Gavin de Becker

Now, there are so many examples of this in my work where I interviewed people who had been victimized and time after time, they would tell me, I knew when I walked into that underground parking lot that that was the same car that I'd seen earlier.

I knew when I met that guy, such and such.

In fact, there's a beautiful, a woman who wrote me the most beautiful thing.

I think it's in

In Gift of Fear, or it's in one of the subsequent books, and she said that she would look at her lifelong diary.

She'd kept a lifelong diary.

And she looked back at it.

And it would say, met this guy, feel a little queasy about him, not so sure, dated him, married him.

And then what she wrote to me was she said, again and again, I could see, there it was in my diary.

Listen to this, the ending embedded in the beginning.

And so what I encourage people to do going to your original answer is how people can be safer is listen to their intuition, know that its function is to protect you.

That's what it's doing.

Yes, sometimes there's a very nice, like in my life, and I suspect in yours too, there's often a very straight line between certain childhood experiences and what we ultimately do.

In my case, a very easy one is there was fear.

I then come to have a deep understanding of fear, both sides of it, and some compassion for it and some insight.

And I then study it.

There was violence in my childhood.

And so I now come.

Now, it's so long ago that I'm 71.

So my childhood is so long ago now that it doesn't have a grip on my throat like it did for a lot of my life where the narrative was very, very important.