inmate screaming threats. When he took a breath, I said softly, “I know. But you tried really hard and you did well for a long time. No one can ever take that away from you. I’m proud of you.” He let me cuff him.
Attack the relationship To do this you must understand what dynamic you’re in. You and the bad guy are both playing a role, so if you change the one he has assigned to you, you change the relationship.
Threat: “What you starin’ at?”
Me: “Sorry, man. Worked a double yesterday and I zoned for a minute. How you doin’?”
Attack the context This requires a global awareness: you must know what is going on and what the threat thinks is going on. If he is attempting to put on a show for his friends, try to remove the friends. If a predator believes you’re alone and vulnerable, start talking to someone out of the threat’s line of vision or make a cell phone call. My personal favorite is this: when the threat sees me as a potential victim and I have a three-way conversation with Jesus and Elvis while rhythmically twitching, the threat tends to change his mind.
Concept 9: You won’t have your normal mind or body
Remember the first time you asked someone out on a date? Your mouth was dry, your palms were sweaty, your knees felt weak, and you were unbelievably clumsy. After hours or days of working yourself up to it you were still barely able to stammer out the words. Compare that high anxiety moment to having a casual chat with your friends.
Your fighting skills in real life will degrade about as much as your verbal skills did when asking that person out. This subject can get complex.
As the stress hormones hit your system, your perception can alter:
You might not be able to hear anythingYour eyesight might become incredibly acute but without peripheral vision, or just a blur.You might not be able to feel anything with your fingers.
Your mind will alter:
You might lock onto an idea and, though it’s not working, you’re unable to do anything else.Everything might appear to be in slow motion, but still you can’t move.You might feel calm and peaceful as horrible things happen to your body, or to a friend’s, and you don’t feel like doing anything about it.You might meekly obey when you know you shouldn’t. Many victims of horrible crimes comply simply when ordered to or when they are only threatened with violence. I had a 400-pound veteran jailhouse fighter meekly get on the ground when ordered just because of volume, intensity, and surprise of the command. I never had to touch him.
Important point: a training environment that emphasizes instant obedience to any authority figure or shouted command may make the students more vulnerable to this kind of assault.
Your body will alter:
Your finger dexterity might be gone (loss of fine-motor skills).You might not be able to move your arms and legs at the same time (loss of complex motor skills)Your limbs might feel heavy or numb.
After putting a 240-pound jail guard through a scenario that was an emotional wringer, he leaned over, and panted, “Sarge, I feel like I’m gonna cry and I want to puke. Is that normal?”
It was perfectly normal. Even though he did everything right and had performed excellently, his adrenaline had still gotten to him.
Are there ways to deal with this? Yes, but it’s not easy. Experience is the best system for adrenaline control but it can be hard to survive enough encounters to reap the full benefits. Here are two pieces of advice:
If you’re in a bad situation and you get a warm and happy feeling like you’re floating – you’re frozen. Recognize the state, and act. Move, punch, scream, or run, but consciously do something. Then do something else. That usually breaks you out of the freeze.Get used to things going badly. You only have to use unarmed defensive skills when everything else has gone wrong, so take every opportunity to practice recovering from bad positions.If tournaments scare you, compete.If someone in your class always beats you, spar with him every day.Keep going even when you’re exhausted.If you slip and fall, fight from there and insist that your training partners take advantage of the opportunity, just as a threat would.
Concept 10: A threat isn’t your training partner
You should see a pattern by now:
Martial arts are relatively safe, fun and healthy.Fighting is dangerous, unpleasant and potentially crippling.Martial arts are practiced in a clean environmentReal fighting happens in alleys, bars, and public restrooms.In martial arts, you know what you’re getting into.In a fight, you might not know if it’s a wrestling match or a knife fight until things get slippery.
Here’s a big one: you practice martial arts with your friends, people who enjoy spending time with you, who enjoy the art that you enjoy, and who are dedicated to becoming, and helping you become, a better person.
A threat may hate you or despise you with a level of venom that you can barely comprehend. Or the threat may feel no emotion whatsoever, viewing you as nothing more than a source of cash, gratification, or a convenient toy to vent some rage. He might be responding to voices in his head that only he can hear or playing out a scripted fantasy of torture, rape and murder that he has cherished since childhood.
You can’t break your partners in training. The ones you spar with tonight will be the ones you spar with next week. The fact that you’re training specifically to break human beings but at the same time you cannot break your training partners is the source of most flaws in martial arts.
This need to recycle training partners affects what is taught in a martial arts class, and it affects how it’s taught. If you have ever been told “We don’t do that here, it’s too dangerous” or “that’s not allowed in a tournament” take a good hard look at why. If you fight non-contact or you hit with contact but only to relatively safe targets, you have been practicing to miss. It becomes a habit and, under stress, you will miss just as you have trained to do.
Serious competitive martial artists have stated that just because they don’t practice a technique doesn’t mean they can’t do it. Wrestlers have said that just because they don’t practice eye gouging doesn’t mean they can’t do it. In theory, it’s a pretty good argument. What actually happens, however, is that these fighters don’t even think of using the illegal techniques because they fight the way they have trained. Then, when a threat uses a technique that the martial artist knows as an illegal one, he freezes for a second to reorient. I have actually seen officers getting their asses kicked while looking around for a referee. You fight the way you train and the more intense the training the deeper the habits are ingrained.
That it’s hard to train not to injure friends is one half of the problem. The other half is that because of the context of the conflict, threats don’t react like training partners.
Most criminals have never been taught to flow with a joint lock or respond in the specific way that you need to make your favorite combination work. Threats who are emotionally disturbed, drunk, drugged, or angry, might not feel pain and won’t react to it as your training partners do. Threats have a tendency to flail fast and hard in a continuous jerky action as opposed to those smooth, trained responses you practiced against.
Real threats try to get close to either blitz or sucker-punch; they don’t face off at the critical distance line. They don’t play the skill and timing game of feint and counter attack. They aren’t trying to win; they are
