My Wife, the Self-Defense Expert

My wife has gone her entire life without ever getting in a physical fight. She doesn’t train in martial arts. She does not read books on military tactics. She has never had any training on how to de-escalate violent and mentally ill people. She doesn’t know how to do any joint locks, or even how to throw a punch. And yet, her self-defense tactics have yielded perfect results for her entire life. To be clear, she hasn’t lived an isolated existence, either. She's been to some pretty rough places.

Food for thought, no?

I think about my martial arts training. When you use the term “self-defense”, people’s minds automatically go to punching and kicking. When I think about my own life, however, I am struck by how little of my own effective self-defense has involved those things. In fact, I can count on one hand the number of times I have had to use my physical training to defend myself. I literally cannot count the number of times I avoided violence through smart tactical decisions and careful social interaction.

So why is it, then, as martial artists, that we focus so much on those rare instances when all other options have failed and we are forced to resort to physical intervention? Shouldn’t the systems we use to train, if they are really effective systems of self-defense, have methods for training these non-combative forms of self-defense?

(A good friend of mine always says, “You tend to solve problems in terms of the tools you like to use.” If the only tool in your toolbox is violence, you’re in for a rough life.)

Martial arts should teach these “non-violent” facets of self defense, and thankfully,  I have found that many do, if you look in the right places. When people look at a martial art’s curriculum, their eyes are naturally drawn to the “sexy” parts: the throws, the strikes, the locks, and the pins. All the stuff they put into movies. That said, I have noted one theme that is common among many people I have talked to who have seriously trained in a wide variety of systems: High level teachers in many systems spend a lot of time working on how you stand, how you walk around, and how you approach other people. I do not believe that to be a coincidence. I think that, hidden in a lot of these teachings, are the core concepts of non-violent self-defense.

Upright, alert, relaxed posture is a no-brainer. Sure, such a posture puts you in a good position to do the techniques of your system, but it also sends a message. Predators, by nature, are essentially opportunists. Watch as many nature programs as you want, and you will never see a lion crack its knuckles, look at its fellow lions, and say, “Well, boys, let’s assault that elephant over there. It will be a long fight, with casualties, but I think we can take him.” Lions don’t attack elephants because they would get trampled to death. Lions attack gazelles, because they can kill them. And even then, it isn’t just any gazelle. It is the smallest, easiest one to take down.

Human predators aren’t that much different. Even if you aren’t the largest or meanest looking person on the block, there is a high likelihood that predators will see you, an alert target, and simply decide to wait for an easier mark to head down the street. If he does so, and you do not have to fight him, congratulations. You have just engaged in successful self defense. Sure, you don’t have a swinging dick story, but does that matter? Nope. Not to me, at least. I embrace the “I want to keep on living” school of thought. I could give a damn about whether or not I am perceived as strong.

The focus on how one walks is important, too. I can’t think of a lot of refined martial arts systems that teach their devotees to move wildly or swagger. These sort of inefficient, attitude-infused methods of movement attract all kinds of bad attention, because they are an unspoken challenge to anyone who views them. Most of us don’t bother to answer that challenge, but a territorial predator who feels threatened certainly will. A relaxed, controlled, unobtrustive, non-eye-catching gait will render you effectively invisible. Paired with an unobtrustive appearance, your moving through a predator’s territory will not be viewed as any sort of challenge to his authority. If you aren’t challenging or threatening the potential Threat, there is no reason for a physical conflict. Again, self-defense without fighting.

If you think I am being a bit too obsessive about small details, I invite you to spend a lot of time at a jail and see who catches a hard time, be it an inmate, guard, or lawyer. The old ones, or at least the wise ones, will have learned how to keep their head down.

Another part of this non-violent self defense puzzle are what I call the okuden (Japanese for “inner transmission”). Nearly every high-level teacher that I’ve met puts in a significant amount of face time with their students, both in and out of the training environment. Enormous amounts of information are imparted orally, sometimes in lectures, more often in the form of instructional stories. These little gems often contain many of the important principles in non-violent self defense.

I know that I had picked up an enormous amount of information about this stuff before I ever studied it formally. My teacher, a paramedic for twenty-five years, is a veritable vault of information about personal interaction, violence on the street, and the realities of how people get hurt. He has been deluging me with these real-life stories for my entire training. It was only after many years of training, when I started formally studying things like de-escalation and tactical decision-making in urban environments, that I appreciated exactly what he was doing. More than once, I thought to myself, “Holy shit, I already know this stuff!”

It got snuck in to my training without my realizing it. Thanks, sensei.

I think another piece of it is the way that good martial arts training will systematically reduce your arrogance and your insecurities. (Note that “good” qualifier in that last sentence. There are a seemingly infinite amount of assholes out there that will teach you to swagger and act like an even bigger asshole. I’m not talking about those guys, and if you don’t know who they are, recognizing them needs to be one of your top priorities.) It takes a good deal of personal growth before you can habitually take your ego out of your decision-making. The serious martial artists that I know have no compunction about walking away from a fight if they have the option to do so. Even if it might make them look “weak” or “scared”. Drinking from the well of reality long enough will inform you that it is better to look weak than to run the risk that you are going to get seriously hurt or killed (which, by the way, is a risk in any physical conflict, no matter what). It is amazing how many options open themselves to you when your decisions no longer have to bolster some sort of skewed self-image about who you are, or how strong you think you are. 

This also addresses the issue of what I call "unconscious data transmissions". Again, ask a scholar why this works, but here is how it works. In a thousand ways that you often don't realize, what is running through your mind is manifested in your body. There are the really obvious ones like scowling when you are enraged, or flushing when you are embarrassed, but there are a lot of much smaller transmissions that people don't even realize. A really common one I see with young public defenders is the idea they maintain that they are somehow better or smarter than their client. While there are instances where this might be correct, this sort of thinking is a bad idea. (There's a lot of reasons that it is - I'm only going to touch on one here.) This thinking, in a thousand small ways, manifests itself in the person's physical demeanor, and the clients pick up on it. Drug-addled, drunk, or even the mentally ill will pick up on these unconscious data transmissions and be rightfully pissed. And they will make life a living hell for the transmitter until said person pulls their head out of their ass and stops doing it. 

I believe that martial arts, in its technical and psychological aspects, helps with this phenomenon. Earlier this year, I had to go to a really rough part of town to track down a witness. As a white guy in a suit, I definitely attracted a lot of stares. I kept the following dialogue running through my mind, "Good Lord, I am not supposed to be here. I have come here for a limited purpose. I am not a threat to you. I will do my job quickly and get the hell out." I totally immersed my mind in this as I moved through this particular neighborhood, and no one bothered me at all. Coincidence? Maybe. But I think not. I had enough young predators size me up that, had I moved differently, I am sure that one would have felt the need to protect his territory. 


Hopefully I’ve made you think a little bit with my post. Take a long, hard look at your training system. Does it address these things? How so? Does it do it enough? If not, ask yourself where you might go to get this type of training.

After all, it’s only the vast majority of your self-defense.

"Catch!" Mind

I recently read Patrick Rothfuss' book A Wise Man's Fear. I really enjoyed the book as a whole, and I am not sure whether or not Mr. Rothfuss has ever done any sort of training in martial arts, but there were a number of passages that stimulated my martial arts thought processes.

In one of my favorite passages, one of the teachers at a university gets seven students together. Each of these students is brilliant, and accomplished in a wide array of academic fields. The teacher tells the students that he will, in thirty minutes, stand at a certain point and lob a ball with a certain amount of force. He asks the students to use their arts and sciences to calculate where the ball will land.

The students spend their thirty minutes furiously applying their various disciplines to the prediction of the ball's landing point. The thirty minutes pass and leave the students frustrated. The teacher asks the students if they have their answer. The students grudgingly admit that they cannot say for certain where the ball will land, despite their calculations. The teacher abruptly leaves the classroom and comes back in the company of an eight year-old boy.

Striding right to the spot he gave the students, the teacher turns and lobs the ball at the surprised eight-year old. The eight year old, somewhat started, catches the ball perfectly.

The teacher then turns to the students and asks them, "How is it that an eight year-old was able to predict in less than a second what seven of the brightest students here could not in half an hour?"

The answer, of course, is that the boy saw the teacher's movements, the ball, and its flight and was able to make all the calculations in the subconscious parts of his brain, and relay all that information to place his hands in the right place, at the right time, in the right shape to catch the ball. If he'd tried to process it intellectually, the ball would have hit the ground long before he came close to making all the right calculations.

This brings me to martial arts training. I am not so different from those students described in the book. I have a great deal of intellectual training. Doing things intuitively, by feel, is not something that comes naturally to me. That said, I do believe it is a necessary part of martial arts training.

Kata makes sense to me. The pre-arranged forms are designed to teach certain principles in certain ways. Things go as expected, and can be intellectually processed and analyzed. If something goes wrong, you can repeat the experiment, making little adjustments, until it works correctly. While it is intense, and emotionally challenging in its way, it is somewhat predictable work.

Randori isn't so simple. For one, if it goes south, you can't just stop and do it over again. You've got to live with whatever ugly thing you tried to give birth to. Instead of a small number of variables, like in kata, there are an infinite number of variables, compounded by a problem that is constantly shifting and changing (i.e. - your opponent). Instead of a steady trickle of data, it is a flood. Compounded by the flood of information is the strange way that randori seems to tap directly into all of your inner psychological clutter and allow it to flow up to the surface. In such an atmosphere, the odds on being able to intellectually process your way through a problem in half a second (which, in my estimate, is a realistic measure of how much time you have) are quite long.

I have spent years doing randori slowly, thinking my way through it. I certainly learned a ton from this practice, but I believe I made some faulty assumptions about it. I functioned on the assumption that if I did enough of this, I could learn to "think fast" enough to do the right thing in full-speed randori.

My efforts have been met with a lot of frustration.

Last night, my training partner and I tried something totally different. We agreed to do randori with no definite plan as to what techniques we were "looking for". If he attacked, I would just touch him, feel, and move with him. That was my only agenda. I didn't even care if I got him or not, or whether or not I made a technique.

And strangely... stuff just started happening. We relaxed, moved our feet, and tried to do it "by feel" instead of engaging our intellectual brains. We didn't care if it looked silly, or even if it worked. We kept hitting techniques, and found ourselves echoing the words of our teachers... "I don't choose the technique. You do. I just go with it and it happens." It felt so organic, so natural. And my brain didn't feel like it was trying to do the intellectual version of lifting a car. I could describe what happened (usually after the fact), but I didn't really plan it.

This is a totally different type of practice for me, and it wasn't easy. After a few exchanges, I would find myself trying to "do stuff" again... and I would have to catch myself and remind myself that I was doing it by feel and to leave my machinations at the door.

Regardless, I think exploring this might bear some interesting fruit.

"I dunno..."

“I dunno... I just did it. I didn’t have a reason.”

I do not accept this explanation for any human behavior. If you apply the labels “random” or “pointless” to any human behavior, you close off the possibility of exploring the inner workings of the behavior... and my experience is that there is always a reason for human behavior. That isn’t to say that it is a good reason, necessarily, but there is always a reason, and I think a large part of our task in practice is to ask the question.

It’s an important question, because what are we, if not a collection of behaviors and reasons?

I think people use “I dunno”, perhaps unconsciously, because looking at the alternative can be extremely uncomfortable.

I encountered a great example of this the other day in the dojo. I was on the mat with on of my training partners. We were about half-way through a kata that he had been practicing for about a year. Our in-class repetition of the kata had been sporadic, so his recollection of the techniques was a bit spotty.

In these situations, especially with juniors, my teachers have taught me to verbally communicate before attacking the person, to make sure he knows what he is doing. Bad stuff can happen in martial arts practice when the two people practicing aren’t on the same page.

In this instance, I said the name of the technique, and asked my training partner, “Do you know it? Are you ready?” He replied in the affirmative, so I attacked him. He started half of a movement in the wrong direction, moving without much real purpose, and then I knocked him on his butt.

Perhaps it comes from the fact that I am a bit too at ease in the dojo environment. Perhaps it is just that I am naturally a it disrespectful. Maybe I’m just getting better at being honest. But when this happened, I looked down at him and said, “You lied!”

My partner, who is usually a deeply introspective, spiritual, and moral man, stiffened up as he got up. I could tell that I struck a nerve. “I do not lie!” he responded, testily.

Years ago, I would have shied away from uncomfortable confrontations like this. Luckily, my teachers have put me in this “crucible” before, with my own thoughts and assumptions, so when I saw that I’d struck a nerve, I realized it for what it was: a great training opportunity. Randori for the heart and mind, if you will. I fell into the cadence of a cross examination without realizing it.

“Do you remember me telling you the name of the technique?”

“Yes.”

“Do you remember me asking you if you remembered how to do the technique? If you were ready?”

“Yes.”

“Do recall what you said?”

“... that I knew it, and I was ready.”

“Were you?”

“I guess not...”

“You guess? You mean you’re not sure whether or not you were ready? I’m positive. You weren’t. In your heart, you know it, too. So, why ‘I guess’? You know!”

“I dunno. I just said it. I didn’t have a reason.”

Ah-ha! The roadblock!

I have a dear friend (not the same person) who often tells me, “Words are just wind, Pat.” I disagree. If my life as a practitioner of law has taught me one thing, it is this: words have power. Words have deep, subtle, and resounding power. And the words we choose often provide a valuable cross-section into the inner workings of our minds and hearts. This interaction, rich as it was, gave testimony to that.

“Yes, you did,” I replied, “You just may not be comfortable saying it.”

He thought for a moment, and scratched his head.

“I guess...” he began. I looked at him meaningfully.

“Okay, I know why. I... did not want to admit that I’d forgotten it.”

“Eureka!” I raised my hands up.

Now, think about this for a second. It is one thing to be uncomfortable to admit a failure... but put it in the martial arts context. As I mentioned above, two practitioners who aren’t on the page can end up in serious injury, or even death, depending on what is being practiced. You add velocity, or weapons into the mix, and these little mental “vacations” can have life-altering consequences! My friend’s desire not to admit ignorance ran so deep that he was willing to risk injury to himself and one of his best friends in order to run from it!

I pointed out as much to him, and he looked troubled. That is a good thing, in my opinion. As one of your companions in training, if I do not occasionally trouble you, I don’t believe I am doing my part. (That’s another valuable thing I learned from watching my teachers.)

It really is amazing how all our little fears can have dramatic impact on our decision-making, without us even realizing it. The beauty of martial arts training, though, is that it has a way of making the things we’d prefer to avoid startlingly explicit. My friend may have been able to ignore words, but he could not ignore the fact that he ended up firmly on his butt. No shades of gray there, just shockingly clear truth.

I looked him in the eye, clapped a hand on his shoulder, and said, “How many places you got in your life where you won’t admit that you don’t know what the hell you’re doing?”

He grinned, sheepishly. I gave him a big hug. It was amazing to see Something in him (and yes, that is a capital “Something”) change as that realization traveled through him. I could see all the little gears whirring in his head as he thought about all the different places in life he ran into that particular mental roadblock. He’d discovered the reason for his behavior, and I could literally see him make the decision to have better reasons.

That kind of stuff keeps me coming back for more and more.

Lexicon

(This is an answer to a friend's question that turned into a blog post.)

I remember when I first started training, I spent a lot of time on the internet reading material about martial arts, and discussing it with other people. The reading part hasn't changed that much (that's another essay), but I find myself engaging in a lot less discussion.

It isn't because I don't have anything to say. To the contrary, I've been training for eight and a half years, and I certainly have a lot more food for thought than I did at the beginning.

That said, I don't engage in much "net discussion" because of the lexicon problem. Here is what I mean. In any given system, there is a particular lexicon. One of of the difficulties of martial arts, in comparison to things like music, is that there isn't an extremely precise technical language that can produce nearly identical results. At best, we have a hodge-podge of terms from physics, poetry, and history meant to convey certain principles. Among practitioners in a common system, we at least use some of this same hodge-podge to convey meaning.

Further, this meaning is reinforced by common experience. Most of us have been the business end of the same people, and spent time trying to do the same things. Therefore, our "common picture", if you will, is a little bit more clear.

That said, I often find myself striving to communicate things in the dojo and failing. And this is among the people that I work with every day. I use a word like "push" to mean a certain method of moving feet and dropping weight on a certain vector, while relaxed and extending. When I say it to someone, they might interpret it to mean that they are going to plant their feet in one place and strongly "exploding" into their target with upper body force.

There is a constant struggle to find the right words to cause a certain set of muscular actions.

Now, remove that web of common experience. Things get a lot more tricky at that point, when you've got different people doing things. Made more confusing by the fact that some people use the same words to describe different sets of physical activities. (Get people from 3 styles of aikido together and try to define what "attack" means.) When you get a group of different people from different traditions on the same mat, confusion is inevitable.

But at least you've got the equalizer of being able to get hands on each other. Even if I can't say the right words to someone, I might be able to create understanding by demonstrating what I am doing. Whatever labels we put on things, we can all perceive the same phenomena in the same room.

Thus my problem with internet discussion. Now, we've muddied the waters even further by removing physical proximity. In this virtual dojo, nothing that we say has to be backed up by reality. We never "walk the talk". In the way, when one doesn't have that ability to get out and do, I think the essence of martial arts practice is lost. Much of what is said has to do with killing spare time and affirming one's own views, and very little to do with that visceral, heart-touching learning that occurs in a dojo.