The Gift of Fear

I have been doing a lot more reading than my blog would suggest. I've fallen behind in my blog posts and have been jumping around in a lot of books recently. This is exactly the habit I was trying to break by starting the blog, so that doesn't seem to be entirely successful. I'm supposed to take a break after each book to reflect on it before diving into the next one. Oops. I will keep working on that as I try to catch up my blog posts.
My friend Summer recently recommended to me a book called The Gift of Fear by Gavin De Becker. Thanks Summer! I enjoyed this book and liked that reading could help save my life someday, or help keep me from being in a position where my life needs saving! It's about your intution and how that can warn you to remove yourself from a potentially dangerous situation, and how it can help you if you are in danger to know how to respond. I tend to be a little paranoid about being attacked, and have always believed that that will actually lessen my chances of actually getting attacked - constant vigilence! (Thank you Mad-Eyed Moody, or Barty Crouch, Jr. technically I guess.) Anyway, it seems I'm actually right. I'm not trusting of other people and I'm not afraid to be rude so I actually have much less of a chance of being attacked because I come off as someone who would fight harder. Usually criminals look for easy targets, people who will let them in to make a phone call type of things or who won't want to offend someone. So it's nice to know that particular character trait of mine isn't a flaw after all! I was a little disappointed that this book didn't have more practical self-defense type of tips, although really it's point was to avoid those situations to begin with so that makes sense. It also addressed domestic violence, which the author grew up having to deal with, and tried to explain some of the psychology behind those who stay in those situations, but I still just don't get it. That will never make sense to me. He does say that when it happens once you're a victim, twice you're a fool though, which I do tend to agree with. This book was also interesting to me in light of the recent story about that Jaycee who was held prisoner for 18 years. It's interesting to me that she survived that long. I would have died trying to escape or would have killed the guy. No other option. Even if it had happened when I was 11. Obviously it worked out for her not fighting to hard, and we don't know exactly what happened anyway so I'm not judging her, I just know he would have had to kill me long before 18 years went by. My aunt agreed with me, but she said he probably would have killed me just to make me shut up or I would have annoyed him to death, which I thought was funny. Anyway, thank you Summer for recommending this book and I in turn recommend to anyone else reading this!