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The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker... The subtitle of this book is: "Survival Signals That Protect Us From Violence."
If you hear yourself thinking, "GIFT of fear? Who in their right mind would want MORE fear in their lives, I mean look at this place!!" then you've got it all wrong. de Becker does a great job at explaining that we can de-activate a lot of free-floating fear and anxiety (that largely comes from living in modern America with its marketing techniques and 11:00 NEWS! programmes) by training ourselves to be able to trust our OWN perceptions, our own intuition, our own "gut feeling".
And to do that you must be able to distinguish your worries, and your imagined fears, from real perception of potential threats.
de Becker uses dozens of real-life examples. It can actually be kind of triggery at times, he talks about real life robberies, rapes, murders, stalkings... and he also talks about stories of successful ESCAPES from robberies, rapes, murders, stalkings. And he explains how the situations differ, and what tools anybody can use to become an escape or avoidance story instead of a victim.
I've been working to conquer my own anxieties and fears for over ten years now, and he describes some of the conclusions I've arrived at (don't read tabloid magazines, don't watch commercial news programs, control and choose the input into your brain to decrease fear-mongering from outside) but has the benefit, as I do not, of a deep and varied career problemsolving and deconstructing threatening and potentially deadly human-on-human violence, in various permutations. Man's good.
Granted, since the book was published in '97, some of his examples are a bit dated. Shouldn't be a problem, since his principles are sound and many of the stories are either anonymized or just regular people.
I highly recommend this book - and despite its age, its popularity is such that I couldn't renew my library loan, someone else had it on request. That should tell you something.
If you hear yourself thinking, "GIFT of fear? Who in their right mind would want MORE fear in their lives, I mean look at this place!!" then you've got it all wrong. de Becker does a great job at explaining that we can de-activate a lot of free-floating fear and anxiety (that largely comes from living in modern America with its marketing techniques and 11:00 NEWS! programmes) by training ourselves to be able to trust our OWN perceptions, our own intuition, our own "gut feeling".
And to do that you must be able to distinguish your worries, and your imagined fears, from real perception of potential threats.
de Becker uses dozens of real-life examples. It can actually be kind of triggery at times, he talks about real life robberies, rapes, murders, stalkings... and he also talks about stories of successful ESCAPES from robberies, rapes, murders, stalkings. And he explains how the situations differ, and what tools anybody can use to become an escape or avoidance story instead of a victim.
I've been working to conquer my own anxieties and fears for over ten years now, and he describes some of the conclusions I've arrived at (don't read tabloid magazines, don't watch commercial news programs, control and choose the input into your brain to decrease fear-mongering from outside) but has the benefit, as I do not, of a deep and varied career problemsolving and deconstructing threatening and potentially deadly human-on-human violence, in various permutations. Man's good.
Granted, since the book was published in '97, some of his examples are a bit dated. Shouldn't be a problem, since his principles are sound and many of the stories are either anonymized or just regular people.
I highly recommend this book - and despite its age, its popularity is such that I couldn't renew my library loan, someone else had it on request. That should tell you something.
