Free The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals that Protect us from Violence by Gavin de Becker

who had been one of the first pets in the program. When they noticed the old animal was sick, they wanted to find a way to keep her from dying, though most knew that wasn’t possible. The program’s coordinator, Jayne Middlebrook, sent me this report:
     
    One patient, Oliver, made it his job to be sure the ailing animal had everything she needed. Oliver asked to keep her in his room, “so she won’t be alone at night, just in case she decides to die then.” Eventually, the old guinea pig was unable to move and her breathing was labored. Oliver gathered several patients in my office, and the guinea pig died in his arms, surrounded by an unlikely group of mourners. There was not a dry eye in the ward as the patients said their good-byes and silently left the office.
     
I have often shared with you the effects these events have on the patients, some of whom, moved by the death of one of the animals, cried for the first time about the harms they had committed on others. Now I want to share some of my own feelings. As I sat in my office watching the patients, all felons, many guilty of brutal crimes, most lost in a variety of addictions (you choose), mental illness (pick one), and regarded as the bottom of the barrel, I saw a glimmer of compassion, a bit of emotion, and the glimpse of humanity that society believes these men lack (and in most situations, they do). It is true that the majority of these men are exactly where they belong; to unleash them on society would be unthinkable, but we cannot disregard their humanness, because if we do, I believe, we become less human in the process.
     
     
    So, even in a gathering of aberrant murderers there is something of you and me. When we accept this, we are more likely to recognize the rapist who tries to con his way into our home, the child molester who applies to be a baby-sitter, the spousal killer at the office, the assassin in the crowd. When we accept that violence is committed by people who look and act like people, we silence the voice of denial, the voice that whispers, “This guy doesn’t look like a killer.”
     
    Our judgment may classify a person as either harmless or sinister, but survival is better served by our perception. Judgment results in a label, like calling Robert Bardo a monster and leaving it at that. Such labels allow people to comfortably think it’s all figured out. The labels also draw a bold line between that “wacko” and us, but perception carries you much further.
     
    Scientists, after all, do not observe a bird that destroys its own eggs and say, “Well, that never happens; this is just a monster.” Rather, they correctly conclude that if this bird did it, others might, and that there must be some purpose in nature, some cause, some predictability.
     
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    People who commit terrible violences choose their acts from among many options. I don’t have to provide a list of horrors to demonstrate this—you can find the proof in your own mind. Imagine what you believe is the worst thing anyone might ever do to another human being; imagine something worse than anything you’ve ever seen in a movie, or read about or heard about. Imagine something original . Pause in your reading and conjure this awful thing.
     
    Now, by virtue of the fact that you could conceive it, rest assured it has likely been done to someone, because everything that can be done by a human being to another human being has been done. Acts of extraordinary horror and violence happen, and we cannot learn why they happen by looking at rare behavior as if it is something outside ourselves. That idea you just conjured was in you, and thus it is part of us. To really work toward prediction and prevention, we must accept that these acts are done by people included in the “we” of humanity, not by interlopers who somehow sneaked in.
     
    One evening a few years ago, legendary FBI behavioral scientist Robert Ressler, the man who coined the term “serial