drawn from years of exposure to crime novels and bad television. I unplugged the phone from the wall. I turned off the lights I’d flipped on during my trip from bed to desk, so no one outside could see any movement in my apartment. I checked the lock on the door, and I grabbed my cell phone and the largest knife in my kitchen. Then, having prepared as best I could, I retreated to my bedroom, which had only one small window, and shut the door behind me.
I sat down cross-legged on the bed, and now that I was no longer in motion, I felt my fear, really felt it, for the first time. My heart pounded. My eyes were wide, my chest tight, my breathing short. I was terrified.
Knife in hand, I called the police from my cell. “I think someone is stalking me,” I told the dispatcher.
In the moments after I heard the man’s voice on the phone, I’d made a series of rapid calculations. First he had called me at my friend’s house; now he had called me at home. Same man, same time of day, same day of the week. Two different land lines. There was only one thing tying the two calls together, and that was my physical presence. My conclusion, then, delivered in an instant, was that the caller knew both who I was and where I was. He had to have been physically following me, I figured, and learning enough about me along the way to track down the phone numbers at both places.
I didn’t get to sleep again that night, or rather morning, and later that day I delivered a grainy-eyed report to a kind and sympathetic officer at the police station. He said he’d look into the phone records and get back to me. Then, by coincidence, I left for two weeks on a work trip. I was glad to be leaving my apartment, which now felt compromised, behind.
Years later, reading Gavin de Becker’s book, I thought about those few seconds after I’d hung up on the man. There are so many times in my life when I’ve been afraid, in one way or another, but not many when I’ve been driven by fear to that kind of fast action, the rapid conclusion and immediate response. It reminded me of the night my friends and I had made our unanimous departure from the park, all those years before—our instant, silent agreement that the threat was real and immediate.
In that case, we never found out if we were right to view the man by the river as a threat, if we had made an accurate assessment. We would never know if he was what we’d all feared he might be, the words we never spoke out loud to each other as we fled: a rapist and murderer, an episode of Law & Order: SVU come to life.
But I did find out more about my “stalker”—and as it turned out, my conclusion was wrong.
Two weeks later, when I got back from my trip, the Mounties told me that they’d gotten a number of reports from other women about vulgar, harassing phone calls on the same dates that I’d received mine. On the morning that I was at my friend’s house—and my friend’s last name happened to begin with M—several other women listed in the phone book under M got calls too. On the morning I was at home, in my own apartment, he’d hit the H section of the book. The other women had been grossed out or unsettled enough to report the calls, but since I was the only one who—through sheer alphabetical bad luck—got two separate calls, at two separate locations, I was also the only one who’d become convinced I was being watched and that my life could be in danger.
I felt silly. And my embarrassment was made worse when the local paper ran a short item about the harassing phone calls. Within hours, some of my fellow Whitehorse residents posted comments online, below the news story, mocking anyone who would be frightened by a pesky phone call or two. Had I overreacted? Was I wrong to be afraid?
At the time, I felt angry at the people who’d mocked my fear, but their contempt also made me doubt myself. More recently, I found some validation in de Becker’s book:
Not everything we predict will come to pass, but since intuition is always in response to something, rather than making a fast effort to explain it away or deny the possible hazard, we are wiser (and more true to nature) if we make an effort to identify the hazard, if it exists.
If there’s no hazard, we have lost nothing and have added a new distinction to our intuition…. Intuition is always learning, and though it may occasionally send a signal that turns out to be less than urgent, everything it communicates to you is meaningful.
I thought about the man on the phone. Was he calling from outside my apartment that night, ready to kill me? No, he wasn’t. But was he someone who enjoyed frightening women, who found some sexual gratification, perhaps, in frightening us, in displaying his power to make us afraid? It seemed likely. And would I ever want to be alone in a closed room with him? No, almost certainly not. He was a person to avoid—a person, at least on some level, to be afraid of. I had been right about that much.
The catch is in figuring out when to listen to our fear—when to trust our threat assessment, which may or may not be as accurate as the ideal Navy SEAL’s—and when to suppress or ignore it. And I had a lifetime of reasons not to trust my own reactions.
When I called Justin Feinstein to ask about Patient S.M., we also talked about the broader role of fear and its appropriateness or inappropriateness in any given situation. In modern society, we are facing, Feinstein said, a “juxtaposition right now between fear as an emotion for survival, and fear as an emotion to the detriment of our survival.”
“It really affects us not just as individuals,” he said, but “at a societal level.” Our fear has been a survival tool for as long as we have existed—and even before we existed as Homo sapiens, we had access to less advanced forms of threat response than the complex, multivalent ones we now call fear. But in today’s world, our ancient alarm systems seem less and less in touch with our contemporary dangers. (While my internal alarm system shrieks about heights, there is nothing warning me to get up off the couch and stop wallowing glumly in other people’s choreographed happiness on Facebook.)
“The usefulness of fear as an emotion to help us survive in the wild is starting to be tested by modern society,” Feinstein said. “There’s a paradox happening now, where as a society we have everything that we could potentially want to imbue ourselves with—safety, and certainty, comfort, things that our ancestors couldn’t have dreamed of—yet our anxiety and fear is off the charts.” It’s that paradox, he explained, that had driven him to study fear in the first place. “We need to study fear, we need to study its purpose, and we need to study how it’s actually leading us in a potentially maladaptive direction.”
After I read The Gift of Fear, I spent some grim late nights at home, thinking back on the times in my life when I’ve been afraid of another person, analyzing each one, trying to take them apart. How had I known to act, if I did act? Had I been right? How had I acquired the tools, over the years, to make those snap judgments?
I suppose, when my phone rang at 5 A.M. in my apartment, I relied not only on the data from the call two weeks earlier. All the information I’d collected during a lifetime of reading the news, watching TV, and talking to female friends and acquaintances about creeps, stalkers, and predators was fed through my mental machinery again as my brain calculated the threat posed by the man on the phone. I acted on the conclusion that came shooting out the other end of the machine.
I was right to be alarmed by the creepy caller—everything in my experience told me so, even if I misjudged the scale of the threat. But it’s easy to imagine situations where people’s fear responses are completely wrong, and dangerously so. “If there’s no hazard, we have lost nothing,” Gavin de Becker wrote. But what if our actions in response to a perceived threat have caused loss? What if our fears have caused us to lash out? What if, say, our misapplied fears have led us to call the police on a black boy playing with a toy gun, and then a police officer’s irrational fears, in turn, have led them to shoot to kill, without pausing to assess the situation?
Rifling through the drawer of scary experiences in my memories, I wanted to embrace Gavin de Becker’s theory. I wanted to believe that, as he wrote, “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.”
I couldn’t do as de Becker advised and set aside my reluctance to trust my own fear responses so completely. Fear can be a useful tool for survival, yes. But I worried about the fallout of fear gone awry—fear that had become “maladaptive,” to use the term preferred by the neuroscientists I’d spoken to. Hadn’t I seen for myself on the Usual that an outbreak of wild, irrational fear could put not just a fearful person but also the people around her in danger?
So how can we know when to trust our fear?
In the end, I can only fall back on the clarity I’ve felt in the times I was driven to action. My irrational fears—my belief that I would slide to my death down the Duomo’s terra-cotta roof tiles, or that the wind would blow me off a hiking trail, or that my car might plummet off any curve of a wet highway—have always been paralyzing. They’ve made my brain fuzzy, my movements slow and awkward. But in the handful of times in my life when my fear has propelled me into rapid, instinctive movement, I’ve felt different: not fuzzy at all, but sharp—as sharp as the edges of torn metal on the side panels of my Jeep after I’d steered myself away from an almost certainly fatal impact.
“I have ninja skills,” I’d told Svenja, as I sat on the couch in her office, pods buzzing rhythmically, my eyes shifting back and forth, back and forth, behind my eyelids. “I saved myself.” I had believed it when I said it. And now, I thought, maybe I could believe in that sharpness—could try to remember how different it felt from the fuzzy, paralyzing fear. That, at least, was something to hold on to.
One summer day during my undergrad years, a friend of mine went for a bike ride on a path near her home. While she was riding, a man on a bike stopped her to ask for directions. She explained where the path went, and when he then invited her to join him on his ride, she turned him down. She felt strange about the interaction, though she couldn’t say exactly why. Something about the way he made eye contact seemed off, she felt. The man had a weird vibe.
After she declined his invitation to carry on together, she turned her bike around and rode back in the direction she’d come from. She didn’t hear him coming until he was almost on top of her, but suddenly he was there, on her tail, riding hard. He was close enough to reach out and touch her. On instinct, she swore at him and rode away fast. He fell back and didn’t continue the chase.
She started doubting herself almost immediately after he was gone. She wondered if she’d misunderstood him somehow, if she’d read aggression where there had only been an awkward attempt at playfulness. Or…something?
As she rode away, she yelled back into the empty woods, “I’m sorry, you just scared me!”
She didn’t think much about the man again until she saw the missing persons announcement. Another young woman had disappeared that same morning, on the same bike path. Search parties were being sent out. They found her body in the woods near the path a few days later. Eventually, the man on the bicycle was convicted of her murder.
Years later, when we talked about that day again, my friend told me she’d never really experienced any lingering trauma or sense of danger from her close call. Sadness and anger, yes—but not fear of the world. She thought it was because she’d had agency, because she had sensed a threat and taken effective action. She hadn’t been trapped helplessly with her fear, like Pavlov’s dogs in the flood.
Her moment of sudden, immediate fear had kept her alive.