THE GIFT OF FEAR: That fight-or-flight visceral, in-the-moment response that we call ‘fear’ is often intuition. I can absolutely point to many times that my intuition kicked in, and I 100% know that I would be dead if I hadn’t listened to it in that split second. The first was in 1979 when I arrived home from a function, late at night, and something told me to peek in the window before entering the house. My then-husband (a physical abuser) had his shotgun trained at the door.
The second time was in the mid 80s; I was driving along an isolated stretch of road (a sort of highway) and a car behind me kept flashing their lights as if to tell me to pull over. Thinking that maybe they saw something on my car about which they wanted to warn me (like a tail light being out or such) I finally pulled over. A man walked up to my window and something told me that something was off. So I just barely cracked the window, and kept my foot on the gas. He said “How are you? Where are you going?” and I peeled out of there so fast! I later learned that there has been a serial killer in that area using exactly that MO.
The third time was in the early 2000s, in Sunnyvale, California. I was gassing up my car, and another car pulled in, nose first, to the other pump in the aisle. A man in the driver seat in that car yelled out “Hey, can you tell me where highway 101 is?” He had a map open so I couldn’t see his face, although I didn’t really consciously take note of that at the time. But something told me to not go over there. I just pointed in the direction of highway 101. He asked me to come over and show him on the map, and I didn’t. Then he said “You won’t come over here because we’re black, right?” I hightailed it out of there. It was only later, as I was recounting this to my husband, in detail, that I realized 1) The gas pumps were between us and the convenience store, so nobody could see what happened to me if I’d gone over there; 2) highway 101 was literally just behind them, in fact in the direction from which they had come, and 3) They were trying to shame me into going over there – I actually hadn’t noticed that they were black (how could I with their face obscured by the map)?
Gavin de Becker has a great book called ‘The Gift of Fear’. He is a psychologist who debriefs trauma survivors, including rape victims/near victims, assault victims, and near-victims of murder. Every time he debriefs them by bringing them back in their memory to the moments leading up to the event they realize that their intuition had told them that something was off. The ones who became victims had ignored their intuition. The ones that escaped had listened to their intuition even though they had no idea at the time why their intuition had told them that something was ‘off’; but in the recounting they were able to bring to mind many details that had added up to that ‘intuition’. de Becker explains that your intuition is, often, actually your brain and senses taking in the entire landscape, and sending a message triggering your fight-or-flight response because your brain is taking in at such a speed the things that you are unable to process consciously in the moment. Whatever you want to call it – intuition or something else – it’s your friend, trying to protect you.
I have never regretted listening to my intuition. I have often regretted not listening to my intuition. I highly recommend de Becker’s book, The Gift of Fear.
I’m sure that many of you have similar stories. Please feel free to share them, there will be no judgement here.
, because I love it, and it makes my hair soft but not flat or weighed down, and it does take care of that last little bit of static.
, but they are bulky, taking up way too much space in your suitcase, and adding too much weight.
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