A Question about Psychological Self-Defense

Caveat: If I sound like an expe­ri­enced author­ity on self-defense, you should know I’m not. I’ve only been attacked once in my life and then man­aged to talk my way out of it. The other parts of my per­sonal expe­ri­ence come from books, teach­ers and sim­u­la­tions. I actu­ally con­sider it a bless­ing not to be an expe­ri­enced author­ity on self-defense, as I like liv­ing a peace­ful, happy life where peo­ple don’t try to change my lifestyle for me with­out my permission.

Where a lot of mar­tial arts fail is in not address­ing the men­tal and emo­tional aspects of self-defense before, dur­ing and after the fight. Nobody gets attacked in a vac­uum, every­body gets attacked in a con­text. Nobody goes through a vio­lent attack with the same men­tal and emo­tional response they go through a kata drill. And nobody goes from nor­mal life, to vio­lence, then back to nor­mal life the same way again.

I trained for years with­out even once address­ing the men­tal and emo­tional response to being attacked, then I donned a High Gear suit and had a part­ner go at me high speed, strength and intent and expe­ri­enced the “oh fuck!” freeze for myself. It wasn’t as pretty as the kung-fu movies. Even though they were real fake train­ing sim­u­la­tions, I went through the whole gamut of sur­prise, shock, fear, lock-up, despair, anger, aggres­sion, indig­na­tion, all the while try­ing to defend myself phys­i­cally. Con­clu­sion? It wasn’t as easy as I thought it’d be.

And yet.

Real-world phys­i­cal vio­lence will be rare for most of the peo­ple I know, includ­ing myself. Yet I sus­pect we expe­ri­ence real-world men­tal and emo­tional vio­lence more fre­quently in our daily lives from toxic peo­ple and rela­tion­ships, some more than oth­ers. But how? Why? And how do we defend ourselves?

Wolves choose their prey; they don’t chal­lenge the strongest in the herd, they go for the weak­est. They’re not look­ing for a fight, they just want food as quickly and as eas­ily as they can get it. Preda­tors choose their vic­tims in the same way, they want to get what they want with as lit­tle injury to them­selves as pos­si­ble. And as ugly it is to say, and as hard to admit, I’ve seen that abu­sive rela­tion­ships really are a two-way street. A toxic per­son looks for the type he knows will suf­fer his abuse, and the vic­tim allows the toxic per­son space in their lives for the abuse to take place.

I know it’s not as easy as that makes it sound. And it’s not about plac­ing blame. It’s about per­sonal respon­si­bil­ity – the per­sonal abil­ity to respond – while rec­og­niz­ing that the dis­tri­b­u­tion of respon­si­bil­ity lies in shift­ing degrees. In a per­fect world, the toxic abuser will exer­cise respon­si­bil­ity for his thoughts and actions, and act to cre­ate mutu­ally ben­e­fi­cial rela­tion­ships instead. In a per­fect world, the vic­tim will exer­cise respon­si­bil­ity for keep­ing her­self safe from toxic peo­ple and act assertively. But it ain’t a per­fect world.

If you can teach some­one to over­come men­tal and emo­tional bar­ri­ers to keep them­selves safe phys­i­cally, can you teach some­one to over­come men­tal and emo­tional bar­ri­ers to keep them­selves safe psy­cho­log­i­cally? How would you do it? Espe­cially for peo­ple who have had a pat­tern of play­ing the vic­tim role in an abu­sive relationship?

Related Posts

1. There is Only Time for Decisions
2. Mar­tial Arts is Deal­ing with Self-Defense Failure
3. Degrees of Delusion