Quote from B on November 16, 2021, 1:58 pm

I read the book "The Gift of Fear" by Gaving de Becker some time ago, and to me it is one of the most important books one could read on the topic of protecting from other people's aggression.

Gavin de Becker is an expert on personal protection, and the book deals, among other things, with how to recognize and address bad intentions in other people and "inform" your intuition so that you can trust it more.

Two of the most important concepts I got from the book, which I highly recommend:

PINS (Pre-Incident Indicators)

"Pre-incident indicators" are behaviors that, invariably, indicate bad intention and future aggression. While the focus of the book is physical aggression, in my experience the presence of "pre-incident indicators" is useful to detect psychological aggression and manipulation as well.

Taken from Wikipedia, they are the following:

• Forced Teaming. This is when a person implies that they have something in common with their chosen victim, acting as if they have a shared predicament when that isn't really true. Speaking in "we" terms is a mark of this, i.e. "We don't need to talk outside... Let's go in."
• Charm and Niceness. This is being polite and friendly to a chosen victim in order to manipulate him or her by disarming their mistrust.
• Too many details. If a person is lying they will add excessive details to make themselves sound more credible to their chosen victim.
• Typecasting. An insult is used to get a chosen victim who would otherwise ignore one to engage in conversation to counteract the insult. For example: "Oh, I bet you're too stuck-up to talk to a guy like me." The tendency is for the chosen victim to want to prove the insult untrue.
• Loan Sharking. Giving unsolicited help to the chosen victim and anticipating they'll feel obliged to extend some reciprocal openness in return.
• The Unsolicited Promise. A promise to do (or not do) something when no such promise is asked for; this usually means that such a promise will be broken. For example: an unsolicited, "I promise I'll leave you alone after this," usually means the chosen victim will not be left alone. Similarly, an unsolicited "I promise I won't hurt you" usually means the person intends to hurt their chosen victim.
• Discounting the Word "No". Refusing to accept rejection.

The Messengers of Intuition

These are feelings and emotional states that we usually minimize and explain away. Gavid de Becker explains that they are, on the contrary, to be taken into account and acted upon at all times, as they are invariably right. Among others, they are:

• nagging premonitions
• persistent thoughts
• black humor
• wonder
• anxiety
• curiosity
• hunches
• gut feelings
• doubt
• hesitation
• suspicion
• apprehension
• fear.

This concept actually blew my away when I read the book, as by reflecting on past events in my life I found that when I had, for example, a "doubt" about someone and explained it away, invariably the doubt turned out to be justified.