Why Your Gut Instinct Might Save Your Life

The following is adapted from A.W.A.R.E. by S. Gale Bleth.

Picture this: Sara and Bri stroll out of their campus Target on a sunny spring afternoon, bags packed with dorm snacks, giggling about the night before. Then Sara freezes. A white van is parked beside her 4Runner, side door slid open, and a man stands there pretending to rummage inside.

"Hold up," she says.

Bri rolls her eyes. "It's just some weirdo. I'm melting out here."

Sara doesn't budge. She marches Bri back into Target for Starbucks Refreshers and explains the red flag: a stranger with a van parked tight against a driver's door is a classic abduction setup. Bri grew up in a gated neighborhood where crime felt like somebody else's problem, so this framework is foreign to her. But Sara was raised to stay A.W.A.R.E., and her gut is rarely wrong.

I've had moments like Sara's myself. Every year for the last fifteen, I take a girls' trip with three of my college friends. One year we met in South Lake Tahoe, and I was driving up with a friend from Castro Valley. Around 9:00 p.m., just outside Sacramento, we pulled into a KFC drive-through so she could use the restroom and we could grab dinner.

When I asked the cashier about the bathroom, he told me the dining room was closed and only the drive-through was open. Then he leaned closer and clocked that it was just the two of us in the car. As I handed over my cash, his fingers brushed mine in a flirty, inappropriate way that set off every alarm in my body.

"Park over there," he suggested. "I'll let you in to use the restroom." Through the window I could see the only other employee was another man, and the cashier was already calling out to him that two "gals" were coming inside.

Another person might have shrugged it off. I've seen too much to shrug anything off. My friend thanked him sweetly, and we inched toward the next window to collect our food. That's when I hit the gas and peeled out of the parking lot.

My friend was furious. "What are you doing?"

"Getting us out of here," I said.

She still needed a bathroom, and we were both starving, but I wasn't touching food that had passed through those hands. We drove to a bright, bustling Denny's, she ran inside, and we finished the trip hungry but safe. She razzed me about being "mean" all weekend, and I let her. She'll never know what could have happened if we'd walked through that back door.

External awareness is the starting point. Internal awareness, that quiet inner voice, is what keeps you alive. The more you listen to your intuition, the louder and clearer it gets.

…

For more advice on personal safety and sharpening your instincts, you can find A.W.A.R.E. on Amazon.

S. Gale Bleth has been a certified self-defense instructor with R.A.D. Systems since 2000. She worked in higher education at California State University, East Bay, for sixteen years and spent another sixteen years as a Crime Prevention Specialist for the Hayward Police Department teaching personal safety to the Hayward community and other organizations. She also served as the state board president of the California Crime Prevention Officers’ Association (CCPOA). An alumna of California State University, she then earned her master’s degree from Saint Mary’s College. Though retired, she continues to actively teach personal safety. She lives in California and Arizona.

(Royalty free image: https://www.pexels.com/photo/cars-parked-at-the-parking-lot-12493038/, Credit: Eathan Hood)