How to spot when something that looks like a nuisance is becoming something more

📞 An adviser rang me recently about a man who had been writing to her client for almost a year. Polite letters at first. Then more frequent. Then two or three a week.
He had never threatened anyone. That was the point she kept coming back to.

👉 “He hasn’t actually threatened anyone.”

I have been hearing that sentence, in one form or another, for more than two decades. It is almost always the moment things start to drift.

⚠️ Most of the worrying cases I look at, in any given month, do not start with a threat. They start with repetition.
➡️ A single message becomes three.
➡️ Polite turns persistent.
➡️ Persistent turns demanding.

Then the contact starts to spread:
📧 Email → 📞 Phone → 👥 Multiple staff → 🔒 Personal channels

None of those steps looks serious on its own. Put them side by side, though, over weeks and months, and the picture starts to change.

📄 We give our clients’ teams a one-page sheet called Communications of Concern. It lists fifteen early signs that matter.

❗ Only one of them is a direct threat.
📌 The rest are all about pattern:
• 🔁 The same person contacting you again and again
• 📈 Their tone is becoming angrier or more hostile
• ⚖️ Mentions of being wronged, of injustice, of blame
• ❗ Strange or excessive demands
• 🧠 Phrases like “no other choice,” “last chance,” or “at the end of my tether”

When those items sit separately on the page, they look manageable. Stacked up in one case, they begin to tell a different story.

🤔 Most people are still waiting for the threat. That is the honest answer — and it is an understandable one. If someone has not actually said they will do something, it feels wrong to treat them as if they might.

📊 The research has been telling us a different story since the 1990s.

The first major study of attacks on public figures was conducted by the US Secret Service, examining every known incident over several decades. Only a small number of the attackers had directly threatened their target beforehand. That finding has since been repeated by independent researchers across the United States, mainland Europe and the UK.

👉 The figure sits at around five per cent.

📚 During my own Master’s research, I reviewed every attack or planned attack on a British MP since the year 2000.

❗ Not one of the attackers had directly threatened the person they went on to attack.

What they had in common was behaviour:
• 🔄 Changes in pattern
• 🎯 A growing obsession with a person or a cause
• 🔥 Rising anger

Signs visible to people around them, if anyone had known what to look for.
💬 There is a phrase we use in this work:
👉 Actions speak louder than words.
It holds true more often than most people realise.

🔍 What To Do Early
This is where good advisers make the difference. Not through drama, but through small, early decisions.

👀 Look at patterns, not individual messages
A single aggressive email is rarely the story. What matters is the frequency, the way it spreads, and how the tone shifts over weeks. Read the messages together, in order, rather than one at a time.

🧠 Listen for grievance language
Words like “unfair,” “wronged,” “betrayed,” “no other option,” or “end of my tether” often appear long before anything else does.
Dr Reid Meloy is one of the world’s most respected researchers in this area. When he came on The Defuse Podcast for the episode Threat Assessment with Dr Reid Meloy — you can listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify — he described personal grievance as resting on four things:
👉 blame, loss, anger, and humiliation

When those start showing up together, take it seriously.

🗣️ Ask around
People who become obsessed with someone rarely keep it entirely to themselves.
They mention it to a friend.
They post something odd online.
They drop something in conversation with a third party who has no idea what they are hearing.

If something feels off, it is worth asking:
• 👩‍💼 household staff
• 📒 PAs
• 🚗 drivers
• 🤝 close contacts

…whether anything has been said, anywhere, that made them uncomfortable.
👉 More often than you’d expect, the answer is yes.

⏱️ Share earlier than you think you should
The biggest delay I see, across every sector, is hesitation.
👉 “It is not serious enough yet.”
That thinking is how quiet concerns turn into genuine emergencies.
Early conversations create options.
Late ones take them away.

📞 Pick up the phone
If you are not quite sure what you are looking at, ring someone who does this for a living.
A fifteen-minute conversation at the early stage is almost always the cheapest and most useful thing you can do — and in most cases, we end up reassuring the adviser that nothing needs to happen yet.
👉 That is a good outcome too.

Most of these situations will not end badly. That is the truth of the work, and it is worth holding onto. The people who worry us rarely go on to harm anyone.
But the ones that do almost always follow a path that was visible beforehand.

What separates the two is rarely intelligence, or experience, or expensive kit. 👉 It is timing.

And the willingness of someone — often an adviser, often quietly — to say: “I think this needs a proper look.”

If something feels like it is shifting, it probably is. I’m only ever a phone call away

📩 If you would like a copy of our Communications of Concern sheet, just reply to this email, and I will send it across.