Another excellent collection of essays on murderers and their excuses. Dalrymple lays out as plain as a pikestaff how these people think and act. His insight as a prison psychiatrist for decades is an insightinto the minds of the murderers and how often they see themselves as the victim in their sorry story. To say he has heard every excuse in the book (pun intended) is probably only a slight exaggeration, but he has certainly heard most. Every chapter is an interesting read on its own and together they make an excellent read, the description of the judicialsystem, including the cross examination of witnesses, and his descriptions of life in British prisons is also eye opening. This, despite its sombre topic, is, as usual from this author, a humorous and chuckle inducing experience, his style of writing carries the reader through the book and is packed with interesting observations and references. Highly recommended.
The Safety Concepts team has over 65 years of combined experience in fields related to crime, violence, and conflict… from both sides of the law. Our research and instruction are firmly rooted in decades of high-level training and real-world problem-solving.
Jenna Meek is anything but. A homeschool mom, self-defense author, and certified firearms instructor, she brings an impressive resume of formal training with the who’s-who of the shooting world. She runs publishing and defensive firearms businesses with her husband, Jeff. She has authored and published three books.
Marc MacYoung is a proudly reformed bad guy, ex-violence professional, and Safety Concepts’ resident grumpy old man. Marc is grumpy because he has “been there and done that.” He hates seeing bad information hurt good people. That’s why he became a pioneer in the self-defense industry, authoring over 30 books and videos about crime, violence, and conflict.
Dan LoGrasso is the owner and operator of Silent Partner Productions. He brings a decade of intense media and communications experience to the Safety Concepts team. An Iraq veteran with his own resume of impressive training, Dan works behind the curtain herding a variety of cats and doing his life’s work: getting expert information to the people who need it most.
After 6 years informal collaboration, Marc, Jenna, and Dan have surrendered to the inevitable: despite all efforts, they are a team.
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My stepdaughter manages a women’s refuge, she is currently taking a course as part of her cpd and already has a degree in counselling. It was our family Christmas party last weekend and she told me she had to write a short essay on social impact and added value on the service they provide. In a former life I was a research officer for a college of further education here in the UK, I was the first person employed to examine and evaluate the work of the college, principally the social impact and the added value.
Armed with my honours degree in sociology I set about my task assiduously, I was driven to produce the research and within a fewyears had amassed a huge vault of statistics and reports full of qualitative and quantitative evidence of the massive social impact studying at the college, part time and full time, had for the individual students, their families and community organisations and employment. My methodologies and tools included in the reports so that it could be seen that the research was sound and not biased, I liaised with external organisations, national bodies and some universities and the added to the evidence base too.
Added value wasmeasured in terms of progression onto further and higher education programmes, career progression and my research made for impressive reading, so I was told. It was used when the college was inspected by the Further Education Funding Council and played its part in helping the college to be graded as an outstanding institution, at the time the third highest rated college in the country. I loved the job, it was very rewarding, especially as this college is where I found a route into education that profoundly changed my life, I was a truebeliever. That is why it was extremely important that my methodological approach was documented and openly available for scrutiny.
It all sounds very rosy does it not? The college shone like a beacon in a misty sea, we were a very expensive institution to run, we were not a conventional college but the results as evidenced by my, and a few others research showed that we had an excellent, enviable social impact and added tremendous amounts of value beyond the individuals who studied with us. The thing is my research allowed me to dig and to burrow into how we worked, how we functioned and I began to find problems and weaknesses in lots of places.
For clarification I was the research officer for the principals unit and worked very closely with the principal and vice principal, both of whom had introduced me to sociology and research studies in the first place. It was a privileged position to be in and well rewarded financially and in status. As the problems, inefficiencies and weaknesses were identified then ways of tackling them were applied, it was not easy as there were political and cultural practices, individuals and departments working to their own agendas, people in positions they were not suited to, all sorts of complicating factors.
The great challenge was managing change. It was not easy, it took massive amounts of time and energy, physical and emotional, but we got there eventually as evidenced by the glowing FEFC inspection report. The nuts and bolts of how we did this would bore you and are unimportant. The point is that in the task of researching the social impact and added value of our service, education, there were 2 outcomes.
1, the happy one we showed to the world, the qualitative and quantitative evidence of social impact and added value.
2, the unhappy one we kept locked in the attic, the problems, inefficiencies and weaknesses that the research exposed.
Make no mistake that if you attempt to measure the social impact of any service that you provide you will almost certainly discover both yourself. Is this a reason to steer well clear of the task, my response is a firm no. Any attempt must be seriously undertaken and academically rigorous. As martial artists and or self defence training providers, writers we ought to try and learn what the social impact of our training offer is.
Is there any should be the 1st question and what is it the 2nd. Do we add value to the lives of our students?
We can go on listing questions but need to maintain focus.
What must be avoided is to seek to produce ‘evidence’ that our service is the best, outstanding whilst covering up and problems, inefficiencies and weaknesses we find, that is the research of the sick.
Unfortunately in a world where many organisations are funding dependent in an age of austerity, a way of describing what some of us call responsibility, the temptation to see only what we would like to see, or what our superiors want to see is far too tempting and power, like money, talks.
Understanding whether and how our service has a social impact and adds value, is in my opinion, an important task. The search to assess just what it is should, if conducted properly, show the evidence as it actually is and help to improve the service provided so staff who are asked to conduct the research must be properly trained and empowered or expert outside help should be employed.
If you think yourservice is outstanding, or you want it to be so, then the research is well worth it, but beware, the will most likely be pleasure but it will most likely be accompanied by a little pain.
If you are interested in attempting this please feel free to contact me as I have a service you might just be interested in and the 1st 10 customers get a massive 50% discount.
The modern approach, the one my German friend is struggling with, simply doesn’t work. Further, the system is resistant to anything that actually might work.
I may have to expand this later, but there is an ethos in certain professions in the US and a lot of countries. Germany right now. Teaching is one of those professions. The ethos has a lot of tenets. One of those is that violence is wrong. That any use of force is a moral failure. This tenet is clearly wrong, as I’ll try to show later. The only way to understand this ethos is to see the entire thing as a religion, a state religion, with sins, original sin, heretics, dogma, missionaries, prophets… the whole bit. That’s the only explanation for rejecting things known to work and insisting on processes that we know fail.
As parents, we see the travesty that the victim is punished for an act of violence. We often don’t see that the teacher will also be punished for any effective intervention. Not only will any active intervention, or even direct, personal communication likely violate policy, but it would be an act of heresy, with all the guilt and punishment inherent in that.
So the teacher does nothing.
The kid, the bully, is not stupid. He learns the teacher does nothing and he doesn’t attribute it to any kind of moral superiority on the part of the teacher. He rightly understands it as cowardice, fear.
Remember
the teacher is bigger, stronger and, theoretically, has the authority
of the institution or even the entire state behind him or her. The
bully learns quickly that it doesn’t matter how much power someone
has if they are afraid to use it. The bully can bully the teachers as
well.
I should say something here about helicopter parents and how any intervention can be punished. Absolutely true, but it only works because of the cowardice of the target, whether that cowardice is personal or, more often, institutional.
Because kids are never protected and they are forbidden to work things out for themselves, all kids—bullies, victims and bystanders alike, never learn a mature understanding of violence. When bad words and fistfighting and assault are all equally forbidden, what’s the distinction when it comes to shooting up a school? When you don’t know the difference between a “friendly” fight, an “attitude adjustment” and murder, why not bring a knife to a minor disagreement?
Get this— under
this system, there is no incentive for the bully to mature out of
bullying or to develop a healthy relationship with power. The bully
becomes a permanent bully.
*And that, thepunishing of the victim either through victim-blaming or the gruelling cross-examination** are a primary reason for the under-reporting of sex crimes.
** (Is this the equivalent of a fourth wall break within a fourth wall break?) As unpleasant as this is, proof beyond a reasonable doubt, due process, and the rights of the accused cannot be thrown out the window just because an assault was sexual in nature.
*** To be fair, if your parents found out you were being a bully and picking fights, you would get in trouble, but unless you came home with black eyes, they’d never know, hence no punishment.
I am here to walk out my info-graphic on the “Three Types of Freezes”, which describes the model that I’ve been currently using to explain the freeze.
Now as we all know, “fight, flight, or freeze” seems to be the industry standard term right now. (There’s two other things that happen when it comes to inter-human communication; we won’t get into that here). When we’re talking about “the freeze”, this is something that happens to every human being when they run into a situation that they have zero response for.
As you can see on the info-graphic above, we’ve been running a three-freeze model. Level 1 of the freeze is what we call the detection freeze; level 2 of the freeze is what we call the shocked freeze; and level 3 of the freeze is what we call the discriminatory freeze. Most of the work we have been doing here has been with the discriminatory freeze – the third level of the freeze – because that’s the thing that has not been discussed in a lot of current literature. All the literature up to this point has involved a two-freeze model.
As most of know, I have a book that’s coming out based on my talks and all the stuff that I do on Randy King Live. I’m going to walk the info-graphic out even further in the book, but understanding that the reason why a lot of people don’t talk about the discriminatory freeze (AKA the “no good options” freeze) is because most of thepeople in the industry that are writing the books on this have an extremely high level of training. So, at no point would a discriminatory freeze even occur to them; with it being the deepest level, the “no good options” freeze – their training already superseded that. The craziest thing you need to understand about this is, we’ll go into it a little bit deeper, but the only thing that comes out in a fight or a high stress situation is habit and ritual. So if you don’t have a preloaded habit or ritual for what is happening to you, you are going to encounter one of the various levels of the freeze … and if there’s absolutely no response you’re going to hit that deepest level.
Lets break this down. The stimulus happens, your body doesn’t know what’s going on … if it’s a counter-ambush situation, your operant conditioning might take over first. (If you don’t understand the seven aspects of self defense, read Rory Miller’s book Facing Violence; it goes through all of them). If you don’t have any operant conditioning, then your body is going to go into a freeze, because that is what switches your body into being able to fight. It is your brain switching over from regular talking mode into battle mode. We talk about this a lot – my favorite saying is “the best time to hit a man is when he is talking”, because people, when they are talking, are not concentrating on what you are doing, they are concentrating on what they are going to say next. This is a great breakdown for the freeze. Another great breakdown from my friend Kasey Keckeisen is that “the brain cannot go where the body has never been”.
Lets start at the top – the detection freeze.
The detection freeze very simply is, something happened, your brain needs a minute to figure it out. There is not ongoing stimulus, it is just something quick, like a car backfired and you freeze, and then you have the ability to go forward. I talk about this all the time in my seminars – my daughter went through a detection freeze once when she dropped a cookie jar in our house, she got freaked out that I was gonna get mad and she froze. That is a detection freeze – did the big animal see me (I am the big animal in this story), did he see me? Am I OK? These happen all the time, they are very very quick. When a situation goes weird, say, somebody tells an off-color joke – all that stuff is basically a freeze cycle. For a detection freeze it is very small, some people do not even register this type as a freeze at all.
The
second level of freeze that most literature is covering – again
because of the people writing the literature in the self-defense
world – is what we deem the shocked
freeze.
Now the shocked freeze very simply is, something happened, and it was bigger or badder than you thought it was going to be. If you have ever been in a street fight, the first time you were punched for real, it probably surpassed any punch you had in training, so it is going to take your brain a minute to figure out what is going on and then try to get back into the game. If there are multiple stimuli coming in and you have no response, you might stay in the shocked freeze for longer. There are ways to break out of it, training will obviously shorten that shocked freeze, and if you have seen similar things beforehand your freeze cycle becomes shorter. It never ever really goes away, from what we have seen, the brain always goes into it. In a shocked freeze, at that point in time, your body is coming up with no new options, so you have zero problem-solving ability in this. Your brain just has to get to it and cycle on through. This is why sucker punches are so valuable in an aggressive assault. A lot of people do not understand that when a sucker punch comes in, that is shooting your brain into an OODA loop, and you are going into a freeze. Your body freezes first before it goes into either fight or flight.
We have been saying that with the shocked freeze, actions that affect the world seem to break it. That is very anecdotal – we do not have any actual evidence on that except for the stories we have heard. This happened to me as well, as I tell during my knife story – two things happened, I screamed and threw the person when I went deep into the freeze. This caused me to research this stuff even more.
The last freeze on the model that we have is called the discriminatory freeze, AKA the “no good options”freeze.
Editors note: This will be part 2 in January giving you something really cool to read in the new year.
The ability to manipulate time is the ultimate super power. The benefits of time travel are obvious. So too is having the capability to slow time down and dodge bullets Matrix style. If you can control time, you will always be faster than your opponent. This advantage would virtually guarantee your victory in a physical contest. But let’s face it, you can’t control time. But you can optimize the manner in which you use time.
You can optimize the use of time through efficient brain processing which allows you to move and think as fast and smoothly as possible. Just like a computer with a faster microprocessor, you can get more done and quicker.
Your brain can be thought of as having two systems. System I is the fast processing part of brain that doesn’t think on a cognitive level. It processes movement, touch, and balance and is based, in part, around your Cerebellum. System II is the slow processing part of your brain that thinks, strategizes and is based around your Prefrontal Cortex. Most complex tasks such as human physical performance and competitions require both System I and System II utilization. The trick is to deconstruct these tasks so they are accomplished in the most efficient manner by your utilization of System I and System II.
As an analogy, imagine you have two friends Flash and Geeky. Flash moves very fast, but he can only do certain tasks and follow known patterns. Geeky on the other hand, moves slow, but his actions are creative and strategic. Your job is to locate a needle in a haystack. One method would be to divide the haystack in half and have Flash and Geeky sift through their respective piles. A more effective method would be to have Geeky devise a clever searching strategy that both he and Flash could implement.
When it comes to optimizing your overall task processing, your System II devises a plan of action that your System I is able to execute for certain aspects of the task.
Let’s examine juggling three balls as a complex task to be accomplished. If you pick up three balls and attempt to juggle without prior experience, you will fail. You will not know how to get started other than to throw the balls up in the air. No pattern will emerge. There is nothing instinctive about the standard three ball juggling pattern.
As an aside, you can learn to juggle two balls in one hand by doing nothing other than practicing. That is because it is intuitively obvious how to do it. You just need practice. Rock climbing is the same. Put someone in front of a rock face (not too hard) and he or she can just start climbing. She may be technically weak, but she can get started. The same goes for fighting. Emotions aside, anyone can physically fight without training. He or she may fight poorly, but he can do it.
In order to juggle, your System II must discover and learn the three ball juggling pattern. Once you intellectually understand the pattern, you still must implement it on a physical level. You will throw the balls up in the air as before, and they will still fall to the ground. It will appear to you that you have no time to throw, catch, throw, and repeat the pattern. You will feel rushed and overwhelmed. The problem is that your System II processing is too slow to be able to juggle three balls. And your System I has not had enough pattern training/repetitions/practice to take over primary processing control. Therefore, if you are like most people, you decide that juggling is too hard to learn and you quit.
But if you are determined to persist, you need a strategy for success. In the beginning, you need to slow down and reduce the inputs to your System II to a manageable level. You start with one ball. Your System II can handle one ball with ease. You have plenty of time to throw and catch back and forth. You add a second ball. Now it seems that you have less time to respond. The balls seem to move faster (they don’t). Two balls results as many throws and catches (inputs) as your System II can handle.
The more you practice, the more your System I will become involved in the processing. As System I builds proficiency and takes over processing from System II, you will feel as if you have more time. You throw and catch without thinking about the movements. They just happen. It seems as if the balls slow down. Eventually, you will notice that you have time to throw a third ball into the pattern. But once the 3rd ball is in play, you will feel rushed again.
At this point, your System I doesn’t know how to process the three ball pattern. Your System II must guide the pattern which slows down the overall processing. Hence, your feeling of having no time. The more you practice, the more System I processes and the less System II processes. With enough training and repetitions, you will be able to juggle three balls and feel as through you have plenty of time. When System I is primarily processing, System II is available to focus on other tasks such as observation of your surroundings, talking, planning future movements/tricks and so forth.
Now imagine that the processing doesn’t involve juggling. The task to be performed is hand-to-hand/stick/knife/gun fighting. The overall concept is the same. The more pattern movements processed by System I, the more time you feel is available for higher level System II cognitive tasks. Time seems to have slowed down for you (It hasn’t). But you have optimized your brain processing and resulting performance.
When competing directly against another person(s), you want to reverse to happen to him or her. You want to degrade his performance. You want him to feel as if time has sped up, and that he has no time to think or act. You want his System II processing to be overwhelmed. You want him to feel like you did when you first tried to juggle three balls. To want him to give up.
Your goal is to force him out of fast System I processing into slow System II processing. You can accomplish this goal in multiple ways. Here are a few:
You change the movement pattern to an area that the other person’s System I is unable to handle, but your System I is able to handle.
You put your opponent in an emotional state that interferes with his System I processing ability.
You force him to “think” by making him uncertain, hesitant, or fearful. You want his System II to second guess his System I, thus degrading his overall efficiency.
The bottom line is that accomplishing complex tasks effectively requires prior brain training and maintaining optimal brain processing in real time. While you can’t manipulate the actual passing of time, you can still use time to your advantage.
In this article we examine why we need to train the mind as well as the body, better people than us have written extensively on the theory and practice and between us we have used over their works to inform our training methodology. Marc MacYoung and Rory Miller in particular but many others contributed to my learning and how we help people train at the Academy of Self Defence.
Whether we class ourselves as teaching a martial art, self defence, RBSD or whatever we call our stuff, we think that teaching the practical skills and techniques is the easy bit, that does not mean everyone teaches well. The vast majority of ‘instructors’ in this diverse and entirely unregulated ‘industry’ of ours have little or no training in how to teach. Most have worked their way through the ranks, put in the time on the mat, some have not, and, being generous here, most do what they do with good intentions. Some, luckily a minority, are either con artists, deluded or both.
Possession of the relevant techniques and skills of what is being taught, good coaching skills should be a no brainer and a sound theoretical underpinning of what you are teaching are the three main elements that instructors need. The top these up with bags of confidence and excellent communication skills and away you go. With these five things together you can teach the techniques, the skill, the art but how effectively can we train the mind.
Let me digress slightly, over the years we have had a quite a few discussions with students, instructors and especially between the 2 of us. Most people (students) understood that we could teach simple but effective techniques that they could learn, drill and repeat in comfort and increasingly under pressure but they questioned whether they could actually bring them to ‘do it’ to somebody even if it was somebody attacking them. The honest answer is of course that we cannot know whether they could or not. It is not an answer many want to hear. More importantly it is less an answer anybody wants to give, not if your income relies on getting them signed up as student. That is a killer of a dilemma and for many it is the elephant in the room, everybody knows it is there but they are all willingly blind.₂
Here is another killer, no pun intended. Learning martial art is no walk in the park, we speak from experience, but it should be underpinned by a wider skill set. We do not need to go out and take degree after degree course in order to develop this but an attitude that celebrates and indulges us in continuing professional development is essential. We will never be fully formed as humans, there is too much ‘knowledge’ out there to ingest and digest but we can strive to learn a little more everyday.
So how did learning the techniques and drilling them over and over creates the neural networks that make future use possible, so actually training is the keystone in the process, without it we cannot build further. Our students are not empty vessels, they have their own fully developed values and beliefs, inculcated over many years and these include, for the normal person, beliefs related to harming and damaging other human beings, beliefs that tell us it is wrong, a taboo. Our students are not signing up to have their values and beliefs reprogrammed, they want to be able to prevent being hurt. well it is a long job to help them achieve this and whether we know it or not we will be using operant conditioning.
Now the person who manages to assist ordinary decent people develop a mental attitude that will instil in them the mental ability to dish out some actual or grievous bodily harm, albeit in self defence, in a fun, sweet and cuddly way will probably mint it. Or set their students up for injury or death.
For a small example just watch the following video.
Time for a new acronym, EAR, this stands for Encourage, Assist and Reward. In the clip Jack receives two instructions, being told to roll over plus the motion made with the reward, over a period of time he is persistently encouraged with an even tone, exactly the same stimulus each time, he is assisted then rewarded, he desires the reward, he realises that if he rolls over when asked he gets the reward, clever Jack. Our students are more sophisticated animals but the process is the same, within our training we need to introduce stimuli that represent a threat, the student is encouraged to respond with power and aggression to repel or downgrade the threat quickly, this done they receive praise, the reward they desire, EAR. We are encouraging them to develop their controlled aggression. For a more violent example please take a look at the following.
We have all heard many anecdotes of the effect of just hearing the command ‘fix bayonets’ has had in diminishing an enemies will to fight on, it is the primitive fear of being impaled on cold steel. Killing someone with a bayonet is not neat and never very pretty and incredibly hard to do, from a psychological perspective, but replace the dummies for our focus or Thai pads and the training process is the same, we too use operant conditioning, (I notice it is a war face and not a killing face, on camera).
Militaries the world over have invested money beyond imagination into working out how to make normal people into killers₃, not irreversibly but as and when needed, in battle. Much of that research is underpinned by psychological and sociological factors and we can take it and use the same underlying principles. Of course we are not going to scream and use profanities at our students, of course not, we are going to scream and use profanities with them as they use force, use violence to defeat or repel the attacker. If we are to empower them to quickly turn a state of normality to one completely abnormal to them, like training the young soldiers to kill manually up close, we need to build on the new neural networks created by learning and drilling technique. Once the drill is hardwired hardware it is possible to create yet more neural networks connected to them, repeated training loads the supporting software. we make the actions that make up our responses to attack habits. Predators have habits, attackers have habits, we have habits, we can create new habits₄ lets look at the psychological training of the military.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7waGhujn44
The example used explains the need for close analysis of the situation and identification of component factors and the relationships between them. So removing the food vendors, left field if ever you saw it, removed the threat.₅
We argue it is good practice to analyse our students and our training, identify the component parts and the relationships that exist between them. Maybe we need to analyse the drills, the equipment and environment in which we train. Is the threat quietly menacing or threatening verbally, is the threat approaching in interview style or is it an ambush, are you on lovely mats with well-lit and dry surroundings or are you in a burnt out, dim shell of a building or a deserted car park. Are we training both the mind and the body? We argue we need to Encourage, Assist and reward our students as they progress from automatic repetition to a thought out series of actions based on what the threat is and not what an instructor said the threat would be.
Think about it, we all train mostly in safe, well-lit dojo and gyms, it is not where our students will be attacked. Maybe we need to not only think outside the box but train outside it too. Maybe we need to experiment, to play around with how and where we do things, please let me know how you work to train the mind as well as the body not just to learn the drills and techniques but to apply them with controlled aggression. Last point, to EAR you also have to hear.
We look forward to hearing from you, comments, criticisms and your thoughts all welcome. For now it is back into the trenches for us and until then, fix bayonets and remember…….
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejmFSN2qBG0
Marc and Rory have both produced huge volumes of excellent work in books, video, in training sessions and on their websites, go help yourself.
2 ‘Violence of Mind: Training and Preparation for Extreme Violence’ by Varg Freeborn.
3 ‘On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society’ by Dave Grossman.
4 ‘The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We do and How to Change’ by Charles Duhigg.
5 ‘Left of Bang: How the Marine Corps’ Combat Hunter Programme can Save Your Life’ by Patrick Van Horne and Jason A. Riley.
This is a great talk, We, the west in particular are sleepwalking into a problem. However, if you look at this from a MA/SD perspective we face the same threat, but now.
Lieutenant General Mark Phillip Hertling, is the Commanding General, US Army Europe and Seventh Army. In that role, he is the commander of the approximately 42,000 U.S. Army forces assigned to Europe, and he is the Army Component Commander of U.S. European Command. While Hertling’s primary role is training U.S. Army soldiers and units for Contingency and Full Spectrum Operations, he is also responsible for Theater Security Cooperation and Building Partner Capacity with the 51 allied nations that are part of the European area of operation.
The most commonly held view of a self-defense situation involves an “evil” attacker assaulting an innocent victim. As a result, the majority of self-defense instruction is based on the following two fundamental beliefs:
1. If you are able to inform people about the existence of threats to their personal safety, this information will then make them more “aware” such that they will be able to identify and avoid these threats.
2. If you teach people basic physical defense skills, they can apply these skills for physical defense in the event their awareness and avoidance fails.
In theory, these two steps seem logical and make sense. But they fail to take into consideration that the primary factor for maintaining personal safety is the ability to execute good judgment and make critical decisions. These skills are developed through experience, and a process of observation, trial and error, and evaluation.
As a practical and statistical matter, the average person is exposed to very few incidents of actual face to face violence in their daily lives. They don’t see, hear, or speak about “evil” incidents or personal safety threats in more than a passing manner. As a result, they don’t really think about “evil” or self-defense scenarios.
In fact, “evil” incidents or violent assaults are commonly described as “the unthinkable”. Thus, they do not develop the judgment and critical thinking skills necessary in a time of personal danger.
As long as the image of self-defense and personal safety conjures up horrible and “unthinkable” situations, people will tend to not think about the subject regardless of any well intentioned attempts to make them more “aware”. It is not enough to be told about the importance of “awareness”. People need to be aware of “how to actually respond” to individual threats and that requires judgment.
The solution is for people to see, hear, speak, and ultimately think about the fundamental concepts of self-defense as Violence Dynamics with its roots in common everyday incidents and situations. And to think about how these concepts apply to themselves and to others in terms of social confrontations and disputes, not just in terms of “unthinkable” asocial incidents. This process will enable them to develop their judgment and critical thinking abilities.
These fundamental concepts of Violence Dynamics are that:
a. Human interactions are either social, asocial, or a complex mixture of the two.
b. Violence is used as a “tool” in both social and asocial interactions.
c. What works for dealing with social violence will not necessarily work for asocial violence and vice-versa.
d. The majority of violence is social in nature. Therefore, it involves a social dynamic that is the result of the intentions, actions, and responses of all the parties involved.
Once people are able to “see” these elements of Violence Dynamics in many of life’s relationships and common confrontations, they will be able to begin developing their self-defense judgment and critical thinking abilities. The “New” self-defense which includes Violence Dynamics is intended to do just that.
I cannot recall how I came across this book but I think it was something I came across on social media referring to an article in National Geographic from December 1994. So I searched for and purchased said magazine and it is a great article on animals playing, fascinating in fact how different species such as a polar bear and a husky played together, go find and read.
Better still buy the book as its all in there too but without the fantastic pictures. To be fair Dr Brown is preaching to the converted with me. I love to play. Play is fun, it is a natural act but unfortunately many forget how to play as adult life takes over. In a world where the screen dominates and managed activity is all pervasive we have forgotten how to play creatively as we did as children.
Many children are also deprived of the opportunity for spontaneous play as they are ferried from adult supervised activity to adult supervised activity.
At our junior Ju Jitsu sessions the kids love to end with a game, it seems not to matter what the game is except the more chaotic the better. Play engages the brain and the body, when we train in the woods, what we call Wild Wednesday, the adults taking part in some pretty tough physical training are re-engaging with their younger selves as they crash about through the undergrowth, jumping over logs and throwing rocks.
Having grandchildren is fantastic, I get to be Mr Wolf or just ‘the monster’, I am on all fours as a horse for them to ride and they really love the rough and tumble and we had an epic water fight not so long ago. I love to play, to me Ju Jitsu is play, padwork is play, training is play, its how I express myself, I can lose myself in these activities and more importantly play with others.
I thoroughly recommend this book, the other night I was reading ‘Behave’ by Robert Sopolsky and was not surprised to see him quoting Dr Brown’s work on play. High praise indeed. Buy it and read it.
