The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals that Protect us from Violence Read Online Free PDF

bullet passing so close to my ear that I felt it buzz in the air before striking the wall.
     
    On my way back to our living room, I stopped when I smelled the gunpowder around me. I listened, trying to figure out what was happening without going back into that room. It was too quiet.
     
    As I stood straining to hear any tiny sound, there came instead an enormous noise: several more gunshots fired quickly. These I had not predicted. I quickly rounded the corner into the living room.
     
    My step-father was crouched down on both knees, my mother leaning over him, seemingly offering care. I could see blood on his hands and legs, and when he looked up at me, I tried to reassure him with my calm. I knew he’d never been through anything like this before, but I had.
     
    The gun was on the floor near me, so I leaned over and picked it up by the barrel. It was uncomfortably hot to the touch.
     
    In terms of predicting what was coming next, the scene before me was good news. My initial thought had been to grab the gun and run out the back door, but because of a new prediction, I hid it behind a cushion on the couch. I had concluded that my mother had discharged much of her hostility and frustration along with those gunshots. At least for the moment, she was not only reasonable, but was shifting to the role of supportive wife, nursing her husband’s injury as if she’d played no part in it. Far from being someone to be apprehensive about, she was now a person we were grateful to have in charge. She would make sure my stepfather was all right, she would deal with the police and the ambulance, and she would put our lives back in place as surely as if she could draw those bullets back into the gun.
     
    I went to check on my little sister, who was now sitting up expectantly in her bed. Having learned that the time after a major incident offered a period of safety and the best rest, I lay down next to her. I couldn’t take a vacation from all predictions, of course, but I lowered the periscope a bit, and after a while we fell asleep.
     
    By the time our family moved from that house a year later, there were nine bullets embedded in the walls and floors. I imagine they are still there.
     
    ▪ ▪ ▪
     
    When the U.S. Attorney General and the Director of the FBI gave me an award for designing MOSAIC™, the assessment system now used for screening threats to justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, I am certain neither realized it was actually invented by a ten year-old boy, but it was. The way I broke down the individual elements of violence as a child became the way the most sophisticated artificial intuition systems predict violence today. My ghosts had become my teachers.
     
    I am often asked how I got into my work. If viewed in cinematic terms, the answer would cut quickly from scene to scene: running at eleven years old alongside a limousine, clamoring with other fans to get a glimpse of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, would cut to me inside that limousine working for the famous couple within eight years. Watching President Kennedy’s inauguration on television would cut to standing with another president at his inauguration twenty years later, and with another twelve years after that. Watching in shock the reports of Kennedy’s murder would cut to working with our government on predicting and preventing such attacks. Watching in shock the reports of Senator Robert Kennedy’s murder would cut to developing the assessment system now used to help screen threats to U.S. Senators.
     
    Trying unsuccessfully to stop one of my mother’s husbands from hitting her would cut to training hundreds of New York City police detectives on new ways to evaluate domestic violence situations. Visiting my mother in a psychiatric ward after one of her suicide attempts would cut to touring mental hospitals as an advisor to the Governor of California. Above all, living with fear would cut to helping people manage fear.
     
    My childhood