The Gift of Fear

Excerpted from
The Gift of Fear
By Gavin de Becker

As I write this, it has been nearly a year since The Gift of Fear was first published, nearly a year since I sat next to Oprah Winfrey as she told her viewers that "every woman in America should read this book." She added, "It could save your life one day." I had hoped, maybe even expected, that it might be true. I did not, however, expect thousands of letters from readers - women and men, parents, teachers, students, police officers, prosecutors, children. I did not expect that all over America there were readers who had faced personal hazards which they successfully managed by applying ideas they had read about in The Gift of Fear. Their letters were gifts to me, and continue to be.

Among those who decided to get the book on the basis of Oprah's suggestion was a California woman named Janet. Before she could buy it, however, she was given a copy by her daughter, Blair, who was attending college in Arizona. Within weeks of reading it, both women got a pop quiz on the material: Blair was in danger.

Blair was living in a small rented house off campus with two other young women, Amanda and Cheryl. They all got along well, mostly, but Blair's letter to me described one persistent problem: Cheryl's boyfriend, Nick, who was in the marines. Blair and Amanda did not want Nick around the house, and with good reason: He scared them. Earlier in the year he had attempted suicide in their dorm, and his general instability made them apprehensive.

Because of Nick's relationship with Cheryl, the girls felt they had to allow his visits, but when he "dropped out of the military" and dropped back into their lives, Blair was alarmed. Amanda, who had always said she wouldn't tolerate Nick being around, suddenly lost the nerve to insist he leave, probably because she was afraid. Only Blair refused to deny the obvious: Nick wasn't going anywhere; he was not looking for a job, he was not looking for an apartment, and something needed to be done.

Blair discussed the situation with her mother, and having just read this book, they quickly noted some of the warning signs of intimate violence from chapter 10: Nick's controlling behavior toward Cheryl (not letting her see friends, deciding what she could wear, etc.) and his rabid jealousy (persistently calling Cheryl, demanding to know what she was doing, whom she was with). They noted Cheryl's refusal to see any of this.

Blair kept trying to get Amanda to focus on the fact that Nick was basically living in their house. Her letter describes how she felt: "I couldn't sleep, I could not feel comfortable in that house, and the whole time a voice in my head was telling me to get out, that something was going to happen."

She made one last effort to fortify the will of her housemates, but the meeting was a failure. "When it came time to be direct with Cheryl, Amanda stunned me by saying she had no problem with Nick. This, after more than a year of telling me she was afraid of him! When it came down to standing up for what she believed, she caved. I did not. I was confident that you, your book, and my inner voice knew better than anyone else in that room."

Throughout this period Blair kept her mother apprised of the situation, and Janet decided to contact the parents of the other girls and discuss the situation.

Each parent told Janet that yes, they also disliked Nick. They told her they wished he'd leave (but wishing does little to make it happen). One had even asked Nick to leave that very day (but asking did no more than wishing). It was clear to Janet that the other parents were not willing to intervene.

The theme of these phone calls with the parents was that Janet was overreacting to a matter that her daughter could handle on her own. Admittedly, Janet was torn between being a friend to an adult daughter and mothering someone who had already left the nest, and this made it difficult for her to know what-if anything -to do next. The other parents had different levels of concern and different ideas to offer, but even Cheryl's parents solidly agreed on one thing: Nick was not dangerous.

Cheryl, meanwhile, had been telling Nick every detail of these discussions, and the day after Janet called the other parents, Nick stormed into Blair's room and said, "This is all your fault. You better be willing to pay the consequences in the future."

Janet would have loved the peace that denial brought to the other parents, but not if the cost was her daughter's safety. Then she heard from her daughter about the "pay the consequences" warning. Then she heard that two of the girls were now referring to Nick as "psycho."

A few days later Nick surprised everyone by moving out, but what looked like good news to the other girls looked like trouble to Blair. She felt Nick was not someone to just give up. More important, her intuition was sending her an emergency signal: "He's going to kill Cheryl, I just know it," she told her mother.

Janet listened, and without hesitation she set off to get Blair out of that house. (Later she told me, "You may stop parenting, but you never stop being a parent.")

Janet did not rest for a moment after her ten-hour drive to Blair's house. Wordlessly, mother and daughter rushed through their packing. They shared a powerful sense of urgency they couldn't explain, and didn't have to explain, to anyone. Soon enough, Blair's stuff was in the car and so was she, and for the first time in weeks they both felt safe. That's the undramatic end of Blair's story, but not the end of Cheryl's.

Within one hour of Blair's moving out, Nick arrived at the house with a gun and kidnapped Cheryl. He tied her hands and then drove around aimlessly, first to a remote desert area, and later to the small motel where he'd been staying. Nick parked the car there, and as he yelled various threats at Cheryl, some employees of a nearby store looked on, and concluded that the couple was just "arguing." A woman shopper with much courage and no denial ran over and yelled to the store employees: "He's got a gun in the car! Call the cops!"

Cheryl's own fears (no longer deniable) were now free to empower her. She struggled with Nick, finally got out of the car, and ran toward the store. The employees, now acting quickly, locked Cheryl in a storeroom just as Nick arrived. Frustrated at losing her, and filled with rage and self-hate, Nick grabbed a bottle of cleaning fluid from a shelf. Wailing "I want to die," he drank it down (an odd attempt at suicide for a man with a gun).

Realizing he couldn't get to Cheryl, Nick fled the store and was apprehended by police the following day. He has now been indicted for several offenses, including kidnapping.

It is easy to understand and to forgive Blair's former housemates and their parents for their unwillingness to see hard truths about danger. But even after a kidnapping at gunpoint, all the other parents remained experts at denial to the end, choosing to blame Blair for "causing" Nick's behavior. Thankfully, Blair knows very well that she could not and did not make Nick into a violent man. Would they blame her for his suicide attempt months earlier, his troubles in the military, his abusive and obsessive behavior toward Cheryl? The forces at work inside Nick were there long before he met Blair.

Because Janet and Blair listened to their intuition in spite of the criticism of others, they never had to learn what would have happened if Blair had been at the house when Nick burst in with a gun.