To get the chills from someone I barely know at all?

[bloopingbleeping]

Had my hackles rise and a strong feeling someone I hardly know is not someone to be trusted.

(I do experience anxiety to some degree already, but it’s more of a “overthink and worry” type, not being physically cold and shaky like this). I don’t believe this person is a danger to my physical safety, but I’ve hardly ever felt this unsafe even around people I know I couldn't trust.

Please tell me about times your intuition reacted to someone and whether you were wrong or right. Preferably more mundane, everyday relationships, not the rare cases of someone encountering a serial killer.

@TheDogthatDug I remember feeling uncomfortable as a small child, when I was watching him on his fix it programme. A girl wrote in asking to be a dancer in a pop band. He fixed her up to dance with with Gary Glitter and his band. The poor girl looked like a haunted animal sitting on the sofa between them. I've never forgotten it. It didn't feel right to me then and I'm horrified for her now. I hope she's OK.

My granny once met a notorious serial killer in the course of every day life - before he was caught. He was a pleasant local man and she made him a cup of tea. You can never tell. In your case though, I would not ignore the awful vibes you get from this person though. Can you keep away from him?

Not chills, but I did meet someone at a sports club event recently who gave me "off" vibes. He seemed too interested in me, I was getting an undercurrent of him trying to dig for information and align himself with something, it was weird and I suddenly felt I had to walk away.

2 weeks later I've found out that he's scammed a young woman from my club out of a substantial sum of money and disappeared. We're now trying to establish if anyone else has been scammed. It's sensitive because some people will be too embarrassed to say they have.

When I found out I did remember how I felt uneasy and was glad I walked away!

I had this with someone I randomly saw in the street at times. Eventually circumstances arose that we engaged in conversation and they seemed normal and lovely, for about 10 minutes, and then they weren’t ….

Yes, we used to work in a big open-plan office with another team sat near us. Combined together the head count of both teams must have been 150, and all fine except for one man in the other team (he must have been around early 30’s at the time.) He was so friendly and amiable with everyone, got on with his job etc. But for some inexplicable reason I disliked having to go over to his desk to talk to him if I had a query - he gave me really uneasy vibes. I even remember saying to a friend once that he was a ticking time bomb waiting to go off.

And then……one day, just before lunchtime we were all heads down, involved in our work & we just heard this almighty crash, then a man screaming and shouting in fury at the top of his voice. Then more heavy crashes. He had just flipped and we could see him shoving people, throwing punches, picking up file boxes and launching them into the air. Tables and chairs were going over. Four big burly security men rushed in and pinned him to the floor, one had blood running down his face, in the fracas but he wouldn’t let go.

We literally ran out of that place down the back flight of stairs and understood later than police had been called and he’d been taken into custody.

I have honestly never been so frightened in my life, I think we were all traumatised by that. I remember standing in the car park and a group of us just sobbing with fear. So terrifying

Yeah I've had it, and I get it more frequently nowadays. My ex was very abusive and as soon as I get similar vibes from someone I instantly think they're a wrong'un.

Read the gift of fear by Gavin de Becker

I had it with a local woman I met a few months ago. A voice entered my head saying, " don't tell her where you live! Don't let her in your home!" I sense she is rather chaotic. Others agree.

Trust your instincts. Better to be wrong than find out why someone put you on high alert.

I've felt this quite a few times in my life, unfortunately from a very young age but the strongest sensation was in a shoe shop. It was very busy so I have no idea what my brain picked up but one man with a wife and 2 boys set this absolute sense of dread and animal like fear off. I couldn't keep my eyes off him, I felt like I needed to know exactly where he was at all times, I probably looked like a nut but I essentially was stalking him around the room visually because I was frozen on the spot, my heart was pounding by the time they left.

Yes. While talking to the new guy in work, who everyone liked and who I did too, I was just chatting to him one day and got a sense of something. It stopped me in my tracks and I suddenly knew he was dangerous. It was like a coldness emanting from his eyes. I told my good friend in work who said I was mad as he was so nice.

Soon after, she came to me and said she had noticed him doing and saying things she didn't like. She found him sneaky. One things after another happened, until we discovered that he had been sacked from his last job for inappropriate behaviour with a teenager. It sounded like grooming. More and more people started coming out of the woodwork with things they'd heard about his past and more and more people started to drop him.

Eventually he moved on. He was a total creep and I knew it before I knew it.

I hated a friend's partner on sight. There was nothing obviously bad about him, but my gut told me he was awful.

Over a decade later, she finally left him because of DV. I wish I could have spared her that decade, but there is nothing you can do to make someone leave a partner unless they are ready.

For some reason, I think it's easier to identify a bad'un when it's someone else's partner. We all have a blind spot when it's our own.

PS I don't usually hate my friends' partners - this was a first!

That may be true, but it also doesn't invalidate instinct - we are animals like any other and our instincts developed to help keep us safe just like any other animal. What we need to be able to do is to examine whether there are other factors at play that lead us to unfairly trust instinct above reason - which is the thing that other animals cannot do.

Some 20 years ago a friend of mine asked if I would do some photography for a family event (it's a hobby but I am quite good). It was alrage event. Her fathers 90th. There was one person there that everyone wante to chat to an was flitting around like a social butterfly. I had an "instinct". I really couldn't understand it at the time. He was a lovely chap, friendly, outgoing and above all really pleasant. I still don't know what it was that I was feeling or why I was so uncomfortable because there genuinely was nothing at all about him to cause this. His name was Jimmy Saville.

He gave me the creeps just watching him on TV!

I don’t think there’s anything magic or woo about it but we are definitely capable of instinctively discerning threats - some are not dangerous, such as with British house spiders and we can educate ourselves out of our phobic reactions and get help to understand them. It’s an evolutionary thing that no longer serves us. With certain men it’s the other way, we are socialised so hard to overrule our instincts for fear of making them uncomfortable that we distrust our unease. There are probably dozens of nonverbal hints that we read in an instant without being aware of the process.

Lots of men make me uncomfortable but every so often I have that visceral, intense fear, a sort of revulsion, and the last time that happened it subsequently transpired that he was a literal monster, a respected professional in a position of trust for the sole purpose of abusing the most vulnerable children of all.

I remember a boy on Jim'll Fix It asking to dance with Lyndsey de Paul. He seemed really reluctant to do it when the time came, and had tears in his eyes. Saville was bullying him and saying, 'Look like you're enjoying it more!' I remember not understanding at all but think Saville was horrible and couldn't he see the boy was very upset about something. Now I can only imagine what that was.

I've worked with lots of different people over the years, colleagues and the public.
I met plenty of unstable, volatile people but always felt OK.

There was just one young woman I had to train who I felt uneasy around. I couldn't put my finger on it. She was really nice to me and we chatted a lot and she said she thinks I have 'the gift' - in a spiritual way. It's not the first time I've been told this but I didn't like it this time.

Anyway, one day, a lady came to talk to me from the place where this young woman had worked previously. She was emphatic that we should get rid of her and that if we didn't, we would be very sorry. It was all very weird. I responded professionally but felt unsettled.

She left shortly after anyway. No idea what happened to her.

The shop near me ,a guy worked there and he always gave me the creeps . A few months later a post was put on social media that this guy had wrote disgusting fantasies involving children aged 5& 7 , only got caught because he accidentally put the disgusting material through someone’s letter box instead of a form he was supposed to print out 🤢

I've had the chills where someone turned out to be a nasty piece of work (he is now in prison).

I've also, more often, had the chills for no apparent reason. Perhaps I just don't know what they have done, or they haven't stepped over the line yet. Or perhaps there is no reason other than subconsciously they remind me of someone else.

Whatever the reason, even if it is just because you don't like something about someone, you don't need to overthink or dramatise it. Just keep your distance.

It's a long time since I read The Gift of Fear, but some of you who've read it more recently might remember a part of it that resonated with me.

It was something like .... Say you were alone, waiting for the lift in a quiet building, and the lift stopped with a man on his own in there already. Even if he made you feel uneasy, your social conditioning would mean that you'd still get in. If, however, you had a dog with you and the dog growled at the bloke, you'd trust the dog's instinct and you wouldn't get in. So we'd trust an animal's instinct but we'd override our own.

It stayed in my mind because of something that happened years ago with one of my dogs. It's a long story and not particularly relevant to the thread, but the dog was right anyway!

"Can you imagine an animal reacting to the gift of fear the way some people do, with annoyance and disdain instead of attention? No animal in the wild suddenly overcome with fear would spend any of its mental energy thinking 'It's probably nothing'" - Gavin de Becker

There have been several times in my life when I've been overcome with fear for no reason other than the feeling that someone exudes. I questioned it in the past, but since reading Gavin de Becker's 'The Gift of Fear' I now pay attention. de Becker is a very interesting man and he knows a great deal about predicting and dealing with violence, so is worth listening to.

Really good post

I was 19 years old, taking my boyfriends dog to meet him across some fields towards his workplace. Man coming towards me, I felt something was going to happen. Dog was off lead, I called him back, turned round and there stood the man with his tackle out. Don't know what made me do this but I laughed, dog came closer and growled at him so he ran off. Reported to police with a good description of him. Later found out he'd done the same thing to 2 13 year old. He admitted it so I didn't have to go to court. But I still remember that feeling of something was going to happen.

Are people really still recommending The Gift of Fear? The book with the line " the first time a woman is hit, she is a victim and the second time, she is a volunteer.”? Ok, then.

God yes. My ex-husbands cousin. Hated him from the moment I first met him. Turned out, about 15 years after I first met him, he was a rapist and has now served 7 years in prison. Some of my female friends met him too at our wedding and he gave all of them the creeps.