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

National Alliance of Mental Illness correctly terms “No-fault Diseases.” (It is also true that many people with mental illnesses were abused as children.) Genetic pre-dispositions may also play some role in violence, but whatever cards are dealt to a family, parents have at a minimum what Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence calls “a window of opportunity.”
     
    That window was slammed shut during the childhoods of most violent people. To understand who these mistreated children become, we must start where they started: as regular people. One of them grew up to rape Kelly and kill another woman, one of them murdered Rebecca Schaeffer, one of them killed a police officer just after Robert Thompson left that convenience store, and one of them wrote the book you are reading. Difficult childhoods excuse nothing, but they explain many things—just as your childhood does. Thinking about that introspectively is the best way to sharpen your ability to predict what others will do. Ask and answer why you do what you do.
     
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    When assassin Robert Bardo told me he was treated at home like the family cat, fed and left in his room, it occurred to me to ask him to compare his childhood with his current life in prison.
     
    Bardo: It’s the same in the sense that I’m always withdrawing within myself in my cell, just like back at home.
     
    GdeB: Are there any differences between what you do here and what you did when you were a child?
     
    Bardo: Well, I have to be more social here.
     
    GdeB: Didn’t you have any requirement at home to be social?
     
    Bardo: No, I learned that in prison.
     
    As long as there are parents preparing children for little more than incarceration, we’ll have no trouble keeping our prisons full. While society foots the bill, it is individual victims of crime who pay the highest price.
     
    In studying Bardo’s childhood of abuse and neglect, I could not ignore the similarity of some of our early experiences. I was also struck by the extraordinary intersection of our adult experiences, both drawn as we were to opposite sides of assassination.
     
    The revelation reminded me of Stacey J., a would-be assassin I know well. For years, my office has prevented him from successfully encountering the client of mine with whom he is obsessed. I came to know his family through the many times I had to call and ask them to fly to Los Angeles and take him home, or the times they called our office to warn that Stacey was on his way to see my client, or that he had stolen a car, or was missing from a mental hospital. Once, I found him slumped in a phone booth, clothes torn, bleeding from a wound on each leg, wounds all over his face, and completely crazy from a week off medication. On the way to the emergency room, he described the origins of his interest in assassination: “When John Kennedy was killed, that’s when I knew; that’s when it all started.” Stacey and I had both been profoundly affected by the same event, each of us sitting at ten years old in front of a television at the exact same moment in time. In part because of what we saw back then, we now found ourselves together, one of us stalking a public figure, the other protecting a public figure.
     
    In the fifteen years my office has monitored his behavior, Stacey has mellowed some, but from time to time he still requires our attention or the attention of the Secret Service (for threats he has made to kill Ronald Reagan). When I see him, some years doing well, other years doing terribly, overweight and damaged by the side-effects of medication, I think of him at ten, and I wonder about the paths of people’s lives.
     
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    Though I did not end up a violent man myself, I did become a kind of ambassador between the two worlds, fluent in both languages. I’m able to tell you something about how many criminals think because it’s similar to how I thought during much of my life. For example, because my