“Years ago,” she starts, “when my three sons were small, I was
walking to the store, and I saw this man on a park bench. He said,
‘Come here please.’ So I went over to him. I said, ‘What do you
need?’ He grabbed me by the shirt, and he held a knife to my throat
and told me he was going to cut me. I said, ‘Go ahead and cut me. I’ll
be coming back, and I’ll hunt your ass.’ I wasn’t afraid. And for some
reason, he let me go. And I went home.”
She sounds brave. But is that really bravery? Being brave
means you persistdespitethe fear you feel. I mean you aren’t really
brave if you don’t know you are in danger. Because SM didn’t
experience fear she was unable to detect she was in danger, so she
dealt with the situation with a certain direct logic: If you attempt to
harm me, I will track you down and kill you.
Apparently, SM has had encounters like this more than
once. She’s been held at knife point multiple times, held at gun
point twice, and her ex-husband almost beat her to death. Louise
Spiegel, the journalist who wrote the story, speculates that because
SM has no fear she is more open to human interaction both good
and bad. Most of us can sniff out dangerous situations, and we try to
avoid them. But SM doesn’t seem to have any dowsing rod for
danger. On the one hand, this makes her about the friendliest
person you could hope to meet. On the other, it sets her up to be
exploited by the seedier elements of society.
You might think she would be traumatized by so many
attacks, except one outcome of her total lack of fear is that she
also doesn’t experience trauma. Trauma occurs, in part, when
a person has difficulty making sense of a shocking or disturbing
experience. People sometimes try to cope with trauma by numbing
themselves, so they can’t experience the pain. Often people who
experience traumas relive the experience in their minds over and
over again and they are on the lookout for new sources of trauma all
the time, to avoid being harmed again. This can manifest itself in
what psychologists call hypervigilance or a heightened sensitivity
to your environment. Without fear you cannot be traumatized. So
when SM relates these stories, she isn’t thinking back to a terrible
time or day in her life. It’s just a fact that it happened like the time
the wrong package was delivered to your house. That’s it.
Scientists have conducted experiments on SM to demon-
strate her lack of fear. Experiments that honestly seem a little
gruesome. They have put her in a room with dangerous snakes
and other animals and had to physically restrain her from playing162 / Buzz!Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSF Library, on 11 Nov 2019 at 14:18:43, subject to the Cambridge