Frost on the skin: how do we feel in the presence of dangerous people?

Our readers have shared stories of how such warning signs turned out to be not empty fiction, but a warning of serious danger.

“He drove her to suicide”

Marina, 55 years old

I had a friend with a difficult fate. She adored her children, two boys. The eldest son was sick with schizophrenia, his mother was very worried about him. And when the same diagnosis was made to the youngest, she was completely lost. I went to some psychic – I don’t know where I got him from, but I was very imbued with confidence in him, talking about him with delight. Fell in love. Decided to introduce us.

As soon as I saw him, I had a very unpleasant sensation, as if a large spider was nearby. And my five-year-old daughter immediately hid behind me, although it was not in her habits. I am not a mystic, but there was a feeling of some kind of evil from him. And not by accident. My friend no longer listened to anyone and blindly trusted this man. They had an affair. But he robbed her and drove her to suicide.

When she disappeared, her husband and I looked for her body in the morgues … They did not immediately find it and barely recognized it. A monstrous ending … I can’t help but think – if I had seen him right away, before she fell in love, maybe she would have dissuaded her friend from this relationship and she would have been alive?

“I felt such animal fear, people are not so afraid”

Anna, 30 years

At the dacha, my great-grandmother was friends with a neighbor, and I was almost forced to play with her grandson. I didn’t “like” him, he scared me. I always knew that something was wrong with him, I just could not explain it as a child. When we met, he was 8, I was 6 years old. He had terrible eyes, the kind they call “fish eyes,” very light, as if watery. I was afraid to look directly at him. He also had a terrible way to communicate, as if with a grin, without emotions, and he liked to emerge unexpectedly from the darkness.

He looked like the most terrible maniacs, according to which you can’t say that they have physical strength. Tall, very thin, like a skeleton, and his eyes are empty … I literally had a chill on my skin from him, as if he was not a person, but some kind of incomprehensible entity. I felt animal fear, people are not so afraid – rather, a bear or a wolf.

The other children avoided him too. He shot at the thrushes and happily collected their corpses. While his grandmother was alive, she somehow restrained him with her love. And she gave herbs to drink – she was well versed in them. And then she died – and it became obvious how dangerous he was. One day he started shooting at his relatives and killed his stepfather.

“He turned out to be a killer”

Olga, 39 years

I once worked with my mother in a printing house, got a job for the summer. Once her boss came to us – I had not seen him before. He checked everything and left. I approached my mother and asked, what kind of monster was this? “How can you talk like that,” my mother protested. This is our CEO. He is very smart, knows his business and is a good leader.”

And I felt such a physical rejection when he entered the workshop – everything shrank, it was unpleasant to look at him – that’s how a person who has a phobia looks at snakes. And then it turned out that he killed three of his competitors and a pregnant mistress so that his wife would not find out.

“This is definitely an occasion to take a closer look at the situation, at the person”

Anna Ivanyutenko, gestalt therapist

“Frost on the skin” is a reaction of our body, a signal that something difficult to determine, elusive, possibly dangerous is happening in contact with the environment.

The stories lack descriptions of the behavior of anti-heroes. The exception is the second story, but even there the author concentrated more on the appearance than on the personality of the boy. And this is very revealing. The feeling of danger that arises next to such people is more intuitive and bodily than clear and expressed in words, in behavior.

What did they do?

The storytellers failed to notice, but sensed that something was wrong. If we had the opportunity to examine in detail the behavior of these people, then it is highly likely that we would see exactly what their behavioral patterns cause vague anxiety and chills on the back.

This may be the facial expressions of the anti-hero, the contradiction between his words and gestures, how and with what speed he approaches, makes contact, interrupts the interlocutor, maintains or breaks pauses, and so on. There are many different signals that we catch, we are not aware of, but to which we bodily and emotionally react. Therein lies the complexity of such situations.

Yes, sometimes the response system “fails” and we suspect the innocent. But in some cases, we can even tell exactly what it was about the other person’s behavior that made us wary. Sometimes only our body whispers: “carefully!” And it happens differently. For example, in the third story, social status made it difficult for employees to notice the “monstrosity” of their boss.

But the most dramatic option is that for some reason a person does not read these signals, they seem to fall into his blind spot, and the first story is about this. Do you trust the sensations of “frost on the skin”? Yes, this is definitely a reason to take a closer look at the situation, the person, collect more information and not rush to conclusions.