Rory Miller – Page 2 – Conflict Manager

Burnout – Rory Miller

“Almost every officer on the force that has the years in, is retiring. We’re all crunching the numbers.”

“I just don’t want to do this anymore.”

Burnout. It’s a big risk in almost every profession. I’m going to concentrate on the worlds I know in this article (high-risk professions and freelance instruction) but burnout is universal. Jobs are hard. That’s why they are called work and not play. That’s why you get paid to do jobs, not pay to do them.

We think of burnout as the person who can’t do the job anymore, but almost worse is the life of a person who stays with a job he or she hates, just going through the motions. Miserable day after day until retirement, and when retirement arrives, the gift of free time falls in the lap of someone who has practiced being miserable for years or decades.

There are a lot of sources and models to explain burnout. My take is that when stress outmatches coping mechanisms, the burnout process starts. How fast it builds depends on a third factory— rest and recuperation. You can hold back burnout for a much longer time with good sleep, exercise and hobbies.

In the work I know, there are some obvious sources of stress. Dangerous jobs are stressful. Perhaps more stressful are jobs that can be boring for long stretches and then suddenly dangerous. The contrast between the adrenaline-fueled moments and the tedious hours of paperwork also induces stress. In the freelance world, the instability of income can be very stressful. All of these stresses affect your support network as well, your family. For every night you’ve spent out there wondering if you’d make it home, someone else sat by the phone, wondering if you’d make it home. I suspect sitting by the phone is even more stressful than being in the action.

http://practicalbudo.blogspot.co.uk/

Some other sources of stress, drawn from both worlds:

Outlining it: Avoiding burnout:

Surrounded by people with less dedication than yourself. You may have spent a lifetime devoted to one pursuit, but to your student’s it’s a hobby. Your badge may represent your devotion to the sanctity of life, even at the cost of your own… but to the people you contact every day, you’re just another civil servant.
The better you do, the more others are driven to tear you down.
The top end is always lonely. If it wasn’t, there wouldn’t be any way to distinguish the top end. If you’re doing the same as everyone else, you’re unnecessary.
Some of the people you serve. Some of them will be goofs. Or even bad people. Or accidents waiting to happen. Working corrections, you break up a lot of inmate fights. Once, early in my career, I stopped a potentially lethal beating. Then realized the guy I had saved was just as bad, maybe worse, then the one I saved him from. What’s the karmic equation on that?
Some of your colleagues got into the profession for the wrong reasons, and the negative attention they get reflects on you. There are very few bad cops, but every time they make the news the citizens feel justified to treat you as a bad cop. Every time a teacher exploits students, prospective students have to wonder about you. There are two kinds of people drawn to certain jobs— those who feel a need to serve and those with big egos. Sometimes they are hard to tell apart, even from the inside.
Sometimes it’s too easy. Most people drawn to dangerous professions or freelancer are adrenaline junkies. And some of them are quite competent. Which means it’s possible to burn out simply because the job isn’t challenging enough.
Disconnect between you and your bosses. In Conflict Communication there is a section on longevity-oriented and goal-oriented groups. Line staff deal with the day-to-day job. Management deals with public perception and politics. Often, these are incompatible. In talks with officers all over the world— Hungary, Israel, Iraq, Canada, UK, US… this has been mentioned as the biggest source of job discontent in law enforcement.

Mixed signals. What your clients say they want and what they actually want (or need) are often incompatible. Do you teach the things that work or the things that are cool? Isn’t it amazing how one person’s riot is another person’s free expression?
Impossible Standards. Sometimes we even stress ourselves. You will make mistakes. If you can’t live with that, you might need to rethink your profession. You can’t undo mistakes, but you can learn from them.
Lack of appreciation. When you are doing important things and doing them well, it’s normal to want a thank you now and then. It rarely happens. Turns this one around: What would your life be like without your weekly garbage pick up? And when was the last time you said, “Thanks?”

Burnout is a looming threat for all of us. Study the sources of of stress in your life and work out coping methods for each.

Don’t forget the universal coping methods:

Get good rest.
Keep your fitness level (particularly aerobics) up.
Make sure your purpose is clear and keep it in mind.
Keep a solid support network and be sure to show your appreciation.

Book Review – Processing Under Pressure: Stress, Memory and Decision Making in Law Enforcement by Matthew J. Sharps

Life is a series of weird coincidences. A friend sent me a copy of Processing Under Pressure because the cover used the same stock photo as my book, Force Decisions. It was good for a laugh and it sat on my shelf for months. I finally picked it up for a read and tore through it in two days.

Professor Sharps teaches cognitive psychology in California. His wife is a practicing police psychologist. He has made a point of consulting with active officers in this book, and also in the experiments he has designed and published. As Sharps says, “… modern psychological science and modern law enforcement have a lot to say to each other… Both groups, the shrinks and the cops, are in possession of critically useful information, information that can enhance both fields.”

This short, readable book covers the effects of short- and long-term stress on the nervous systems; how stress affects perception, decision making, and memory; and gives practical, useful advice on constructing training and formatting information so that it is easier to access under extreme stress.

The writing style is comfortable, even conversational. There is a mix of science, statistics, documented laboratory studies and anecdotes the illustrate the main points clearly and effectively. The language was clear— you don’t need a background in neuroscience to follow along. If you are familiar with the world of risk management, you’ll find some interesting cross-overs, e.g. Gordon Graham’s concept of “discretionary time” fits very neatly with Professor Sharps’ Feature Intensive vs Gestalt continuum.

Reviewed by Rory Miller.

If you’ve read Laurence Gonzales’ Deep Survival and you want some of the scientific theory underlying Gonzales’ observations. Processing Under Pressure is a good start. I’ll be adding it to the recommended reading list at:

http://chirontraining.com/resources/reading.html

Positive and Negative – Rory Miller

About the terms ‘positive’ and ‘negative.’

In operant conditioning, behaviors are changed by either reinforcement, which increases the target behavior, or punishment, which decreases the target behavior.

Behaviorists break down reinforcement and punishment further as either positive or negative.

Positive and negative in this context are not value judgement or ethical markers. “Positive punishment” does not mean “good punishment.” They are also not like the mathematical values of positive and negative. “Negative reinforcement” absolutely does NOT mean “punishment.”

In behavioral psychology, “positive” refers to presence and “negative” refers to absence. If I am using positive reinforcement, I am introducing something into the system to increase the behavior. If I am using negative reinforcement, I am removing something from the system to increase the behavior. Food can be positive reinforcement because it tastes good and simultaneously negative reinforcement because it removes hunger. Corporal punishment is positive punishment because it introduces pain into the system. Confinement is negative punishment because it removes stimulation from the environment.

There are some conflict and life management skills that require this understanding of positive and negative. I’ll describe a few here.

The first is a very basic positive speech pattern. You will find clearer communication if you are careful to use positive language. Again, positive does not mean happy or encouraging.

Positive speech is to give instruction on what to do. Negative speech would be to give instruction on what NOT to do.

If you tell a child, “Don’t play in the river” the child may not hear the “don’t.” The child may actively focus away from the “don’t” and honestly believe he or she was ordered to play in the river. Further, proscription is not as limiting as we would like. The child can follow your order while choosing to play on the rocks above the river or with the alligators next to the river, or decide building a dam is working on the river not playing in the river.

Positive speech is to tell the child what to do, not what is forbidden. Negative: “Don’t play in the river.” Positive: “Go play in the treehouse.”

The second. Whenever possible, use positive instruction and praise over criticism. Telling a student he is doing something wrong does not help him do it right. Even if instructions are included, e.g. “Don’t do it that way, do it this way” there are two messages to understand instead of one and all of the problems of negative speech described above are still in play. Simply saying, “Do it this way” will be far more easily understood.

Using instruction instead of criticism, has other value as well. Criticism, no matter how well delivered or well intentioned is always a punishment. It will always decrease behavior. When poor behavior need to be stopped, it has some uses, but when you are trying to increase good behavior, whether in interaction or instruction, criticism does absolutely nothing.

If the instruction is good, following the instructions makes life better in some way. Pretty much by definition, if any training or instruction makes life worse, it’s bad training. This means you do not have to reinforce behavior, the results reinforce the behavior for you. When reinforcement or punishment comes from a person (you, in this case) the lesson can always be denied by the subject if he or she decides you are being unfair or have an ulterior motive.

A third application of the positive/negative mindset is very powerful. It is easier to do nothing than something, but it is far easier to do something than to not do something. Confused?

Animals are inherently lazy. In nature, animals rarely burn calories unless they have to. It is easier to sit and watch a gazelle than to chase one down.

However, one of the hardest things for people to deal with is a void. When you are used to doing something, not following that habit becomes hard. It is always easier to substitute a new good habit than it is to quit an old bad habit.

Most people have a hard time dieting because they are giving up foods they like. It is far easier to change diet if you think of it in the positive sense: not giving up food, but looking for new foods you like better. Not buying potato chips is hard. It is a negative. Buying celery instead of potato chips is considerably easier. Quitting smoking is hard. Taking up a hobby, like knitting, so you have something to do when you want to smoke is not easy, but much easier.

Cutting bad things out of your life is the negative (absence) approach and can be quite difficult. The positive approach, substituting good things for the bad is far easier and more effective.

Idiots, Assholes and Pros – Rory Miller

This is aimed mostly at professionals.

There are three general kinds of people that will require force. The three types don’t fight for the same reason or use the same tactics, and your skills may not work the same.

Honestly, most of the time, if you are in enforcement or corrections or especially bouncing, you are going to run into idiots. The drunk college kid who squares off and lets you know he’s coming a mile away. The entitled whiner who thinks he’s too special to go to jail just for driving drunk. The martial artist who’s never been in a real fight but doesn’t believe there’s a difference.

It may just be the old man in me coming out, but it seems like idiots are on the rise. Fewer people have been exposed to violence; more people have never had their behavior controlled. That combination creates people who are both hot-house flowers incapable of taking care of themselves, but certain that anything they want is a right and anyone who disagrees is an oppressor. It seems I see more and more of this pathetically weak but shrill and bullying dynamic. For whatever my opinion is worth.

Idiots are easy. You see them coming and almost anything done decisively works. The drunk steroid freak squares off and let’s you know he has a blackbelt in…

And you smile and toe kick him in the shin with your boot before he finishes the sentence and then drop him. Or beat past his arms and twist his spine. Or, probably the classic:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PIzc6qDnh8

Again, almost anything done decisively works.

Assholes are the second most common. They like to fight and they have varying levels of, for want of a better word, professionalism. The experienced know when they are outnumbered and tend to surrender. The experienced assholes know when they are losing and give up. Generally, even the experienced assholes don’t like going hands on on a cop or other professional– unless they sense any weakness.

They have varying levels of ‘professionalism’ in how far they are willing to go and incredibly varied skill levels. An asshole who gets the drop on you is still dangerous even if he barely knows how to hit. To a large degree, fighting assholes is somewhat like fighting martial athletes. A wide range of skill and commitment but generally, they like to fight and it will be a fight. The fatal mistake is treating an asshole like an idiot. When it comes time to bat his guard aside, the guard won’t be weak and it will likely trigger a counter-attack. An idiot’s lack of confidence and/or lack of understanding of how the world really works are the reasons it is so easy to bat aside even their trained fists. You won’t get this with assholes.

And saying they like to fight isn’t quite right either. They don’t like the give and take of fighting, only the give. They enjoy causing pain and beating people down but tend not to be so big on receiving pain. So most won’t engage if you act like a wary professional. They won’t see the safe opening.

The pros are a different kettle of fish. For the most part, you won’t get a lot of these. Highest concentration is in prison, jails, or on elite teams. Rarity makes them somewhat low risk. Their own professionalism also makes them low risk. It is very, very rare for this category to fight for ego. If you have the drop on them and maintain control they will, generally, not resist. If your handcuffing technique has a hole built into it or your approach is sloppy, they will use the Golden Rule of Combat: “Your most powerful weapon applied to your opponent’s most valuable point at his time of maximum imbalance.” They will hit you hard, decisively, where and how it will do the most damage, and they will strike when you are least ready.

Assume most pros are skilled. It’s not always true and it’s not a necessary factor, but growing into a pro mindset usually takes time and that kind of time doing those kinds of things develops skills. That said, it doesn’t take a lot of skilled technique when you follow the Golden Rule. No one has to be trained to hit a man in the head with a brick from behind.

And the skill may be something unusual. In the debrief on Minnesota I mentioned that there were some high-percentage techniques that simply didn’t work on Kasey, Dillon or me. Our grappling backgrounds made us instinctively structure in ways that idiots don’t think to and assholes are too arrogant for, even if they had trained the skills.

Taxonomy alert: Taxonomies are naming classifications. This is a separate taxonomy from the social/asocial that I usually use. An asocial threat can fight as either an asshole or a pro (as an idiot, too, but Darwin usually takes care of that combination early). The asocial/social/maslow/triune is a better introduction for most everybody, but people who use force professionally might get something from this classification.

The Price – Rory Miller

Some advice I received long ago:

If you want to be successful, you only have to answer two questions. “What do I want?” And, “What am I willing to pay— in time, money and sweat— to make it happen?”

Time, money and sweat. Sometimes blood and tears, but we’ll leave those aside for now. Time, money and sweat are the currency of success. Anything you want to achieve, whether a skill or an object, requires at least two.

Time as currency is something all fighters understand. Like money, time can be saved, wasted, or spent wisely. It can also be stolen, invested and even counterfeited.

Anything you choose to achieve takes time. Everything takes time, including doing nothing. I can use time and money to buy another person’s sweat, and I can sell my sweat and time for someone else’s money, but there is no amount of money and sweat that can buy even a second of time.

Time can be used skillfully, however. You can borrow the fruits of someone else’s time. I just read a book that was the product of thirty years of research. The author spent thirty years. I spent two days. I don’t have his depth of knowledge, but the knowledge I did gain might have taken a dozen years of trial and error, not to mention a few dissected human corpses.

Learning a system of combat, you get the benefits of generations of mistakes. You would never survive enough encounters yourself to get that depth of knowledge. In a few hours, you can get the distilled wisdom of generations.

The benefits of time can compound, like interest. Skills you learn young are easier to assimilate and always there, even if you need a refresher. Habits, like fitness, laid down early have life-long effects. Years learning a marketable skill can become a lifetime career. Time spent at a job can, if managed, become a comfortable retirement.

When you really want something, you must manage your time. Be clear about what you want. Be specific about the steps that get you closer. Be aware of the activities that feel like progress, but aren’t. Watching training videos is not training.

Money. Time is a currency, but money is a tool. Money is just a symbol, an agreed-upon thing with no intrinsic power, but it can do almost anything. It can provide stuff, if the material is what you like. But if you like skills, money buys you access to the people who have those skills.

A lot of us come from the martial arts, and we have done a very strange thing with ideas of money and value. We traditionally expect commercially successful training centers to teach crap (we call them McDojos) and we expect some old man teaching out of his garage for love of the art to have the good stuff.

Even if that’s true, do you want the old master teaching in his garage to die in poverty? I don’t.

When you become a student, you aren’t paying for the two hours you spend with that instructor. You are paying for the decades that instructor spent to make those two hours valuable. Do your research. Focus on the instructor that will give you the best time value in the subject you want. If you want a course in defensive shooting, a tactical shooting course is an inefficient use of money and time. Look first at best material for you. Then best teacher for you. And then look at price.

Sometimes the good stuff is expensive. Sometimes it’s cheap, since many people with valuable skills are terrible at business.

And sweat. Sometimes it’s brain sweat, often physical, but most things worth acquiring, especially skills and attributes take effort. No one can give you a skill, you have to take it. No one can get strong for you— you have to pump the iron yourself.

Want to be a master musician? That’s gonna take ten thousand hours. Want to be a good pistol shot? You’re going to get blisters and a callous on the middle knuckle of your middle finger. Want to go to the Olympics in judo? That’s going to be years of sweat and impact.

You can buy sweat, if you want objects. When you buy a car, you are buying the labor of other people (and robots.) But for skills and attributes, no one can do it for you.

Everything worth having or becoming has a price.

Epilogue. About blood and tears. There are a lot of skills you can acquire in controlled environments and the only price will be time, money and sweat. When you test those skills in the real world, whether the skills are self-defense or first aid or hostage negotiations, sometimes the new price will be blood or tears. That’s what makes it the real world.

On Models – Erik Kondo and Rory Miller

Rory and I have a basic disagreement about models. I love them. He doesn’t. No. We are not talking about the beautiful models you see in print or on TV. That a whole different discussion. We are talking about educational models used for teaching.

Rory will explain why he doesn’t like them. But first I will explain why I do.

I see models as teaching tools that provide a framework for understanding. The world is a complex place. Trying to figure out how the world works is a difficult task. Therefore, I see models as a pathway to building a general understanding of a subject. The basic idea is to take a subject and break it down into it’s component parts. Then each part can be examined and discussed both separately and also in combination with the other parts.

Flexible models allow for understanding to grow and become more complex as the person’s understanding of the subject increases. Models provide the student with mental anchoring where he or she can “chunk” information together. As the person’s understanding increases, so does the connections and relationships between the “chunks” increase.

Therefore, I see models as problem solving tools. They are starting points on the journey of understanding.

“Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful.” — Box, George E. P.

But, I do agree that models also have their disadvantages. Models are only representations of reality. They are not reality. As famously stated by mathematician, George Box, they are also invariably wrong to a certain extent.

For example, Newtonian Physics is essentially a model that is wrong under certain conditions. Einstein’s Theory of Relativity is a model that is also incorrect under certain other conditions, but it solves some of the flaws of the Newtonian model. So why not skip Newton and go straight to Einstein? Because Einstein’s theory is very hard to understand and it requires a fair amount of prerequisite knowledge. And one practical prerequisite, is to understand the Newtonian model first.

I think that much of the practical problems of the Newtonian model can be mitigated by realizing that it is both an imperfect and limited model.

When it comes to models for conflict management, I think that people run into trouble when they assume that the Model will give them the correct answer to their specific problem. Instead of viewing the Model as a problem solving tool for them to use to come to their own solution, they see the Model as already having the solution.

In this case, blind faith in the Model causes them to be rigid and inflexible in their thinking. This is an example of not having a flexible or growth mindset. People without this type mindset tend to see models in this rigid fashion. As a result, learning a model actually could be detrimental for them.

These are the people who want a definite answer to the question of “If he does this, what should I do?”

This is a different question than “If he does this, what are some of my alternatives?”

Ultimately, I think models are useful for helping people who are willing to teach themselves. This type of person will benefit from a model as a starting point. Then he or she will discard the model in favor of his or her own personalized model or means of understanding.

But there is no telling how a person will use a model. Therefore, I think that if models come with full disclosure of their inherent flaws, then their advantages will out weigh their disadvantages. That is why I use them – a lot.

Here is Rory’s take on models.

Models have their place. In closed systems, models or formulas work very well. A closed system is one in which the conditions are known and there are right and wrong answers. Erik brought up physics. Newtonian physics (I don’t know enough about advanced physics to make the same assertion) is a closed system. There are a handful of known constants and laws and if you know the variables (length of lever, distance to both load and force from fulcrum, amount of force applied) you will a always get the same answer.

Most of what we learn in school are closed systems. Math. Geography. Writing is an interesting one, because the fundamentals of writing (grammar, spelling and even story structure) are taught as a closed system, but good writing can and does break all of the rules. Think of Faulkner. Effective writing is an open system, but we tend to teach it as a closed system.

Conflict management is a classic open system. It is broad and deep. There are many variables and the majority of those are outside of your control, unknown to you, or both. There is no single definition of a win and the exact same outcome in a situation can be interpreted as a loss or a win by two different people and each individual can even change their mind about whether it was a win over time.

Models are used for a lot of reasons. In closed systems, they make sense. Bureaucracies like measurability and open skills are not really measurable. But the nature of the beast is that surviving violence is predicated on adaptability. On changing the situation. On breaking social rules and taboos that try to keep a student on a socially acceptable script. Cheating, in other words. And you can’t make a model for breaking models.

But I think the most common reason people try to apply models to open systems is simply fear. If you can take this ugly, immense, complicated problem and give it nice neat labels and put it in a box, it looks less scary.

That’s classic fear management, not danger management. Willful blindness.

My take, as an instructor, is to normalize the chaos. Our world, life itself, is an open system. We evolved to deal with that level of complexity. Humans rock at dealing with unknowns, if they let themselves.

I do use models in my teaching. Partially because I went through the school system like everyone else and it’s a hard habit to break. But when I use them consciously, it’s never to give answers. Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs, for instance.

A prescriptive instructor would use Maslow to say, “An assailant working from the security level of the hierarchy will… and so you must…” Used properly (in other words, my way) the same level gives you, “If no one was going to help you and your children were starving, how would you get money for food?” Followed up, after the class has answered the question: “Get it? An addict doesn’t think differently than you, they just have a level of problem very few people in our culture have had to deal with…”

The purpose of models, when I use them well, is to add layers to the depth of understanding. Most models, however, are used to cut out variables and complexity that the instructor is unprepared to deal with.

There is one other reason to use models in an open system, and it hinges on the instructor’s assumptions and biases.

If you assume that your students are intelligent and adaptable, you give them tools and information and trust them to find their own best solutions by their own definitions with their own personal resources. This is the “gains maximization” strategy, looking for the best win.

If, however, you assume your students are stupid and will generally make things worse if left to their own judgment, in that case you will need to rely on models. You need to tell them what to do and be prescriptive. That’s the loss minimization strategy.

I personally reject that point of view. But that’s me.

Blame, Responsibility and Agency- Tammy Yard-McCracken, Psy.D and Rory Miller

Vctim blaming. Taking responsibility. In assault, especially sexual assault, these are buzzwords that get people to quickly silo into prescribed emotional positions. We rarely find that useful.

In this article we will explore one tool for managing the aftermath of being a victim of violent crime. Our intent is not to present an emotional or political “truth”. This is about taking a situation that many people want to define by a set meaning and adapting it for the benefit of the survivor.

There are some truths we have to explore first:

1) All violent crimes happen within an interaction between the perpetrator(s) and the intended victim(s). Stranger assaults in remote places are relatively rare. Most people are victimized by people they know. There is a relationship. There is communication. The central crime is not the only piece of the interaction and the person cast in the victim role has a degree of control over the antecedents of the crime.

2) Events become violent crimes because of the intent of the bad guy. Looking at point 1— all interactions between any two or more people are interactions. Your morning talk over coffee. The stranger who struck up a conversation on the train. Your waiter taking your order. Any of those events that didn’t become violent stayed peaceful because someone lacked the intent. Bad events are bad events because bad people had bad intent.

3) The agency to affect the world exists. It is inherent in all humans. The perpetrator wants someone to play the victim role. Sometimes the disparity of power is so great that there is no way to evade the victim role. But one can choose the type of victim to be. Sometimes there is no good choice, but there is always choice.

4) Just as violent events have antecedents, they have aftermath. How the aftermath is managed has profound effects on the future of the individuals involved.

5) Mentally, humans are almost infinitely plastic. They have the power to change their views of the world and in doing so, actually change the world in which they live.

Blame, responsibility and agency.

“The person cast in the victim role has a degree of control over the antecedents of the crime.” One emotional response to this idea is that it is victim blaming. If the victim had control, he or she could have prevented it. Having failed to prevent it, the victim caused the crime. The cause of the crime is to blame. The victim is blamed. QED.

We used “QED” (quod erat demonstrandum) so the stance must be at least valid. Truth is another matter.

Our concern is not whether this statement is true or false. Our concern is that the statement is not useful, and this is key. When pointing out a person’s inherent power and agency becomes described as victim blaming, the net effect on any potential victim who listen is a decrease in agency. A decrease in personal power.

And an increase in the likelihood of future victimization

When the impact of violent crime is fundamentally a blow to the Target’s experience of control, decreasing this individual’s experience of agency and power by way of blame serves no one. Except future perpetrators preying on primed Targets.

In the aftermath of a violent encounter, you will play it over and over again in your head. You will wonder if you could have done anything different, if you could have changed the outcome. Here is the tool:

The more responsibility you take, the more agency you will have in the future.

People who have a violent emotional reaction to anything with even the whiff of victim blaming tend to have a strong reaction to this. But think it through. If someone says, “There was nothing you could have done,” this person is telling you, “There is nothing you can do in the future. If you are faced with the same circumstances again, the outcome will be the same. You might as well curl up and give up.” The message runs deep. If there is nothing you could have done, then there is nothing you could ever do. Nothing you can learn, no skill, no training, no wisdom will help you. The power belongs to the bad guys. Now and always. The statement profoundly destroys any chance at future agency, if it is internalized.

Aftermath or not, anywhere in your life, beware of anyone who discourages you from learning, growing, or training. The purpose of training is to become smarter, more aware, stronger, more powerful. If someone discourages that, they have a reason for wanting you ignorant and dull, weak and powerless. Why would anyone want you weak if they cared about you?

The opposite extreme: “It’s all my fault!” can be equally paralyzing. Fault becomes blame and blame becomes punishment. Self-flagellation is not a good place to grow from.

Mentally, humans are almost infinitely plastic. The words people use change how they perceive their choices and from the choices, possible actions. “My fault” breeds blame and self-punishment. “My responsibility” becomes an incentive to understand the variables in the precedents and increase the skills to deal with those variables. It increases agency and personal power. Pause. Breathe. “Responsibility” does not mean fault, does not mean for example, that the target of a rape wanted it, asked for it, or any other reflexive comment you might equate.

Look at the word. Responsibility. At its Latin root, it means to respond. It is on us to choose our response. In this choice there is strength.

We can state categorically that the greater the responsibility one takes in the aftermath of a violet encounter, the greater the possibility of strength. The greater the likelihood that one experiences Post Traumatic Growth instead of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. But —

To push any agenda, to tell any survivor what he or she is supposed to do or supposed to feel or supposed to experience is to once again deny them agency. It is a second layer of victimization. Seeing the possibility of reframing blame to responsibility to agency is a tool, not a weapon. Something that a person can choose to use. But it must be a choice.

Options – Rory Miller

I’m part of that generation of police and corrections officers who was raised with the idea of a “Force Continuum.” We were taught that there were specific levels of force, each level had certain effects and was justified by certain criteria. Most agencies have moved away from the idea of a continuum. Not because it is ineffective or out of a fear that people would misunderstand and think it was a “connect the dots” game that required every step be touched on the way up the ladder.

They have been rejected because the courts have stated explicitly that the court would not consider the continua as elements of reasonableness. That doesn’t make the continua bad practice or bad teaching or even inaccurate, it simply makes them an unacceptable part of one piece of the legal process.

The continuum I was trained on had six general levels of force. Force for our purposes means anything that can make a person do something they don’t want to do or stop them from doing something they want to do.

Our six levels were: Presence, verbal, touch, physical control, serious physical control, and deadly force. For conflict resolution, I’d like to propose eight categories. Not definitive, just for this discussion. The eight options I want to mention are: Avoidance; Acquiescence; Presence; Verbal; Touch; Force; Pain; Damage; and Deadly Force.

There are always three over-arching factors that dictate what level of force is appropriate. The first is the necessary outcome. If you are under serious attack, your own survival should be non-negotiable. If you have a mission to accomplish, such as arresting a felon, that job must be finished. If you are negotiating a contract, there will be things you need in the contract and things you need excluded.

The second is your safety. Not just survival, but a scale from discomfort through pain to injury, to long-term injury, to death. You want the least impact on your life.

The third is the bad guy. Legally and morally, you will be expected and required to solve the problem (accomplish the mission) with the minimal harm to the bad guy.

These three things are always a part of the equation, but they will have different weight depending on the situation and your individual value system. I was taught as a military 91A (medic) that “A dead medic never saved anyone.” My safety first, the mission second, and the enemy a very distant third. In practice, however, many medics put their own lives second on the list. And in some circumstances, the combative person is the mission, and the medic will not and should not harm a combative patient in order to help the combative patient. It’s a balancing act, with few simple solutions.

Somewhere in the balance of mission and the intent to minimize harm to all involved, there is a “best” level. Generally, higher levels of force are faster, easier, more effective and safer (for the one using the force.) Shotguns simply solve problems faster than negotiation, and the problem solved with a shotgun tends to stay solved. But the higher levels of force require higher levels of justification. Boundary setting doesn’t draw the legal or social scrutiny that shooting does.

The Lower Levels of Force.

Avoidance is simply not being in the bad place at the bad time. The skills involved include reading terrain, reading social patterns, reading people and profiling places. Those skills must be combined with the will to act on your decisions. If you know that one of your friends is a trouble magnet, the information is useless unless you are willing to be rude and act. “No, I’m not going to the pub with you.”

Acquiescence is on this list because it has worked. Like many strategies, however, it only works until it fails and when it fails, it fails catastrophically. Acquiescence, without a higher-force back-up plan, cedes all initiative and power to the threat. In addition, under adrenaline and with high stakes, the hind brain looks for any strategy that has worked and acquiescence quickly becomes a habit. Acquiescence as a strategy only makes sense when one is certain that other options will fail and will be met with punishing force. Don’t be fooled, since this is what a threat will want you to believe. Acquiescence is sometimes a survival choice for the victim, but it is exactly what the predator wants.

Is there ever a time to acquiesce? It’s a personal decision when dealing with bad guys, but I’ll give you one example. Lawful arrest, when the person arresting you has the power of the government behind the badge and not just the right but the legal responsibility to overcome resistance, you will lose. And you will be punished. “Resisting arrest” is its own separate crime.

Presence is idiosyncratic. How you move, dress, stand, and what you look at largely determines your victim profile. Some people present as harder targets than others. Being large and fit certainly helps, but small people who move well are also avoided by predators. Your clothes can send a “hard target” message, but without the body language to back it up, particularly the alertness, wearing 5-11 clothes and Oakley sunglasses marks you as a wannabe.

Presence as an action is simply adding information. When you show up as a witness, many bad guys will cease their crime. This can be accentuated as well. I’ve stopped road rage incidents by visibly picking up a cell phone and prevented a probable burglary of a neighbor’s house by walking up to the suspicious car, visibly taking a picture of the license plate and walking back to my own home.

Verbal prevention and de-escalation is a vast skill. It includes everything from pleading to negotiation to naked threats. It is just as personal as presence, but almost infinitely expandable. A hostage negotiator might need to cajole, calm, threaten (rarely) and run a con all in a single conversation.

Presence and verbal are the best options when they have any chance to work. Excellent chances of success with very little chance of physical injury. But part of the skill, especially in verbal de-escalation is recognizing the point of no return, the moment where it will go physical no matter what you say.

Touch is barely a level. That is the soft hand on the shoulder to get a drunk’s attention or a calming embrace. It is definitely communication and can be seen as an extension of verbal. I separate it out for two reasons. The first is that in many jurisdictions, touching someone without consent can be construed as battery. For this reason alone, I prefer to use verbal tactics rather than escalate to even the lightest touch. The second reason is that if I can touch the threat, the threat can touch me. If I have misjudged the danger, touch without control puts me at risk.

Force is using strength and leverage to make someone do something or stop that person without resorting to pain or risking injury. Pushing someone away, or holding back a friend who wants to fight. It has many of the dangers of the touch level.

Pain is also idiosyncratic. Inflicting pain is a form of communication. Which means that if someone is not willing to communicate, or unable due to mental illness, emotional distress or a bad drug reaction, pain by itself rarely works. Pain compliance works through an unstated bargain, “If you quit fighting, the pain will stop.” A threat in excited delirium feels the pain of a pressure-point gouge, but is incapable of reading the bargain and often fights harder.

There is a hard transition between this level and the next. Tactically, morally and legally the levels we have just covered are very different than the higher levels. The levels so far have been appropriate when you are at little or no risk, when you are in control, when you are winning. In police terms, these are the techniques that will likely work on a non-compliant threat. A non-compliant threat is resisting, but that is an entirely different world than a threat trying to injure or kill you.

This split is critical to understand. If you attempt to use a low level of force in a high level situation, you will likely lose. If you use a high level of force in a low level situation, it won’t be legal self-defense.

The Higher Levels of Force

Damage is different than pain. Pain hurts, but doesn’t hamper your physical abilities. When damage is justified, I am trying to break the threat or part of the threat in such a way that he loses the physical ability to hurt me.

Realistically, there is an element of communication to this as well. Most people quit psychologically. I’ve stayed in fights with shoulder dislocations, broken ribs, fingers and (this is sport) twice with complete ACL tears. The shoulder, finger and knee injuries hampered my abilities. The ribs just hurt.

Deadly force is appropriate when you need to shut down the entire threat immediately. Jurisdictions vary slightly in the wording of the legal definition, but “deadly force” doesn’t just mean killing. It is death or “grievous bodily harm.” Again, the definition of “grievous” in the moment is going to be hashed out in court by lawyers. Generally, anything that has a permanent effect or impairs a life function will be called grievous harm. Permanent scarring. A permanent limp. Partial or total blinding… If you want to use an eye gouge, you need to be able to justify deadly force.

Deadly force is only justified when faced with deadly force. For anything less than immediate death or grievous bodily harm— or rape, every jurisdiction I have checked includes rape under the definition of grievous bodily harm and a rape attempt therefore justifies lethal defense— killing and maiming is out of bounds.

There is a saying, “When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” When all you have is training in a single option, it is easy to convince yourself that it’s enough. It isn’t. A pacifist who eschews the physical force options is left with only acquiescence, relying on the mercy of others. Negotiation from a position of weakness, whether that weakness comes from a lack of skill or of will, negotiation without force options is only begging.

Conversely “kill them all and let god sort them out” is almost never legally, ethically or even tactically appropriate.

If you are ignorant of an appropriate option for a given situation, you are helpless in that situation. And always remember that none of these skills have an end-state. You can always get better and learn more.

For more information on different force options, we recommend “Scaling Force” by Rory Miller and Lawrence Kane.

Institutionalization of Flukes – Rory Miller

Last month, I wrote about normalization of deviance, the process by which cutting corners and skipping established protocols becomes simply “business as usual.” This month we’re going to look at the other side of the coin.

Violence presents a perfect storm for ignorance. The events themselves are rare. You will not often meet someone who has personally experienced a hundred assaults. Violent events tend to be quick— the internet is happy to give you numbers such as “6 seconds” or “3-8 seconds.” Assuming that’s true (most of mine took longer, but that ‘applying handcuffs’ step can be slow) a hundred fights would add up to a grand total of five to fifteen minutes of experience.

Further, anything experienced in this five-to-fifteen minutes of experience tends to be experienced in an adrenalized state, with all the sensory, cognitive and memory distortions that implies.

Acts of violence are complicated on multiple levels. An attacker in a rage is different than one with a plan, even if both are active shooters. Two shooters may have wildly different goals, training, ability, equipment… the list goes on. And the intended victim is also a very complicated and often unknown quantity. Then there are the bystanders. And the environment. And…

Violence is complicated. And idiosyncratic (sometimes downright weird). Frequently, things that make good sense and work in class fail spectacularly in the real world.

But also, very rarely, the stars align and a technique that has no business working saves the day.

These weird successes can happen for a number of reasons.

Sometimes, there is an abnormality in the person performing the technique. Bare knuckle boxers used the term “heavy hands” to describe a boxer who could reliably hit an opponent in the head without breaking his metacarpals. I believe there may be entire systems based on the genetic gift of one practitioner who died long ago.

Sometimes, there is an abnormality in the person receiving the technique. A lot of things work on drunks that fail on sober people, and vice versa. A stomach punch is an entirely different thing to a threat with a full bladder. Accidentally striking or gouging an existing injury can get an unexpected reaction.

And sometimes, it is just dumb luck. Maybe the effortless takedown was awesome or maybe the bad guy just slipped. Maybe your gouge made the grappler spring away… but maybe he flinched when he knelt on some broken glass.

Then there’s the twilight zone stuff. Everyone I know who has survived a close-range knife ambush broke the rule that “action beats reaction.” Several of us have done things when it counted that we were never able to replicate in training.

Institutionalizing a fluke is to make something unreliable part of your tradition or procedure. Assault survival— real self-defense— is very high stakes, very hard to pull off successfully, and there is a dearth of good information.

Tradition is the mechanism humans use for accumulating and passing down rare but important information. Kano Jigoro (I was told, might have been someone else) said, “We must learn from the mistakes of others. We will never live long enough to make them all ourselves.” Tradition is the accumulated successes and failures, the collected knowledge, of a long-standing group.

Tradition— the memory of the system— is incredibly important when information and reality checks are rare. If your tribe faces famine every twenty years, people remember what to do. If your tribe faces famine only every thousand years, what to do must be passed on.

When unexamined and untested, you simply can’t tell the flukes from the effective techniques. Especially when people in positions of authority can’t bring themselves to admit ignorance and invent plausible reasons for stupid things.

There are a few schools of kempo that use a fist with the little finger knuckle extended. They are imitating a famous instructor who demonstrated with a broken finger. Some throw the shuto (knife hand strike) with the little finger bent, imitating a famous instructor who has a severed tendon.

Life-or-death combat also skews knowledge and tradition towards the positive. If something worked, you’ll come back to the training hall and tell everybody. Whatever worked will become part of your tradition. If something failed, however, you don’t get to come back and spread the word. Techniques (and flukes) accumulate, they are rarely weeded out.

This is very different for combat sports. Non-lethal encounters and spectators make for tons of information from multiple perspectives. Sports are also driven by tradition, but it is the accumulated tradition of success and failures; not dependent on the memory of a single adrenalized person and; subject to extensive analysis and experimentation. Sport arts evolve very quickly.

There are two dangers with flukes. The first is obvious. If flawed information has crept into your syllabus over time, you have weaknesses and points of failure to which you are blind. It kind of sucks when your never-fail technique fails and your ass is hanging in the wind.

The second is when the results of a fluke are so desirable that there is a push to formally require others to follow suit. To mandate “luck” as an essential part of the system. In 2013 a man slipped into the Ronald E. McNair Discovery Learning Center, a grade school, with a semi-automatic weapon. Antoinette Tuff, a front office worker, talked him down. Kids didn’t get shot. The gunman didn’t get shot. Responders didn’t get shot. A perfect win— no injuries in a dangerous and highly volatile situation.

And there were a few voices using this as an example that anyone could be talked down, by anyone. That force should never be an option. Do you think none of the victims of Columbine or Newton tried to talk? Tried to reason or argue or beg? Only the successes get reported.

Without more real world experience than an individual could survive, it’s hard to find your flaws.

I’m not going into finding flukes, because, believe it or not, I don’t think that’s the problem. The biggest problem is that people defend their flukes, explain them away, ignore or support them.

People invest not only time and money, but also identity in their high risk games. People rarely “practice martial arts” but are far more likely to say, “I’m a martial artist.” I had a huge amount of identity invested in being a tactical team leader. When humans have invested time and identity, sometimes sweat and blood, it’s really difficult for us to admit that some of it might have been wasted. We tend to double down on the stupid.

I learned the pronated straight punch of traditional Japanese karate. Every wrist injury I saw on a heavy bag was from that punch. It shortens your range slightly. Despite what I saw, including real injuries, I couldn’t admit it was a flawed technique… until a very old Japanese man (and for my psychological purposes he had to have been both old and Japanese) explained that it was intentionally introduced to make the wrist weaker because the Japanese were not as tolerant of the occasional training deaths as the Okinawans.

Don’t get your panties in a bunch if I just offended you. It’s not about you or the system. It’s all about me. When you invest identity, you will sometimes discount personal experience. We work to protect our own flaws.

When boxing gloves were introduced, head punching became the center piece of boxing. It wasn’t in the bare knuckles days, largely because hitting people in the head is more likely to do permanent injury to the hand than even stunning damage to the head. But head punching has become so iconic that it will be part of MMA for a long time to come, and will require gloves and handwraps to make it viable.

Once upon a time, someone tried to stab me in the back. It was done with a lot of resolution and appreciable skill. The only reason I am alive is because I saw a reflection. What I did physically was spin, clap my hands together over the blade hand, and twist.

Awesome. We have one example of a technique actually working in a worst-case scenario. Yay. Let’s teach that. Except…

I couldn’t do it again in a million years. I’ve tried to replicate it in training. As near as I can tell, it’s not possible. The time framing doesn’t work. You can’t spin and get one hand around the weapon so you can hit it from the outside and the inside simultaneously hit it from the inside before a lunge (which started first) can be completed. Can’t be done. But it happened.

To try to make this a centerpiece or even one technique in a system would be to institutionalize a fluke. It would make the students weaker.

Comment by Erik Kondo
The following video shows a fluke.

AMBUSHES AND THUGS