Female Smarts – Page 4 – Conflict Manager

Why I Stopped Teaching Women’s Self-Defense – Amanda Kruse

In my mind, self-defense should be of interest to anyone and everyone, as it concerns the safety and preservation of our selves and those we love. It makes sense, then, that everyone would want to have some knowledge on the subject, right?

My experience starting a self-defense business providing self-defense workshops has shown that people do not put self-defense as a top priority, at least not until they feel they “need” it (i.e. creepy neighbor, daughter heading off to college, traveling overseas, murderer on the news).

The idea for the business began after I was on a field trip with a group of 4th graders. We were on a city bus when a man approached a group of girls and asked to take pictures of the girls. Thankfully I noticed this interaction and stepped in to stop it. All ended well and the girls were fine, but I could not get the situation out of my head. I knew that these girls were trying to be polite to this guy, despite their obvious discomfort, when what they needed to do is say “no”, get away, and get help.

In my mind, a logical way to deal with the experience was to provide the girls with some basic self-defense and safety information to help them better deal with similar situations they may encounter. With the help of my tae kwon do instructor, I put together a 4 week class for these girls at their school. We focused on prevention, deterrence, and general safety, along with some simple physical techniques. This class was a huge success. The class filled to beyond capacity, plus the girls and their parents wanted more!

This motivated me to start a business teaching safety/self-defense classes to teens and adults. With the results I had at this first class, I didn’t hesitate to pursue additional training and research and continue to move forward with the business idea. My idea for workshops were different than most self-defense classes, as I included a good deal of information/discussion on prevention, education, deterrence and boundary setting, which I hoped would help set me apart and provide a more well-rounded education.

Securing contracts with local community education agencies to put my classes in their catalogs was easy. At the time, I considered this another success. My first community education workshop came and went with mediocre attendance and I had gotten a few private groups set up. As scheduled classes came and went, with attendance of anywhere between 2 and 6 participants, I realized that this may not be as easy as I thought. I attributed this to being new and people just not knowing about the unique workshops I offered.

As I was losing hope in the Fall of 2014, I had some media exposure that I was certain would change things. I was interviewed for a front page article of the major local newspaper, complete with an online video with the interview and demonstration. This exposure was followed by an television appearance on the local morning show. I was swamped with emails soon after, but only booked two private classes out of all of the publicity.

So, why not take a self-defense workshop? I have several theories, but the following quickly come to mind:

“It will never happen to me”. Bad stuff only happens to other people, right?

“The thought of having to use physical self-defense techniques is scary”. In many of my workshops, several participants have said, “I don’t know if I could do that”. First, just the thought of an attack makes them uncomfortable. Second, and this is particularly true of females, it is difficult to consider causing injury to another person, even in self-defense

“I would be uncomfortable practicing any physical techniques in front of others”. An understandable reason, particularly classes that may involve complex techniques and a high level of physical fitness. Self-defense classes should educate on all of the ways we can prevent violent situations and give the confidence that simply putting up a fight and aiming for vital targets may be enough to escape.

“I don’t have time to attend a self-defense workshop”. People’s lives are packed full, from work, kids, home and activities. Self-defense just isn’t a high priority until there is a perceived threat.

“I live in a very safe neighborhood where crime rates are low”. Living in a small city in the Midwest where people tend to leave their doors unlocked overnight, I hear this on a regular basis. Safety is an illusion. There is always risk, whether it is violent crime, street harassment, rape, domestic violence, or bullying.

For a time, I tried to address some of these theories in an attempt to get more business. I made workshop times and locations convenient. Workshops were marketed as educational, with a focus on prevention, targeted at all levels of fitness. But I always refused to “sell” self-defense workshops by using scare tactics and play on people’s fear.

When the danger of violence seems near or is more visible (i.e. the news, college sexual assaults) is the time when people think of self-defense as a priority. Parents of female high school seniors heading off to college is a great example, in my experience. In July and August, I had parents calling me with fear and a bit of panic in their voices as they wanted to book last minute workshops for their daughters prior to their departure to campus. Prevention doesn’t seem to be on people’s minds otherwise.

The amount of time I have put into my self-defense venture never did pay when you run the numbers, but I had a strong desire to get the information in my workshops out there to those who wanted it. I thoroughly enjoyed the process and interaction and, in many cases, walked away feeling as if I had made a difference in participants’ lives. On the other hand, in classes that only had a small number of non-participatory attendees, they sucked the life out of me, leaving me exhausted, frustrated and continually questioning how badly I really wanted to continue.

This is the second writing of this article. The first was put together prior to deciding to end the business. That first article ended with “I will just keep on teaching, hoping that word of mouth continues to spread”, blah, blah, blah. The first writing made me think long and hard about what I was doing and if I really wanted to continue. A sense of bitterness came through that made me question everything. When I finally made the decision to walk away, a huge weight was lifted and I knew it was the right decision.

Although the business is coming to an end, I have no regrets. The people I met throughout the process were supportive and provided me with resources that have been invaluable, not only for the self-defense workshops, but also for me personally. My plan is to continue to volunteer on a limited basis, providing information and education on safety and self-defense to larger numbers of people, such as schools and community groups. I still believe self-defense education is essential.

The Self Defense Continuum, Part IV – Teja Van Wicklen

Normal vs. Abnormal Behavior

The next step is to be able to identify types of behavior to avoid. To do this, we first have to recognize the things we already know, but don’t know we know. That is, we need to recognize Normal Behavior. For the sake of self defense Normal means not harmful or potentially dangerous. Spastic dancing or other attention getting behavior is quite normal in New York City where I grew up. You know what normal behavior looks like for a time and place, you just may or may not be able to articulate it. You may get an odd feeling when something isn’t normal, and that’s a start, but while you’re pausing to assess that feeling and whether or not to act on it, he’s getting into position.

Since it’s impossible to articulate all abnormal behavior, let’s clarify what normal behavior looks and feels like, so that when you see something that isn’t it, you recognize why. Pick a place and ask yourself what is normal behavior for that place. Imagine you are at your child’s soccer meet. What is normal behavior for a soccer field? Envision it. What is happening? Are planes landing? People on soccer fields mostly play soccer and spectate. A bunch of people may be using their phones to take pictures or tell family members who couldn’t make it what is going on. The kids who aren’t playing will be running or climbing on the bleachers.

What would be odd in this environment? What would bring your hackles up? What would look out of place? Would a lone older man standing separate from the crowd but intently watching the kids cause you to look closer? He might be a grandparent. Would a guy loitering around the parking lot just outside the field looking nervous and chain smoking make you watch more carefully?

It is very important that we not judge people but rather tune into our awareness. There is a fine line. Observe and take action if necessary, do not react to first impressions. All we are doing is taking something that normally hangs out at a low level of consciousness and moving it up for a moment into the spotlight so we can give it a name.

This simple thought process can work in many situations. Once you know the difference between, “normal” and “abnormal” you can also begin to articulate the difference between flirting and probing or asking and manipulating or between your boss calling you out for a reasonable short coming and his stepping over the bounds to something more personal or devious like coercion.

The 15 Foot Rule

Especially if you are in a Fringe Area or vulnerable position, you need to keep your distance from anyone even vaguely suspicious. Distance is your best friend. Do you want the lion next you or on the other side of the river?

Marc MacYoung recommends not letting him get within 5 feet of you. For man-on-man violence with slightly different cues and intentions that may be sufficient. I highly recommend women use the 15 feet rule.

According to law enforcement statistics, a criminal can close 20 feet in a second and a half on average at top speed. 15 feet gives you approximately one second if he lunges, but a second is a long time if you are already aware there might be danger. It is not enough time if you are clueless, but it is difficult to speak to someone further away, so 15 feet seems like the most reasonable distance to work with and reasonable is often the best we can hope for.

In practice here is what it would look like: A man employs the Positioning strategy known as Closing. He walks toward you, appearing to be in a rush, pointing at his watch. He says or implies, “It’s broken, do you have the time?” You are a woman alone in an underground parking facility (Fringe Area) and this makes you uncomfortable, though you aren’t sure why, other than the fact that you are a woman alone in an underground parking facility, which is enough. You have also caught the “it’s broken” and registered it as possibly a bit too much pre-thought information for the moment; too much information can mean lying and you have made a note of it. You employ the Progressive Fence by putting your hands up to show discomfort (Visual Fence). You have set a boundary. You can say, “Stop, talk to me from there,” (Verbal Fence)

Now, he might pretend he doesn’t speak the language, although you know that everyone reads distress language and stop signals pretty much the same way. He might pretend not to notice. How will he do this? Any way that will work! He might pretend he’s looking at his phone and doesn’t see you. He might pretend he needs help and that gives him the right to disregard your hands. You are aware that he is continuing to close distance. In some cases, a potential criminal might look past you as if planning to walk by, yet you can tell he’s focused on you even though he’s not looking at you. Maybe it’s because you look exceptional this morning, maybe not. Is he just one of those people acutely unaware of personal space? Do you want to stick around to find out?

This is what fifteen feet can do for you. It gives you time to calculate.

Whatever this particular potential criminal does, you now have several cues to work with. Cue number one, you’re in a fringe area and anyone who understands the most elementary thing about human interaction understands that you don’t stroll up to woman in a deserted area under any circumstances. Cue number two, he ignores your body language and boundaries. Cue number three, he ignores your words. This alone labels him as a predator unless he is completely clueless, drunk, desperate or otherwise impaired. Either way, no need to stick around. If he is really in need of help he can tell you from a distance. If he is so desperate that he needs to get that close, remember that a drowning person will drown you as well.

In the unlikely instance that you are confronted by a master criminal pretending to be old, infirm or blind, you will just need to use all we have discussed and be a good interpreter of human behavior. What if he breaks into a run and comes at you from fifteen feet or less. It comes down to your awareness, knowledge of exits, and your reaction time. There are lots of ugly possibilities. Luckily most of them are very rare. He will probably walk right by as if you weren’t there. Most people are not after you. If he is a predator, your awareness alone might informed him that you aren’t his girl.

In general if someone ignores your boundaries, get out. Get in your car, lock the door and drive. What you don’t want to do is stand there thinking to yourself that you’re probably just exaggerating or you don’t want to be impolite. Denial is common in unfamiliar situations. The remedy for denial is to heed your instincts and cues.

Let’s for a moment assume you are imagining things. Let’s assume that the guy walking toward you in the dim and deserted garage just doesn’t notice you. He also won’t notice you’re not there.

Fear of social embarrassment is a survival instinct. Not that long ago if you weren’t part of a hunter/gatherer group, you wouldn’t last long. If your group ostracized you, you starved, died of illness or were eaten by wild animals. So fear of public speaking goes back a ways. No one wants to act crazy or be labeled crazy, but there are times to disregard or override this fear. Remember the person walking toward you is someone you don’t know and are unlikely to ever see again. Do you really care if he goes home and tells his wife this crazy lady ran from him in the parking lot for no reason. She may even be likely to ask him if he got too close to you and enlighten him. And you’ll never know. Give yourself permission to act stupid if this sort of thing ever happens. Seriously. Do it. Say it out loud, “I am allowed to run away, slam my door or whatever I feel is necessary, if I feel in the least bit threatened. It doesn’t matter what I look like when I do it. I am not that person, this action does not define me. I am only doing the right thing at that moment by heeding my instincts and my training.” If it helps, pretend you’re late for something.

This may seem like a lot to remember – only you already know it. Just practice articulating behavior, context and intuition silently in your head and you will begin to create a consciousness around it. Once you create that consciousness, it will be relatively easy to pick out the cues of Intent, Interview and Positioning.

Non-Violent Disruption

Now that you know what Positioning looks like and how to articulate it, how do you Disrupt him before he gets into Position?

Obviously in real life rather than a classroom violence can get you into trouble even if you are in the right. It’s only your opinion after all. If you are female against a male you have a better chance of convincing people you were the one in danger, but let’s agree that if you can get away without leaving your fingerprints on the murder weapon it is preferable.

At the Positioning stage, talking is unlikely to help. He has already Interviewed you and determined you have what he wants. Some people recommend vomiting or acting crazy, but I have yet to meet anyone who can vomit on command and crazy people are attacked and raped all the time. In face, mentally ill and handicapped people are groups at high risk of abuse. If you have complete conviction, there may be situations in which you can Disrupt by bluffing. You might look over the criminals shoulder, yell police, or say something about that being the third unmarked car in that last few minutes. It is possible that some version of this might do the trick, but you had better be an excellent actor even under duress. If it works, he was probably either still interviewing you or he wasn’t highly motivated.

Running

Let’s discuss the art of the quick getaway. Once you realize you are in danger, you want to act quickly. One of the best strategies is to get out of the situation. Move. Make like a tree and leave. It’s pretty hard to get into trouble if you’re not there. If your chosen strategy is running, practice it. I don’t mean train for the Olympics or run a marathon, I mean practice sprinting. See how quickly you can take off. Practice against someone else, preferably someone bigger than you are, with bigger muscles and longer legs. Running away is a completely legitimate and honorable self defense technique! But you need to know how good you are. Running may not be your thing. If it isn’t, don’t count on it working for you in a pinch. Adrenaline doesn’t always make you super fast or super strong, sometimes it makes your legs weak and wobbly.

Noise

Screaming can get attention if you are in an area where screaming gets attention. There are places where people ignore car alarms, cities usually. If you are at a ballgame no one may notice. A good blood-curdling scream might create an opening for escape by jarring your assailant. But you must have an escape plan since screaming alone won’t necessarily cause him to end his plan to harm you, it might even cause him to harm you faster.

Another option is a sort of bark that off-balances him – a big loud guttural sound. You want to engage his flinch response. While he is recovering from the jamming of his signals, you should be running away, closing and locking the door, jumping out the window, whatever. This is more easily accomplished by men with deeper voices. I myself have not garnered anything but a kind of stare, whereas Rory Miller once demonstrated his barbaric yalp, which had the desired effect on my flinch response.

If you have a whistle use that, but if I were reaching into my bag for something and I thought I was in danger, it wouldn’t be a whistle.

All bets are off in practice. I wouldn’t count on a strategy like making noise if I had other options. Certainly use noise in addition to other things. But we are talking about non-violent options that might save us from having to fight our way out of a life-threatening situation and there aren’t many of them. If you don’t have an escape plan, all of this noise is of course contingent on whether or not there is anyone helpful around you to hear it.

Next, we Disengage the Attack….

Social Conditioning: Women & Violence, Part II – Tammy Yard-McCracken, Pys.D.

Rabbit Trail

I suspect there is an intellectual drift in our thinking as professionals in the world of violence. Whether it is as force professionals, martial art instructors, self-defense instructors, or etc., human nature is to normalize what we learn from experience and training. Once normalized, there is an unconscious judgment that wants to wiggle into our thinking. If we know it, then it must be common knowledge.

Really? Why? Remember how it is that you do, in fact, know better.

The social rules, the subconscious expectations many women follow unconsciously every day, have some obvious and significant implications when women face a violent encounter. These same rules will show up on the mat and on the range if she decides to train for personal protection. (How and what that looks like is better left to a different dialogue.)

These five case examples can be easily used to highlight how social rules set her up as a perfect target. If we stop there, the implication is pretty damning. Up side? There are a couple of hidden superpowers tucked inside what looks like a perpetual-victim default.

Here’s one, and it comes with a hell of a lot of gravitas. Once she slips the leash, she is all in.

I have a theory on this.

She grows up on social rules that can make her a pretty good mark. The flip side? She does NOT grow up with the social rules defining how a fight is supposed to go. She doesn’t spend her days wrestling and playing King of the Hill. She doesn’t get socialized on the football field and she doesn’t learn what a tap-out means on the wrestling mat. She is chided severely if she attempts to solve conflict the way 10 year old boys do by throwing a couple of wild punches and rolling on the ground. She doesn’t play with green army men who blow each other up with mud bombs.

If she does, it may be because she grew up in a neighborhood like mine where most of the kids my age were boys. If I wanted to play, I had to play the games that were running. Even here, she will hear comments about ‘letting the girl play’ and it will be the exception, not the rule.

She does not know the rules to male conflict and violence because she doesn’t grow up playing the games teaching the rules. If she played those games, she will understand it was by special permission and it really isn’t her game. She is only a guest. Consequence? She won’t generalize the rules of war to her own belief system.

These rules are not built in to her internal infrastructure. When she goes physical – she is in uncharted territory and she will do whatever has even the slightest chance of keeping her alive– there are no rules to follow because she was not socialized to the rules. There is a better than average chance her Threat expects her to follow the social rules of being female: acquiesce, be polite, hesitate, ask for permission. There is an equally decent chance the Threat does not expect to encounter a rabid chipmunk, or as one of my students recently said “an unleashed crazy-bitch”.

If she is armed? Like the first two case studies, she is far more likely to fire until the magazine is empty than she is to get off a couple of rounds and stop to see if she hit her target.

Unarmed? If there isn’t anyone nearby to pull her off, she may blow right by the boundary of when a “reasonable” person would disengage. Particularly if her children have been threatened. She will risk her own life without a moment’s hesitation to save her tiny humans.

Earlier, I mentioned a correlation between adrenaline rates and gender. We need to revisit it again. Rory Miller posits a theory for the gender-based adrenalizination delay; it resonates (R. Miller, personal communication, 2015). If his hypothesis bears any credence, combining the two theories has a doubly deleterious impact on women when a physical solution becomes necessary.

Here’s my summary of Rory’s theory on why women experience the adrenaline delay. When we were hunter-gatherer tribes the able-bodied men would be gone for weeks at a time following herds for enough kill to feed the tribe into the future. Left behind are the aged men, the children, and the women. Turn this into the able-bodied men leaving the village for war, in both circumstances if a Threat gets to the tribe, the women are the last line of defense.

It is on her to ensure the next generation lives to a reproductive age. Knowing this, she will go physical with an unfettered, vicious ferocity.

One theory is rooted social psychology; the other is rooted in evolutionary need. In both, once she goes physical she is all in.

I have seen a full sized dog high-tale it in the opposite direction when attacked by a 10-pound cat that thought her kittens were in danger. One good bite and the cat would be done, but the dog was uninterested in the risk it would cost to try. Superpower number one in action.

Superpower number two. She is smart. Not that men aren’t, this is not a comparative dynamic so if you are itching to argue – take a breath. The center of the brain that processes fine details and retains them with attachment to meaning has more neuronal connections than the average male brain (Brizendine, 2006). A Cornell study (Wong, 2013) is a little less definitive as to the why women have this capacity but the science in the Cornell study may be a tad more sound than Brizendine’s suppositions.

Wong and Brizendine agree with an important bottom line: women attend to, retain, and recall details at a remarkable level of accuracy. As a natural process, this ability is far more dominate in women than in men.

A possible explanation for this reality ties into Rory’s suggestion about evolutionary need. Village and tribal life puts her on her own for long periods of time with others to provide for, to feed and nurture. Considering sociological anthropology as a perspective, there are probably a few men in the group and hances are, they are elderly or otherwise unable to physically endure the rigors of a hunt. If they couldn’t hunt, they are not going to be much help to her if violence shows up on the village’s metaphoric doorstep.

If she’s trekking out to the berry patch she may have tiny humans in tow and one strapped to her back. Running and fighting in the event of a stalking predator (animal or human) is automatically compromised by her circumstances. Her chances of survival, and the survival of her offspring goes way up if she notices the tiny nuances of the well-worn path that are different than they were on her last pass. A new print in the dirt, blades of grass bent the wrong direction, absence of prey animals, birds fall quiet or take to wing behind her…a soft sound that wasn’t in her hearing a moment ago…

For this information to matter she must have three things available. She must have a context for what the information means (prior learning), she must notice the fine details, and she must do the math (match memory to the context).

Dial this forward to lifestyles that are more common to us in 2015, how many of you can relate to this?

Him: What? You never told me your mother was coming in this weekend! It’s your mother (or whatever the situation is), I guarantee if you had told me that I would have remembered.

Her: Really? Seriously? How can you NOT remember this conversation! You were standing with your hand on the fridge door looking for something to eat in that blue shirt I bought you for your birthday two years ago. You looked at me and rolled your eyes and then you said ______________. Then you shrugged your shoulders and went out to the garage to work on the lawn mower.

Him: Silence – thinking…what the hell? What blue shirt?

Or, try this one.

Him: Hey, do you know where the charger to my old mp3 player is?

Her: When did you last have it?

Him: I don’t know, I can’t remember. You know, the old one.

Her: Silence, thinking. Look in the drawer in the hallway or on the shelves in the corner of the your closet. If it’s not there, it’s probably in your…..

And she is usually right, isn’t she?

She remembers the details, stores them and assigns meaning to them. She does this with people and behavior too. If you have read DeBecker’s work, or you work in an industry like mine where you get to hear story after story of victim events, you know this:

Her intuition told her something was wrong.

This intuition is not magical. It is biological. It is this powerful capacity to manage details, remember them and use them instantaneously, unconsciously. She cannot always articulate how or why she knows what she knows, but she knows. This makes her capable of a marked degree of tactical intelligence.

And the question that wants to be asked next is this: if she is naturally, tactically intelligent, why doesn’t she use it? Why did she get raped, stalked, why did she ask permission to fire?

Both superpowers can get tangled in the sticky web of social conditioning; sometimes to the degree she may not be able to access them at all. This doesn’t mean her superpowers disappeared. Slowly, over a lifetime of experiences, they have been lulled into a deep sleep.

That’s the good news. If those superpowers are still there and they are only sleeping, we can wake them up again.

The Self Defense Continuum Part III – Teja Van Wicklen

Disrupt His Position

“Never let the enemy pick the battle site.” ~ General Patton

In past issues of The Conflict Manager we covered the beginning concepts of The Self Defense Continuum. We discussed what it is to Decide to Spot Criminal Intent and how to Deter at the Interview Stage. The next phase of the Continuum is the Positioning Stage which is a particularly volatile point in a criminal transaction. Every step we take in the Continuum removes opportunities for us to detect criminal intent and extract ourselves from the situation.

In the Positioning Stage a criminal puts himself and/or you in place for a successful attack. I should say criminal or criminals, because, remember these guys sometimes work together. The idea that there is safety in numbers goes both ways.

To take a step back, the Interview can take place over the phone, by watching only or up close and personal. An Interview which takes place face-to-face or even in the same room may put a shady character in Position already, unless the room happens to be a police station or is in some other way unsuitable. A criminal with Intent who is in already in Position after a successful Interview will Attack unless something pretty significant changes that makes it unsafe for him to attack you. Because of this, somewhere between the Interview and Positioning Stages, will be the last available moment that allows you the space to avoid violence rather than extract yourself from it. Avoidance is to walk away, extrication is to have to exert more energy and undertake more risk. Positioning is the dividing point between Before and During on the Self Defense Continuum. This is why we need to carefully choose who we get into the car with and what the circumstances are. It may be the last choice we make in the Positioning stage. The next stage is quite a bit messier.

We are specifically discussing physical attacks, but this information translates to other types of crime as well. Online the Positioning stage might involve a predator asking progressively more personal questions or sharing something that makes you in turn more open to sharing. He is working you into a Position in which he can successfully ask you to share something extremely personal or even for a live meeting. Again, he or they will use whatever works. Marc MacYoung, who created the 5 Stages, says that a predator, doesn’t usually want to fight, he wants to confuse and overwhelm his victim. This goes for both online and in person situations. A criminal doesn’t want you to have the opportunity to fight back (or shut down communications) at all. He wants to overwhelm you with charm, force or whatever works best for his purposes, leaving you no time or inclination to reason.

A discussion of predatory positioning would not be complete without a mention of Fringe Areas. I am not implying that Fringe Areas are the only places Positioning happens but they do constitute a large portion of the places violence occurs.

A Fringe area is a place on the periphery or on the way to and from somewhere else, hallways, stairways, shortcuts, elevators, alleys, parking lots, garages, etc. Anyplace something can happen and no one can hear you or get to you in time is a Fringe Area. Home can be a fringe area for victims of Domestic Violence or during a home invasion. The inside of a house is secluded and private, the way we like it when we shower and sleep. Criminals like privacy too.

Fringe Areas can also be temporary or transient. An office building might only be on the fringe after hours. A bathroom at a club is a common Fringe Area when the music is too loud or everyone too stoned to hear you or do anything. The back of a bus is on the Fringe if everyone is up front or the driver is distracted by a car accident. The closed room of a house during a party is another common Fringe Area.

Criminals are intimately familiar with these places and we are not. They are like fish looking up at bugs on the surface of the water. You can see them there, but only if you practice noticing.

5 Positioning Strategies by Marc MacYoung

What does it look like when a person or group Positions for an Attack? Marc MacYoung came up with Five Positioning Strategies to watch for. These are the most common documented strategies criminals use to get close to you.

Closing

The first strategy, called Closing, as in closing distance, is virtually identical to the Regular Interview we discussed in the previous installment of the Self Defense Continuum. Again, you can see how closely related the Interview and Positioning stages can be. In Closing, as in the Regular Interview, a potential criminal approaches you in need of something like a light or directions.

Obviously, not everyone asking for directions is after you, but at the moment you feel your intuition whispering in your ear and a stranger happens to be either close or getting there, you can at the very least, choose not to be distracted. Your natural alerts should of course be augmented if you are alone, in a Fringe Area, pregnant, in charge of young or disabled people, lost, it is dark or any one of the other environmental or situational arrangements that causes a measure of vulnerability.

We have ways of reading body language and intent. A person who really needs directions does not “feel” the same as a person who doesn’t but who is approaching you on that pretext. There are subtleties of eye movement, peripheral attention, expression and determination that can be read if we are aware of our own and other people’s cues. This is why it is so crucial to the practice of self defense that we learn to articulate our instincts and apprehensions.

Cornering or Trapping

The next Positioning Strategy is called Cornering or Trapping. The potential criminal approaches you from a direction that traps you between him and a large object, like a wall. This usually means he is blocking an exit as well. He has thought this out while you were shopping.

For obvious reasons you want to be especially savvy about this strategy, which requires general awareness of where you are and where any and all exits are. An accomplice might be waiting behind one of the doors. Know where all the exits are, not just one.

Surprise

The Surprise strategy is that ‘holy crap!’ moment of the movie where the guy appears in the back seat of the car or the closet. You don’t see him until it’s too late.

Notice covered and concealment. Avoid the hiding spots or keep your distance, especially when you are alone. Don’t walk too close to parked cars or doorways, walk down the middle of the sidewalk.

Pincer

The next positioning strategy is known as Pincer. We know that criminals sometimes work in teams or gangs and Pincer is an effective strategy when they do.

Pincer takes several forms:

Two or more people suddenly split up as they approach you. You may have see this when kids split up to harass or bully another kid. It is highly disconcerting to engage several people at once, one of whom is behind you.
One thug engages you from the front using the first positioning strategy we called Closing, and the other blindsides you or grabs your bag.
Two guys face each other across a narrow walkway so you have to walk in between them.

Surrounding

Finally there is Surrounding, which Marc tells us is most common with three or more thugs. You walk through or along a group of guys and suddenly you are in the middle. They may hang out in a sort of line, as in leaning against a wall, so the front guy can wait for you while the last follows behind as you pass. Sometimes they swarm quickly, but often they drift around you. They are hedging their bets in case they have chosen the wrong person. They may also be trying to look nonchalant, that is, not suspicious to anyone who might be watching.

WHAT YOU DON’T KNOW ABOUT WOMEN’S SELF DEFENSE COULD HURT YOU, Part II – Teja Van Wicklen

In business, we find our niche first and then create the product around that niche. In architecture, we build the building for what it has to do and the people who have to live or work in the structure. We don’t build a hospital the same way we build an apartment building or a library. The very specific issues women face mean that, to increase our leverage, strength and skill in protecting ourselves, to reach the heights we need to reach to be safe in the world as it is now and to excel, women don’t just need a taller ladder than men do, we need wings.

Here are some things that are wrong with women’s self defense in general:

Martial arts – the origin of self-defense – has been created by men out of ancient war arts often involving often antiquated weapons and/or horseback, and handed down mostly unchanged over generations. Many so called self-defense styles have failed to evolve with the times. Self defense has been retrofitted in an effort to suit the needs of modern women, but really it was built for something entirely different.
Modern self-defense classes tend to spend a majority of time training for fair fights.
When a man attacks a woman, it is rarely a fair fight. Fighting fair can put you at a fatal disadvantage. When Instructors do discuss or attempt to recreate unfair attacks, a number of things go wrong. They either spend a very small percentage of overall time on the complex issues, oversimplify the dangers, or extrapolate from their own situation and training and come up with answers based on the false premise of man-on-man violence or matched size violence.
Instructors also tend to focus on altercations between people who are facing one another, rather than one blind-siding the other or using charm or the element of surprise to get into position for a crime.
Today’s self-defense is often disconnected from everyday realities, like kids, strollers, overwork, physical handicaps, lack-of-sleep, age, illness, arthritis, depression, distraction, travel, traffic, pregnancy. Life! For reasons such as insurance premiums and convenience, self-defense is almost always practiced by people in comfortable clothing on smooth floors. No obstacles, no furniture, no cars, wind, rain or darkness. All of these things must be part of your consciousness or it will be like learning to drive by playing a video game.
Due to the popularity of stunt-heavy Hollywood movies and sports martial arts, we often see a lot of cool, creative moves I call Finesse Techniques that are more acrobatic than practical. These techniques might work for someone somewhere under very particular circumstances, but a self defense technique you depend on to save your life should be like a good doctor – reliable as much of the time as possible.
Self-defense is often unhealthy for our bodies, which is in direct conflict with safety, since bad health and injury put us statistically more at risk than most other things.
Martial arts and self-defense classes are often more about following a leader than expanding our own minds. And what could be safer than seeing and understanding more? If you ever find yourself in a martial arts class – or a relationship of any kind – where you are discouraged from thinking and asking questions, don’t just get annoyed, get out.
Most people think kicking and punching is the main aspect of self defense. In general, modern self-defense is primarily concerned with the moment of the attack and neglects the Before and After. It leaves out all the things we can do that will diminish our presence on the criminal radar and neglects the aftermath, where stress can affect us adversely and cause us to make things worse. Self defense is more about good decision-making under stress than any other single idea or physical technique.
Self defense is about empowerment. That’s a big word these days. We all want to feel empowered to be who we want to be and to take the world by storm. But HOW we do it is important and rarely addressed. Blind or reckless empowerment can get you in trouble if you think it means being assertive out of context. Not that plenty of people aren’t better off for having learned a few moves, but I think we can do a lot better. We love to hear about the grandma who fought off an attacker who tried to take her purse, but the fact is there are hundreds of other versions of this story that went badly.

New Women’s Self Defense should…

…have aspects of martial arts, but also psychology, sociology, health and fitness, among other things.
… include the study of trickery, goal oriented and criminal behavior.
- … cover attacks the way they are most often perpetrated against women or whomever the class is meant to address. Men, women and children are attacked in different ways, under different circumstances.
- …be based in reality. It should take into account the kids, strollers physical handicaps and other craziness life is made up of.
- … be simple to perform and to remember. When your mind and body are under extreme stress they respond very differently than they do in a class under controlled circumstances. Time both slows down and speeds up. You freeze, you fail to hear someone right next to you calling your name, you drop things involuntarily. You’re unlikely to be able to remember, let alone execute, a series of intricate movements, even with years of practice.
- …involve strengthening muscles and improving coordination and range of motion so our bodies get stronger and work better. What point is self defense if you are your own worst enemy, daily grinding yourself into dust.
- … encourage us to think for ourselves and to question everything. An instructor should be a guide and a roll model, not a disciplinarian. A roll model should NEVER discourage us from forming ideas about our own protection.
- …cover the Before, During and After of a crime event or emergency, rather than just the During.
- …instill a healthy form of empowerment so you can be a big dog in spite of your size. You shouldn’t feel you need to bark right away. You want the space and peace of mind to sit back, watch and evaluate before making your decision. This is the essence of true empowerment. Self-defense should be a place women can draw strength from.
- …include knowledge, tools and games women can pass on to their children, for obvious reasons. Imagine a daughter who won’t give a good-looking but predatory guy a second look, or who won’t allow peer-pressure to cause her to drink or have sex when she doesn’t want to, or who will never accept a drink she didn’t see the bartender mix. Imagine a son who has the decision-making skills not to do a favor for a friend that might get him into trouble. Or a son who stands up for his female friends even if it might cause him to lose face with his peers – a son who sets standards rather than following dysfunctional ideals of manhood.
- …give us the means to practice daily in our heads or in small moments since we cant always get to a regular class. In other words self defense training should be scenario-based so it isn’t dependent solely on practicing physical techniques but on mental prowess and an understanding of situations, danger and how emergencies form. We need to cultivate the ability to extrapolate and learn from the mini dangers we experience every day.
- …be about anxiety mitigation since worry and anxiety make us more susceptible to crime. Self-defense needs to help us name our worries and fears, put them into context and then remove the unproductive ones from our daily plate. This also makes real dangers easier to identify when the worry noise isn’t so loud.
- …put Preparation in an exulted position as part of a daily routine. Preparation for the day, contingency plans, CPR training, etc. can all be made part of basic knowledge and life training.
- If the highest goal of self-defense is to learn to protect yourself and your family from
violent crime and the threat of death or severe bodily harm, then clearly it should train and utilize mental skills above all else, since avoidance is always preferable to survival and healing after the fact. Staying out of trouble first, getting out of trouble only if the first fails.

Protective Offense, The New Self Defense

Let’s take this concept of self defense even further and give it a new name. “Self defense” is how you describe to the judge why you hit him with the baseball bat. Let’s reserve it for legal matters. The “self” in self defense leaves out others we are responsible for and the word “defense” is too reactionary. What we want is something inclusive of the people who need us that is both more proactive and more powerful.

Protective Offense is the term I’ve been using for about ten years now-Offense with the emphasis on “Off”. When I hear Protective Offense, I think offense for the purpose of self-defense, “Offense” as in Chess or football, seeing and thinking a few moves ahead, projecting your desired outcome and being able to map a course and make changes on the fly, being aware of patterns.

When I did TaeKwonDo, in my teens and twenties, I attracted more than one drunken doofus. As it turned out, what I really needed then wasn’t a stronger side kick, but a brain. Actually, what I needed was for the guy not to be bothering me at all, but that goes more to a discussion of effecting culture. Looking back, the guy who came at me in a club when I was 19 and wouldn’t let go, was pushy, not dangerous, and by kicking him I could have escalated the situation to something physical when I would have done better by keeping my emotions at bay, smiling, telling him I needed to go to the bathroom, and then disappearing. After I pointed him out to the bouncer.

My good friend Karim Hajee like to say, “Trouble doesn’t happen to us, it happens because of us.”

If strength were the only important resource we would all be out of luck. The bigger, stronger person would always win. And that isn’t the case. Things like instinct, determination, will to live and resourcefulness play a huge part in survival. In the wild, smaller animals scare off and outsmart larger, stronger ones all the time. Dealing with crap is part of life and dealing with it physically is not usually the best way. Since women are rarely stronger than men it’s a good thing we have lots of other resources to draw on. We need to get back in touch with those skills and hone them. Civilization supplies us with HGTV and heated seats, but an unfortunate side effect is that we put way too much responsibility on others for our safety and decision-making. Police, lawyers and doctors can all do their jobs better if we do our part.

What If….? – Andrea Harkins

What If….?

What if you are attacked?

What if someone sticks a knife in your back?

What if you don’t know how to defend yourself?

“What ifs” are terrible. They are projections of situations and scenarios that may never happen. They increase fear and make you anxious and leave you feeling uneasy all the time. There are many ways to teach self-defense and many angles from which you can draw information and conclusions, but none include the elusive “what ifs.”

I’ve been a “what if” person for a long time. It just comes naturally. “What if my car breaks down? What if I can’t afford to pay that bill? What if I get sick? What if I get lost?”

Finally, one day, I realized that I was projecting a great amount of fear and negativity into my life by thinking about events that were just in my mind. In some cases, I think I even subconsciously jinxed myself in order to achieve my relentless, contrived negative prophesies and predictions. Negativity can work that way. It starts to impose on your life and builds up so much momentum that before you know it, you know no other way. Your guard is down.

Another way that “what ifs” work against you are examined in the questions I posed in the beginning of this article. These are self-projections that are not set in fact or fiction, but in fear. When you struggle with fear, you automatically lower your defenses and expose your vulnerabilities. People do not realize that “what ifs” create undue fearful emotions that hinder real self-defense. These “what if’s” strategically replace awareness and self-confidence with worry and anxiety. I can tell you right now that neither worry, nor anxiety, has ever saved a person’s life in an attack situation.

Think about how you feel when you are scared; or, even more importantly, how you look. Your face contorts almost unknowingly. In the eyes of a perpetrator, you become the perfect victim. You’re “what ifs” that you thought were preparing you, were actually bathing you in fear and working against you. A perpetrator can use this to his advantage because fear is noticeable, and he will immediately target you as a potential, easy victim.

Those self-absorbed with fear have difficulty standing their ground when the time comes. Emotions and thoughtless reactions work in unison to welcome defeat; the better equipped individual is the one who takes action to eliminate unnecessary fear, and strengthen his awareness. Instead of injecting fear or playing out scenarios that may never happen, it is best to take control of vulnerabilities by doing something that makes sense.

Take action.

The actions that can take place, that will better prepare someone for defense than “what ifs,” are many. If you are an instructor, or someone who just cares about solid safety values and a strong mindset, here’s exactly what you should share with all who have not thought through how to be prepared through “actions” and not “what if’s.”

Take a Self-Defense class. Self-defense is inherently different from martial arts, although some martial art techniques may filter through. The difficulty with self-defense classes is that women are afraid of them! Yes, they are fearful of not knowing what to expect, so if the class can be entertaining, refreshing, and right on point about true defense, a woman is more likely to attend. These generally attract non-martial artists, so fitness levels, interests, and reasons for attending vary. This is number one on the list. Fear can be decreased through the actions involved in learning a viable self-defense system.

2. Try a martial art. Yes, they are different than self-defense courses, but they do offer some valuable tools and techniques. I’ve been a martial artist for twenty-six years and also teach some components of martial arts that include grabs and escapes. I can kick high, if I want, but true defense only needs a good kick to the knee or groin. Discerning where and how to kick, if that is part of your defense strategy, has nothing to do with height or speed, but more to do with accuracy. Wrist locks, head locks, grabs, and other offensive holds all have escapes that can be learned. Plus, martial arts training helps with self-confidence factors and resilience, both of which mean a great deal in defense situations.

3. Utilize Resources. Direct your friends, students, and families to resources that you trust. There may be websites, books, or on-line materials that you’ve read and with which you agree. There is a plethora of social media outlets these days where questions from simple to complex can be asked and answered. Everyone has an opinion so no need to accept everything as fact, but something might just make sense for exactly what you need. Don’t hoard. Give up your great tools and resources to others who can really use them.

4. Practice. Even if you have taken a self-defense or martial art class, they can be for nothing if they are not practiced. Self-defense courses can be short, maybe even a few hours. A refresher each year is a must. A martial art takes a while to really learn. Movements and gestures only make sense after a while of application. The key to strengthening defense here, is practice.

4. Read Inspiring Tales. Nothing hits home like reading a true story about someone whose self-defense saved their life. What happened? What did they think? How did they react? What kind of confidence erupted? Learning from others, being inspired and motivated by their situations, can quickly kick-start self-defense thoughts into action.

Final words of advice to share:

Take action and remove the crazy “what ifs” from your life. Arm yourself with simple but strong self-defense concepts. By increasing self-confidence and controlling fear, you become more aware of who you are and of what you are capable.

I don’t know how you plan to proceed, but my goal is to eliminate “what ifs” from my thoughts. They are detrimental and stifling and don’t allow me to clearly see the opportunities I have to learn more about self-defense and awareness. If you are an instructor of self-defense or a martial art, you have a responsibility to give your students a fighting chance. Help them to know that real concepts, real actions, real defenses, can help them; but, “what ifs” will always hold them back from understanding awareness and self-protection, and maybe even prevent them from saving their lives. Instead, do the one thing that will really help.

Take Action.

WHAT YOU DON’T KNOW ABOUT WOMEN’S SELF DEFENSE COULD HURT YOU, PART I – By Teja Van Wicklen

Let’s admit it, women’s self defense is old and tired, it can’t take care of itself, let alone anyone else. What ails it? A dependence on ancient techniques? A blind spot in society? A disconnect between teacher and student? Reluctance to go back to the drawing board? Or all of the above and more.

Two thousand years ago women’s empowerment, self-actualization and freedom of movement weren’t high on the agenda. That doesn’t explain why we are still stuck. Why aren’t female instructors doing more? And why isn’t there more of a demand? Many women are still guilty of thinking that self defense is the same as kickboxing, or that if the police would just do their job, we wouldn’t need all this crazy violent self defense talk and we could just live our lives.

With a modern overhaul women’s self defense could be a grand tool of autonomy. With kids learning from their parents, or early on in school, we could see a drastic decrease in violence against women, epidemic the world over. If we thought of self defense as a series of mental and physical tools that directly addressed the realities of crime today, we might see things change for the better.

I see a class where, through roll play, women, mothers and daughters learn the simple tells and tricks of emotionally unstable people and hardened criminals, so they can identify behavior before it becomes a problem. Students would learn that a man who insists on helping and won’t give in is disregarding their authority and that any self-respecting person responds to the word “no”. Girls would know the many ploys a criminal might use to begin a conversation, get her to share a ride, or borrow her cell so he can call himself and capture her number for a rainy day. A freshman letting loose her first weeks in college would know that no matter how good-looking a man is he may still be a predator and that although he says he knows her friend he may just be a good listener. A woman would know how to fight like a pitbull using every object in reach as a weapon should anyone ever pull a knife and try to coerce her into a car. She would know the statistics are loud and clear that once she’s in that car she’s going to a place of the criminal’s choosing and there’s very likely no coming back.

Unfortunately those who really need self defense training aren’t getting it. Women only look for answers once they’ve been attacked and need to regain a sense of autonomy as part of the healing process. Or they go to a kickboxing class for exercise and a quick infusion of empowerment. For the record, kickboxing isn’t self defense. Kicking in the air is nothing at all like kicking a man who’s fighting back. Most guys barely notice it when I kick them and I have 30 years of training and break six inches of pine with my side kick.

The study of physical movements without an understanding of context, can be dangerous. False empowerment can cause us to jump into situations we aren’t ready to handle, and a lack of understanding about the before, during and after of an emergency, can mean we get in too deep before realizing we had other options. There is so much more women can do to protect themselves and their loved ones than kick and punch. We need a four-dimensional view of self defense – the mental, emotional, temporal and then finally, pointed physical options as a last resort.

Many instructors will talk about self-defense being ninety percent mental, but that’s not what you get in class. That’s because learning to listen to your own brain whizzing away and cultivating the self awareness the enables you to fix things about yourself that get you into trouble, are much more time consuming and complex than any physical technique could ever be. And because this kind of thinking is difficult to teach, it isn’t being taught. Some of this kind of knowledge is available in sports and military endeavors – a team mentality, watching each other’s backs, understanding aggression, quick decision making in which injury or death is at stake. As such, mostly men have had access to it.

There are an infinite number of possible crime scenarios. No number of physical techniques will answer all the variations. Chess players know there are more combinations of chess pieces on a board than atoms in the universe. Crime is an ever-changing game of strategy that requires constant adaptation. And, life is even more complex. We have to learn to think, to see and to make quick, constructive decisions sometimes under intense pressure.

Women are not only smaller and weaker than their attackers, they are conditioned to react to asocial behavior, like threats, with social behavior, like kindness or self deprecation. A woman might be pregnant or responsible for multiple children. Gangs and fraternities work in teams against unsuspecting and weaker individuals. For all of these reasons women’s self defense can’t just be a different version of men’s self defense, it needs to be a different species.

Why Personal Safety Rules Simply Don’t Work – Gershon Ben Keron

Many people believe that personal safety is little more than formalized common sense, and that by following a few sensible rules it is possible to thwart the plans of those who intend to cause us harm. They will gladly accept the top 10 safety tips that some magazine posts, and nod as they read each one, without questioning the credentials of the author, and whether these “tips” are the result of a study, or even somebody’s experiences (and experience by its very nature is limited). As long as the advice given makes sense, then it of course must be true. Whenever I do personal safety seminars and training for beginners, I come up against these rules all the time.

New students might insist that you can tell when somebody’s lying to you because they look away, that if you’re talking on your mobile phone you’re safe because somebody knows where you are etc. Every predatory individual we are trying to protect ourselves from, knows these rules, and has a plan to navigate round them; the pedophile soccer coach who is taking your child to see a professional game, will look you squarely in the eye as they tell you that no harm will come to your kid, and the sexual assailant who is looking to rape you knows full well that they can commit their assault before the person on the other end of the phone can get to you, or get others to you, etc. Next time you read an article on personal safety (including this one) be aware that there is probably a predatory individual reading it as well, and arming themselves with the same knowledge, but for very different reasons.

Even the rules that we think we would never bend, that we believe we’d always adhere to, can be broken if we are dealing with a skilled social predator. If you asked every woman who had ever gotten into a car with a stranger, let a stranger into her home, etc. and been assaulted as a result, if beforehand she would do such a thing; I guarantee they’d emphatically say no. This is not to blame these individuals for their actions, but to illustrate that these predators understand the rules we work to, and know how to either get us to break them, or to think that they don’t apply in the context in which we are interacting with them. You might think you’d never get into a car with a stranger, and if you’re thinking of a situation where a driver pulls up next to you and asks you to get in, you’re probably right – however few predators will target adults in such a direct manner, and prefer to create a situation where you would “willingly” get into their car, maybe because it would be socially awkward not to.

Imagine that you have met someone on the internet, on a dating site, and have arranged to go out for a meal with them, and towards the end of the meal they say, “This has been a really great evening, I’ve not had so much fun in a long time, it would be a shame to end the night now. I know a great bar across town, why don’t we go and have a drink there?” Throughout the course of the meal with this charming and interesting guy (yes, that’s the profile of many predatory individuals), you’ve been hoping that he’d ask you on another date, and it seems that he just has. He’s got you to want what he wants; something that many predators will work towards. This includes the pedophile soccer coach who wants to take your child to see a professional game – you’d love to take them, however you simply don’t have the time to do so, but fortunately this guy does and wants to and because of this you are willing to bend a few rules that you wouldn’t think you’d be prepared to do – why should your child lose out on this experience?

Getting back to the date scenario – as you walk out to the parking lot/carpark to get your car to drive to this bar, and have a final drink, your date says, “Tell you what, let’s take my car. It’s not the easiest place to find, and I can be designated driver.” You want to go with them to the bar and it would be awkward to refuse the ride; after all, they might be offended if you’re insistent about taking your own car. It would be very easy to convince yourself that your rule doesn’t really apply in this situation; is your date really a stranger? They seem so nice, and you have already spent the better part of an evening with them, with no ill result. With this reasoning, you may well find yourself getting into a car with a stranger.

Personal Safety Rules, just don’t work. Skilled predators can quite easily get us to convince ourselves that they don’t apply to a particular situation. Also, the more times we break a rule, and there is no consequence to doing so, the less relevant that rule seems to be. Let’s say you move to a new house, and there are two ways to access it: one is a well-lit route, enjoying natural surveillance, whilst the other means you have to go down a dark alley – the advantage being that it takes you half the time to get to your house. Normally, you take the hit on the time and use the safer route but one day, because you’re in a hurry, you chance the dark alley. On this occasion nothing happens. You still prefer, and believe you’re safer using the other route, but you’ve broken your rule of, “don’t walk down dark alleyways” without suffering any consequences.

After several more occasions of breaking your rule, you conclude that the dark alleyway is actually safe, and it becomes your default route; and it is safe, until the time it isn’t, and that’s the time you get assaulted. Our society is generally safe, and that allows us to do unsafe things, a lot of the time without disastrous endings, and the more times we break the rules that we believe will keep us safe, the more we become convinced that the rule doesn’t apply to us or our/a particular situation.

There are also times when it may be in our best interest to break a rule. Imagine that you are walking home, and just before you get to the entrance to the dark alley (that you have yet never taken, because you favor the well-lit route back), you notice that a large scale fight has broken out on the street that you normally walk down. You now have a choice, you can go down the dark alley, or you can keep walking towards the street fight. In such a situation – although it may be somewhat contrived – it makes more sense to ignore your rule of not walking down dark alleyways, rather than to blindly stick to it. In this instance you will have ignored the rule, and made a dynamic risk assessment of the situation that you have found yourself in, and this is how we should deal with all our personal safety issues and concerns.

Rather than blindly following rules, we should seek to understand the situations that we find ourselves in, and understand the processes that violent predators use. Armed with this knowledge, we don’t need to rely on our flawed common sense and specific rules, for our personal safety. We can question why a single male in their mid 20’s is so interested in taking our child to a soccer match that we can’t, we can understand why our date is so insistent, and is working so hard to get us into their car. It takes effort to make risk assessments, and it’s not as simple as blindly following our common sense (a skilled predator will be able to make everything make sense to us), but it’s the only way of truly ensuring our safety. On the one hand, we are fortunate that the relative safety of our world allows us to get it wrong so many times when we follow our rules, without suffering any consequences, however this does not mean that we or our rules are right, or should be trusted.

When you make a dynamic risk assessment, you need to first consider whether you are facing a High Risk situation, or one that contains Unknown Risks. If you have to make a risk assessment, then you are not in a low risk situation, and thinking in terms of low risk, will only get you to drop your guard. If it is a high risk situation, how can you mitigate these risks? Could you go with your kid to the soccer match (personal safety does take effort) or take them to another one? If it’s somebody offering you a ride, assess your relationship to them – do you know how they will act and behave in this situation? If you’ve just met them, then the answer is definitely no. Forget the rules, and think about the risks.

Mental Models – Teja Van Wicklen

Wherever You Go, There You Are:

Mental Models and Emergency Management Skills

You are walking down a familiar block. You have lived in this area all your life, the buildings, lampposts and trees are as familiar as the inside of your house. You turn a corner and there is an immense park where your house and your friend’s houses used to be. You were only gone for twenty minutes so this reality isn’t possible. It’s like someone erased your world and put something else here. You stare, close your eyes, open them, try to reconcile the discrepancy. Your brain hangs in the space between what should be and what is. Then you start to panic….

In Deep Survival, Laurence Gonzales talks about Mental Models, an important element in understanding why some people, trained or not, survive emergencies while others don’t. Mental Models are short cuts the brain creates–maps of people, places and things we count on so we can make other more urgent decisions like, whether to cross the street against the light. Early in the book Gonzales talks about how mental models work, “You scour the house looking for your copy of Moby Dick and you remember it being a red paper back book but you don’t know where you left it. When you search, you don’t examine every item in the house, that would be tedious…” He explains that your mental model of the red paper back allows you to screen out everything else, but that if you are wrong and it’s a blue hardcover, you may not find it even if the title is right in front of you. In other words, we get into trouble when our internal and external worlds don’t match. We say we are lost or confused when what we see or hear doesn’t make sense. Gonzales argues that being lost is more a state of mind than a state of being. If you are at home wherever you are, you are never lost. The feeling of being lost creates anxiety and hinders both instinct and logical thought. Anxiety gives rise to panic and in an emergency, panic is often the last thing we feel. Being truly lost can feel a lot like suffocating. Substitute the absence of comfort and safety for being lost and you can see this discussion reverberating across many different types of circumstances. Think the end of a long and deeply ingrained relationship or the sudden loss of a child. It seems that older adults who adapt better to the loss of loved ones are documented as living longer. Of course there are lots of variables in these studies, but they make sense. If we spend too much time holding on to what used to be or grasping desperately for the comfort of the familiar, we have less energy to expend adapting to our new and urgent reality.

Quicker recognition and recovery from emotional shock in emergencies large and small may be an emergency management skill we can cultivate during the course of daily life. As with most issues, the first step is to recognize the problem-then to learn to arrest it’s forward momentum and redirect our energies. Easier said then done. Again, action follows recognition. Remember Colonel John Boyd’s OODA loop: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act.

Lots of things contribute to survival in tough situations–widely varying and appropriate experience, self-awareness, physical fortitude, humility, determination and will to live. But if you refuse to accept the situation that presently assails you, all your training and worldly experience may be for naught. This may at least partly explain the many instances in which the most unlikely people survive things like plane crashes where lifelong pilots and survival experts fail. Some people are just born with an empty cup and the ability to start from zero with few expectations.

In general, we don’t necessarily train to adapt to a great discrepancy between the multitude of things that are most likely to be and the thing that goes vastly wrong. The emotional space we have not mapped and are not in tuned with is vast and can exert a powerful effect on how much of our knowledge we are able tap into. Gonzales talks about a firefighter lost in the woods who doesn’t make a fire because he knows it’s forbidden in the park. He might have been found earlier if he had thought to break the rules. Sometimes the answers are right in front of our faces but our mental models blind us.

In martial arts, survival training, rock climbing, long distance swimming, indeed any extreme endeavor, we can only train for what we think will happen. And, there are many emergencies that can only be partially recreated for training purposes. The military is probably the most experienced in this capacity. Even so, we can’t effectively simulate a rape without it actually being rape. We can’t effectively simulate starvation for the same reason. We are consistently wrong in thinking we are training for the scenario that will occur in the future. Only part of our experience will apply. Adaptation to the unfamiliar is something to keep constantly in mind. The worst thing you can do is assume you are ready for anything. You are, in effect, creating a static mindset that will be your downfall. The more set you are in your overall sense of yourself and the world, the harsher it is when those two things fail you.

The stages of being physically or emotionally lost are apparently virtually identical to the Kubler-Ross stages of grief–denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Gonzales explains, “The research suggests five general stages in the process a person goes through when lost…. first you deny that you’re disoriented and press on with growing urgency, attempting to make your mental map fit what you see. In the next stage the urgency blossoms into a full-scale survival emergency. Clear thought becomes impossible and action becomes frantic, unproductive, even dangerous. In the third stage, usually following injury or exhaustion, you form a strategy for finding some place that matches your mental map. It is a misguided strategy for there is no such place now. You are lost. In the forth stage, you deteriorate both rationally and emotionally as the strategy fails to resolve the conflict. In the final stage as you run out of options and energy you must become resigned to your plight. Like it or not, you must make a new mental map of where you are. You must become Robinson Crusoe or you will die. To survive you must find yourself. Then it won’t matter where you are.”

Masculinity, Emotions and Violence – Sharmi Gowri-Krisyk

Have any of you heard the saying “Boys will be boys”? As a parent, I have been trying my best to guide my son (Dino-Lover, 10) from a very young age to always use an empathic, compassionate and respectful approach whilst dealing with others. No matter what. Even if it is just “for fun”. To try his best to be thoughtful of others and be mindful of the emotional and physical boundaries of others.

As a result, he does never hit back physically or put anyone down emotionally – including towards children who can behave in an unempathic or insensitive manner at times. On the other hand, this has often resulted him in being perceived as weak. There are negative consequences he faces as a result of this, e.g. children calling him “girl”,”baby” or “wimp”.

That often makes me reflect on this issue is not the behaviour of these children but what I hear the adults say in the aforementioned circumstances, e.g. “Boys will be boys”. I hear this over and over again. Is it even healthy and appropriate to normalise aggressive or inconsiderate behaviour? What messages are we sending to children? To the next generation of adults?

My son recently told me that there was a particular cartoon (movie name excluded) where one of the cartoon characters cries and then says to himself: “Real men don’t cry” and then stops crying. My son concluded: “Even children are brain-washed, through the cartoons they watch, to believe that expressing emotions is inappropriate for boys and men”

This makes me wonder if violence starts in childhood itself, especially the violence towards women. “For many young people, male aggression is expected and normalised, there is constant pressure among boys to behave in sexually aggressive ways, girls are routinely objectified, there is a sexual double standard, and girls are pressured to accommodate male ‘needs’ and desires,” says Dr Michael Flood, Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Wollongong University.

So why are ingrained community attitudes so important in male-on-female aggression? “Attitudes are crucial to shaping wider social norms and cultures,” says Dr Flood.

“Boys are taught in subtle ways to push past girls’ resistance, that women are good for only one thing. This is reinforced by the media and by pornography, which is easily accessible to young people, and treats sexuality as violent and violence as sexy.”

It is tragic that our society has unfair expectations towards males and labels them as unable to feel or connect to the same degree that females can. Empirical evidence show that there is not much of a difference between boys’ and girls’ capacity for empathy during their period of infancy (Suttie, 2015). However, according to neuroscientists the reason for the empathic skills of females being far advanced than males is not because of any differences in their ability but simply a result of environmental factors; for instance, findings show that some of these environmental factors are that females are being allowed to express their emotions and to identify and understand both their own and others’ emotions (Eliot, 2010).

This indicates how society shapes males into human beings that struggle to be authentic with both themselves and with others. According to the study by University professor Niobe Way (2013) teenage boys began to “internalize society’s masculine norms by equating close friendships with being gay, a girl, or immature.” It was also noted by her that boys’ levels of loneliness and depression began to increase during this time.

We live in a culture of violence that promotes male aggression such as through movies, music videos, video games, toys, lyrics (Miedzian, 2002) – and even recreational activities like sports involve subtle level of violence. “It is our culture that distorts both boys’ and girls’ natural capacity for empathy and emotionally intimate friendships. This is not a boy crisis but a human crisis of connection” (Way, 2013) – and one that negatively impacts our families, our schools, our communities, and our political and economic institutions. We, as a society has the responsibility to ensure that, whether boys or girls, we influence children in a positive way; having a positive impact on the socio-emotional development of the next generation. Just because the majority do something, it doesn’t make it right. We need to be authentic and not blindly follow the crowd by falling into conformity. Instead, we could be critical thinkers with a vision that focuses on making a difference. Towards a better world; towards compassion, respect, kindness, peace and integrity.

REFERENCE

Chu, J. (2014). When Boys Become Boys: Development, Relationships, and Masculinity. New York: NYU Press
Eliot, L. (2010). Pink Brain, Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow Into Troublesome Gaps – And What We Can Do About It. Great Britain: Oneworld Publications.
Flood, M. (2015, February 15). Boys will be boys: does violence against women start in childhood? Retrieved from http://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/parenting/boys-will-be-boys-does-violence-against-women-start-in-childhood/story-fnet08ui-1227237623130
Miedzian, M. (Ed.). (2002). Boys Will Be Boys: Breaking the Link Between Masculinity and Violence . New York: Lantern Books.
Suttie, J. (2015, June 10). Is Morality Based on Emotions or Reason? Retrieved from

http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/topic/empathy

Way, N. (2013). Deep Secrets: Boys’ Friendships and the Crisis of Connection. U.S.A: Harvard University Press.
Zakrzewski, V. (2014, December 1). Debunking the Myths about Boys and Emotions. Retrieved from http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/debunking_myths_boys_emotions