Sex Spoken Here: Risk Assessment Part 3
Welcome to my virtual therapy room!  I am Dr Lori Beth Bisbey and this is Sex Spoken Here. Remember that this podcast deals with adult themes so if you don’t have privacy you might wish to put on your headphones.
Today I am finishing my series about risk assessment in relationships.
We assess risks all the time.  Once we reach adulthood, we do most of our risk assessment without thinking.  When you are driving, you assess the risk of driving at a particular speed, of changing lanes, or driving in certain weather or traffic conditions.  We assess risk according to what we have learned about the risks inherent in any given situation.    We assess based on what we have learned from others, from books and other media, and from our own life experience.
All of us travel with baggage.  Some with just a carry on and others with whole steamer trunks.  The problem isn’t the baggage itself but rather the uninspected contents.  If you are unaware of your own patterns, your risk assessment will be faulty so you will make poorer choices.  For some this means choosing relationships that turn out to be abusive ones for others this means choosing partners who cheat and for some this means choosing relationship after relationship with people who abuse or are dependent upon substances.  We tend to choose what feels familiar to us.
I know my own patterns very well now as I have had lots of therapy, coaching and done other types of personal work.  It used to be that if I walked into a room of 300 people with only one alcoholic in the room, that would be the only person I was attracted to.  They would be the person that felt exciting, who smelled right to me.  Nowadays, I would be attracted to the people who have been clean and sober for more than 10 years, people who are adrenalin junkies and those who come from backgrounds where there was substance abuse but who have done their personal work.  I still like the edge but my pattern has changed because of the personal work I have done.  I recognise different qualities, different scents as attractive now.   The hardest thing for most of us is to admit we have made a mistake and this can get you injured or killed.
Gavin de Becker is an expert on security, threat assessment, and personal protection.  He wrote a book called The Gift of Fear that I highly recommend everyone read.  In this book, he talks about how far we as human beings have moved from our primal senses.  Fear is the body’s way of alerting us to danger.  Many people no longer pay attention to fear or to gut instincts in which they feel uncomfortable.   De Becker talks about how essential it is that we learn to reintegrate our primal senses as they will keep us safer and ignoring them may get us injured or killed.
Often people have an intense gut feeling and then talk themselves out of it.  You meet someone and you feel uncomfortable but you say to yourself ‘I’m being unfair’  or ‘I should give him a chance’.  It is amazing how often the gut instinct is correct.  I have interviewed many victims of sexual assault and rape over the years – some in therapy and others during my research on Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.  A full 60% of them have admitted to having a feeling that someone was ‘not right’ or a situation was ‘not safe’ and ignoring the feeling.  This lead them to blame themselves for their own assaults or rapes.  Self-blame is not useful in this situation.  What is though is to learn how important it is to pay attention to your hunches and gut instincts.  They are often correct because they are based on a whole host of perceptions that happen on a less than conscious level.
Many of the people I have seen over the years have ignored countless warning signs in relationships.  Last week I spoke with Dr Sue Mandel about the red flags she talks about with her clients.  I use a system of red flags or warning signs to risk assess in any new relationship and I recommend that...