CHIRON TRAINING
Volume 5
2009
by
Rory Miller
Published by Rory Miller at Smashwords
Copyright 2011 Rory Miller
http://chirontraining.com
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Cover design by Kamila Zeman Miller
TABLE of CONTENTS
2009- A month in Baghdad and then the transition to Kurdistan for seven more months. New friends, new sights. My seven months in Baghdad was split between FOB Shield and the Rusafa Prison Complex. Not counting in- and out-processing, I spent three days in the Green Zone, getting a tooth repaired.
Sulaymaniyah, in the Kurdish Autonomous Region was considered a good assignment. Fewer bombings, more freedom to go out into the markets and restaurants and get to know people.
Made friends, many of whom I can never write about. Did some good deeds.
Then in August, I came home. Shattered economy and a very limited number of salable skills… For the first time in my adult life, I wasn’t in sworn service to some group. Not military, not the Sheriff’s Office. No longer a contractor for the Justice Department. Just a citizen. No badge. No gun (usually). No duty to act.
A huge change, one I am still adapting to.
As usual, the added material and commentary will be in italics at the end of each post.
MOST OF THE TIME FRIDAY, JANUARY 02, 2009
Communication is never pure. Steve points out that everyone brings their own axes and there is no guarantee that they are really listening when they are grinding them. He has a way with words, that writer. I see it in reviews of the book (I haven't done this enough that I don't bother to read them) and it is amazing what people have chosen to read. People who have never felt my fa-jing assume that I only do or understand 'external' styles (hint: you want to see some awesome internal power principles, play with a world class judo guy. Odds are he can explain it better, too. Oooo, is that sound I hear panties twisting?) Despite a quarter of a century, most of that in the most traditional of the traditional, I have contempt for traditional training. Or so I have read.
Everybody is wrong pretty much most of the time. On complex issues, anyway. There is a default assumption that if two people are arguing one is right and one is wrong. The more complex the subject (say religion or politics or violence) the more possible answers there are. If there are a million solution, then 999,999 of them are wrong. Or at least not as right as the other one. Or at least not as right for that particular person... and you add another layer of complexity which from one point of view makes all the answers "right" (but it becomes a pretty weird definition of right) or all the answers wrong.
That's OKAY. We are just people stumbling through life. We don't see everything, we don't know everything. Most of the things (like religion and politics which are classic for 'the less you know the more rabid you tend to be' syndrome) aren't actually that important. Yeah, I said it. Even assuming that the purpose of religion is to make people more civilized (and I don't think it is) I haven't seen a religion or the absence of a religion that accurately predicts the morality of the person I'm talking too. What conservatives and liberals believe about each other is harsh and dogmatic, but they way they actually act and think are not as different as they seem to need to believe. Just my experience. Go talk to someone you disagree with. Better, listen to one at least as smart as you are.
Anyway, there's one of these big things that has been popping up lately- a growth and truth thing and reality thing. I'm going to be vague here, because I don't want to talk about the thing itself- that is usually pointless. You can substitute "martial arts mastery" if you want- something that is rarely defined well, may mean nothing but a lot of people have a lot of identity invested in the quest.
There are stages, maybe, or definitions, but at the highest (non-faked) level I have seen it is very ordinary. So ordinary, in fact, that many of the searchers dismiss it, "A martial arts master in blue jeans? Preposterous!" One of the things that when you grasp, you become very concerned for the searchers because it both isn't anything like their image and it isn't fun, or happy or comfortable.
They describe it though, even if they have never seen it. They are sure of what they will be when they get there. They measure others by how closely they fit their mental image of what a "martial arts master" should look, act and talk like. This isn't Disney- someone who is at that level can choose to become an ice cold murdering sociopath at will. A choice. Then switch back.
That doesn't fit with most people's image of kindly Master Po or whatever.
Of course, like everyone, I could be wrong most of the time.
What I was talking around in this post was the concept of enlightenment. The trouble with even mentioning enlightenment is that you immediately lose credibility: To the pragmatic, real world types, there is no such thing. To the dedicated ‘seeker’ types, it’s already written into their script that you can’t talk about it and have it… which is prima facie bullshit.
Enlightenment is simple. How simple? Living in the moment, seeing things as they are without attachment… it’s simple enough that turtles do it. And they don’t try. The pragmatics are sort of right, but it’s not that enlightenment doesn’t exist, it’s that it isn’t anything special.- RAM 2012
BASICS SATURDAY, JANUARY 03, 2009
Here's a problem. Martial arts are usually taught from a tool- or skill-based perspective. What are the basics of your system? Strike and block? Nage-waza and Osaekomi-waza? Irimi and shomen-ate? Block-check-strike? The long form?
Learn a technique and play with it for a while. Learn a second technique and play with that. Put them together and play with the combination... when all of these techniques assemble into a system it turns out to be a tinker-toy construction incapable of doing a job or supporting weight. In the martial arts, this is where the instructor steps in to explain the 'advanced aspects'.
That is so, so wrong. The advanced aspects, too often, are principles and strategy. These are the true basics.
Every real system has some things in common: they evolved in a specific environment; they addressed a particular type of threat; and they revolved around a strategy that respected those two facts.
Given that these are the central essences of a system of self-defense or combat, why are they considered advanced? These are the basics of the basics. The things that make everything else make sense and, possibly more importantly, if something doesn't mesh with these core values it doesn't belong. Splitting your strategy weakens everything. (Theoretical example- if the core strategy of your system is to pull someone close and strangle, where does pushing away fit?)
No matter what you incorporate as physical basics- footwork, power generation- make sure your students understand two things from day one:
1) The problem the system was designed to deal with. One of the most popular systems around was designed for the sole purpose of beating Japanese karate in karate tournaments of the 1950s. It is masterful at that. My system was designed for medieval emergencies. It wouldn't work well in a 1953 karate tournament. If the focus is on self-defense some time has to be spent on how criminals think and act and how assaults happen. You must learn diagnostics before you can apply the cure.
2) The strategy chosen to deal with the problem. Different strategies can deal with the same problem, that's fine. Mixing strategies or adding techniques to a system that are incompatible with the strategy just create confusion. Trapping is an aspect of controlling the movement of the threat. It is feasible, maybe critical, for a strategy of "Control the arms to create an opening". It isn't compatible with a more brutal "Close and do damage" strategy. Techniques or types of techniques should only be added to systems if they serve the strategy.
This doesn't mean "don't go out and try new stuff." One of the things you need to prevail is something that I can only call 'clean'. Just as mind, body and spirit have to be in accord, strategy, tactics and techniques have to work together. If they are at cross purposes, the entire structure is weakened.
Strategy and threat assessment are basics.
INTERVIEW SUNDAY, JANUARY 04, 2009
Got interviewed. To myself I sound like a bumbling, nasal idiot. Both of us were dead tired and it was done over a computer from across a sea... anyway:
My interview(s) (plural, it was supposed to be 40-60 minutes and we wound up gabbing for about two and a half hours):
http://warriortraditions.libsyn.com/ And Dr. Keogh's website.
The links appear to be defunct. I searched and found a few links, (try “warrior traditions” + podcast + “Meditations on Violence”) but they were all broken.—RM2012
FROM CLAUSEWITZ TUESDAY, JANUARY 06, 2009
I wanted to open this with a big paragraph about how I don't usually write about politics and that this isn't referring to anything specific. Read it for yourself.
“Plundering and devastating the enemy’s country, which play such an important part with the Tartars, with ancient nations, and even in the Middle Ages, were no longer in accordance with the spirit of the age. They were justly looked upon as unnecessary barbarity, which might easily induce reprisals, and which did more injury to the enemy’s subjects than the enemy’s Government, therefore, produced no effect beyond throwing the Nation back many stages in all that relates to the peaceful arts and civilization. War, therefore, confined itself more and more, both as regards means and end, to the Army itself.” Carl von Clausewitz "On War" pp383 Anatol Rapoport translation
So- this is the basis of the concepts of proportionate force and attempting to limit civilian casualties (c.f. Israeli warnings to neighborhoods about exactly when and where they would strike.)
This seems obvious and right, yet what happens when you face an enemy who deliberately uses your feelings, beliefs, protocols, customs and laws to harm you and conserve his own strength? When he deliberately hides his firing positions in civilian areas, or hospitals or schools?
It’s a great soundbite- once you have the media on your side you can be confident that they will not show the damage or bodies that you have inflicted, but they will film in loving detail the shattered bodies of the children that you used for a shield. You targeted bus stops, but you were never so evil as to target schools...and yet you hid your weapons in schools and fired from them. No matter, roll the cameras and show the broken children and cry for restraint.
Very neat, very effective, but it presages another sea change in the art of war. It is time for a different spirit for a new age.
More from Clausewitz- paraphrased. For a time, war was seen as a political thing involving mostly the cabinet and the army. With the rise of the French Republic, everyone felt that they were part of the State, not the subjects of a State. War became everyone’s business and we wound up with the entire weight of a nation on the French side versus only the army and the politicians on the other.
Wherever Napoleon met this old way, he crushed them.
Not until Spain had its citizen’s insurgency; Austria made the extraordinary step of activating many of its citizens for war and Russia deliberately followed the Spanish lead- only then did the Grande Armee begin to lose.
Someone said (and I wish I knew who) that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme.
So we live in a country where most citizens have never served in the Armed Forces and some citizens openly show contempt for those who do; where people vote as if the primary purpose of the government were to ensure that the voters have enough possessions; where decisions about war are made not by the popularly elected legislative branch (as required by the constitution) but by the largely appointed executive branch… have we regressed to the model described by Clausewitz? Tradition (policy, procedure) and equipment against people? People adapt very fast, bureaucracies less so.
And so another point. Winners always lose. The problem with being a winner is that there is little incentive to get better and the previous losers and people that feel they are going to lose have nothing better to do than to harness all of their creativity, all of their resources and study the winner for weaknesses. They eventually find a way… and the erstwhile winner cries that it wasn’t fair. ‘They’ changed the rules. Changing the rules is one of the best ways to win. And winners are terrified to change the rules that they have won by in the past.
We are in the midst of a sea-change in international conflict, even a change in what international means. That’s not true. It’s not ‘the midst’. The change has happened. I am not even sure that we are trying to play catch-up or trying to adapt in any meaningful way. Rules that were taken for the very highest of ideals are being used by ruthless men to make better men seem careless or even vicious. One group is fighting, or trying to fight, against ‘armies’ and reduce, even eliminate harm to civilians. The other group is deliberately blurring the line- no uniformed armies, civilians exploited to perform military functions including acting as shields, no nations to conquer or negotiate with in many cases.
Eerie parallels with the world that Clausewitz described. The old ways did not survive the crisis of Napoleon. What will change now, and who will adapt?
See also, if you have a tolerance for very dry reads, “The Spirit of Laws” by Charles de Montesquieu.
OTHER BASICS FRIDAY, JANUARY 09, 2009
This is some bedrock stuff- not 'what I think' but 'how I think'. In my experience, most of it is pretty common in people in high-risk professions even when they don't have the words to articulate it. Possibly some of my disconnects (I feel strategy is fundamental, others belief it takes a background in physical skills to grasp) come from this bedrock. So here goes, an incomplete and fuzzy list since sight is the hardest thing to see-
1) Goals-backward. This is taught specifically to most emergency leadership. Drop me off on a desert island and I won't start by going through my pockets to see what I have. I'll list what I need first (shelter-water-fire-food), then check resources to match needs, then gather or create resources to fill the rest. I am also one of those kids who found story problems much easier than the same problem presented as a formula and always found mazes easier to work backwards. Fighting with a clear idea of the goal- to escape, to prevail, to restrain to... is both more efficient and less likely to escalate to something excessive.
2) The Art of Advantage. A practiced sense for vulnerabilities- in balance, position, targeting, but also emotional and logical. Been doing this for so long that I am not sure if it is a 'taught' thing or simply a 'permission' thing. But it takes some deep restraint. To even play with this and not destroy your life you have to understand deeply that defeating someone else is not the same as winning. Knowing how to hurt without knowing when and who is dancing on the edge of evil.
3) Reframing. The ability to look not just at different answers but at different possible meanings for the question. An aspect is to know what the real question is.
4) Context. This is a hard one under stress because your SSR (Survival Stress Response, the adrenaline cocktail) triggers both a visual and mental tunnel vision (that's also why true environmental fighting usually takes experience as well as practice). But sometimes, often (and this is more true with a predator who has moderated his own SSR than with a kid in the Monkey Dance) you can affect what the fight is about. Change the perception of the value of the goal (Ever listen to "The Winner" by Bobby Bare?). Change the perception of risk (Kris' "You guys should probably know the front desk has already called the cops
5) Connected thinking. Everybody does this but not everybody does it very well. Everything you do affects other things. Almost everything is connected. The more deeply and subtly you see, the more you can affect things in relatively distant space or time and with relatively little obvious action. One place where I take this is looking at the source of information and then looking at their motives. With practice, if you are objective, you can predict the drift of bias.*
6) Continuity. What you are dealing with in this moment began long ago and will have effects, intended and unintended, long into the future. The past is for research, the far future for prediction and an attempt to mold, only the present and the near future for planning and action. This works two ways. First, avoid getting caught up in a past you can't fix. How a particular criminal became a violent criminal is an academic matter. I might use it in the future to help another kid not become a predator, but when someone is trying to stomp your head against the curb that is so NOT the time to try to figure out if it was due to potty training or not getting breast-fed. The other side: how you deal with the immediate problem will affect future problems that can arise. Treating symptoms is rarely the same as treating causes.
7) Simplifying the problem. The ability to take all this and cut it down in an instant to an immediate problem with an immediate solution.
I need to emphasize here- almost every good operator thinks like this, but they don't think about it. It appears complex, maybe, and in words and explanations, it probably is. Just like no one thinks about the rules of grammar when they are actually speaking in a native language, no operator is consciously extracting a web of past and future. 'This came from here and is going there.' You just see it because it is the way you have learned to see. When you make an error, you re-evaluate and move on. If they have practiced, and this is rare, they can articulate how they knew 'x' was about to happen, but not all of them can.
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* Predictive power is the only way to evaluate your skill in a lot of this. If you are wrong consistently wrong you have misjudged their bias and must look at your own.
YOU LEARN STUFF WHEN YOU WRITE THURSDAY, JANUARY 15, 2009
Sorry about the long break. I've been doing quite a bit of writing, just not here. A handful of people have asked me to look at their ideas, which always turns into a dialogue that teaches me a lot.
Two other things though 1) A friend (Marc MacYoung) mentioned that he was working on a problem, a big problem in self-defense: the freeze. What is it? Why does it happen? When doesn't it happen? To whom? Are there different kinds? What can you do about it in training? What can you do about it in the moment?
In a lot of ways, Marc and I think a lot alike. Too much alike, IMO, to usefully collaborate most times. In this case, I had been looking at the question from a higher magnification than he had. That little twist, one of us (Marc) looking at the social dynamics surrounding the freeze and the other (me) looking at the different freezes I had experienced or debriefed other on... a lot of connections came together. Can't guarantee that we've broken the back of the puzzle but it looks more solid and far more useful than anything I've seen on the subject.
2) I started writing something for the blog that I've been thinking about for a very long time. The deeper I wrote (with some insight from an entirely unrelated off-line discussion with Asher Bey) the more I became aware that the problem wasn't what I thought it was. Well, it is, but not in all cases. There are two entirely different ways to get to a very bad place, except one of the paths isn't bad. Except when it is. Cryptic, I know, but I have a little more to write and then a lot more to organize and cut before I can post it here.
I'm also toying with yet another writing project. It would be fun. Useful to the right people, and would piss off the people who think they should get it, which I am immature enough to find very funny.
The freeze article mentioned here grew into an entire chapter in “Facing Violence. Here is one of the last versions before the book was written:
BONUS MATERIAL: FREEZING
I’m going to try to integrate what Marc and I have been saying. It may be simpler than we thought.
Three concepts first: The three stages of a fight; Fight-Flight-Freeze-Posture-Submit; and predatory versus social violence.
Three Stages. Being on the receiving end of an unexpected attack you will go through three stages.
The OC stage. This is where you get hit. If you have trained by operant conditioning (OC) a response to a sudden attack, you may be okay.
Then you freeze. Almost everyone freezes, even experienced fighters. Some break out of it fast. Some don’t and it tends to end very badly.
The fight. If you made it through the other two, most of what you have trained will now start to work.
FFFPS. Classic Behavioral Biology lists three survival responses to extreme stress, the ‘three Fs’ Fight, Flight and Freeze. Dave Grossman lists four: Fight, Flight, Posture and Submit. All five of the listed responses are hard-wired reactions to an immediate serious threat (note- a living threat. The responses to major disasters are quite different, more limited and predictable see “The Unthinkable” by Amanda Ripley). All are important to this discussion. Fight-Fight-Freeze-Posture-Submit.
The first two are self-explanatory. Freezing will be the subject of this entire paper. Posturing and submitting need some exploration. First we have to distinguish between FFFPS as hard-wired responses and as strategies. These responses have evolved and are hard-wired because they work. Things that work can be used as strategies. In the hard-wired version of these responses Posturing and Submitting will only be used within the species. Submitting to a lion gets you eaten. However, both can make conscious strategies- looking large and being loud will tend to scare off predators; I can’t count the number of times I have befriended a ‘dangerous’ dog by showing puppy/playful body language. However, I cannot think of a single case when either of these strategies happened involuntarily cross species, only as a conscious decision.
So, three hard-wired strategies for predator assaults and another two for social danger.
Predatory and Social Violence For our purpose, violence breaks down two ways: social and predatory. A lot can be said here. The bottom line, in social violence who the victim is is important to the threat, in predatory violence it is not. Social violence- fighting for territory, for ideas, for status- the threat fights against someone he acknowledges as a person. Most people ‘dehumanize’ the enemy with epithets, jokes and insults. A predator does not have to dehumanize because he never really saw the victim as a person anyway, only as a resource.
This breakdown is critical for freezing because some of your brain is wired for surviving a predator attack (FFF) and some for avoiding social violence (PS). Animals have different attack/fighting strategies for intra- and interspecies violence. Dogs do not fight other dogs the way that they pack and run a deer to exhaustion. Bears do not attack each other the way that they kill elk. Elk go antler-to-antler with other elk, but use mostly hooves against wolves. A human, however, can choose as a strategy to use the Monkey dance fighting of establishing social dominance or the predator/hunting behavior of stalking or ambush or sniping or… When and if you are attacked, accurately telling whether the threat is in a social violence or predatory violence mindset is critical. Lastly, most of what people train for and have experience in are very specific levels of social violence. The appropriate skills for those experiences are not good survival choices at other levels of social violence or in predatory assault.
What is freezing? It is not moving under stress. Sometimes it is a choice and a good tactical decision and sometimes it is a very bad decision (sometimes conscious, sometimes not) or involuntary.
One of the factors that complicates this further is time perception under stress. I have a report at home from a cell entry on a barricaded armed threat. From the time the door was opened until I shot I remember about 3 seconds of stuff. The team leader remembers about a minute of stuff, including a conversation that never happened. The rest of the stack wrote it as almost instantaneous.
The team leader was more adrenalized than I was. He perceived a very quick event to take a lot of time and his brain nicely made some stuff up to fill in the details. I was pretty adrenalized, but I was in the zone. Did it take three seconds? It would take me three seconds right now to do what I did there- scan, aim, reject target, acquire another target, aim, fire, rack a round, step out of the way- but in the zone? The rest of the team was probably right. It was pretty quick.
The point is that some of the people who see themselves in slow motion or even frozen, were in fact moving; or were only frozen for a fraction of a second that they remember as a very long time. Personal reports of events, particularly freezes, are very unreliable for establishing facts.
First, let’s dispense with the Tactical Freezes. I’m not too concerned about them because they are choices.
Sometimes, it is a very good idea not to move. Predators key on motion. Not moving allows them to move on to something else. This is the basis of the hardwired freeze response. When you decide to do this, hoping not to be noticed, it is a tactical freeze. It is also a good decision when you are making matters worse. As an old friend used to say, “When a wise man figures out he’s in a hole, he stops digging.” In a social violence situation a tactical freeze may allow the threat to cool down. It is not a good strategy after damage starts. It is also not something that works if you continue to antagonize or challenge with your body language.
There is often (always, actually, but the victim sometimes is not a part of it) a lead-up to an episode of social violence before the three stages mentioned above. The lead-up is where this tactic applies.
The third possible purpose of a tactical freeze is information gathering. If your intuition tingles it may be a good time to stop, look, listen, and smell. And evaluate and plan.
As said, not too concerned about these as freezes, though people do get stuck there.
Second, physiological freezes. I think I can identify two distinct kinds. When the body switches from its normal metabolic state to an adrenalized state, there’s a little tremor as described by Marc MacYoung in “The Professional’s Guide to Ending Violence Quickly”. It is literally a new mind and body and there is a slight freeze while you switch gears. We’ll do an engines and brakes analogy later, so this stays in theme. The engine is not powering the wheels between gears. Some people switch gears faster than others.
The second is when the danger is so overwhelming, or appears to be, that it triggers the hard-wired freeze response- “I couldn’t move.” Sometimes with the loss of bladder control and everything else. This is the deer in the headlights or the baby bird so terrified it sits in your hands in a near coma. There are a lot of levels of this.
Side note- being frozen can be triggered by fear, but it doesn’t usually feel that unpleasant- kind of warm and floaty with a sound in your ears like the ocean. People who have been so terrified they couldn’t move have described this state and decided that they weren’t really afraid so they weren’t really frozen. It just seemed like a good idea at the time not to move.
Mental/Non-Cognitive: A lot of the freezes are mental, which doesn’t mean that they are all cognitive.
Lonnie Athens posits that one of the reasons that change is hard is that no matter how screwed up your life, how horribly you are being victimized or how clear it is that death is inevitable on your current path- you are alive. Your subconscious mind, especially if it has seen a lot of death, is very well aware that your big plan to change your life is only that, a plan. Subconsciously, it knows that planning is a game, this is real and it will try to stick to what works. He called it working from the blueprint. Any time that you attempt to deal with a dangerous situation from a training perspective for the first time, you will get this freeze. If your OC response was good, you may have bought the time to get over it, but now you have to deal with the fact that your hindbrain was indulging the child by letting you take all those martial arts classes and doesn’t believe any of it. You will have to consciously force yourself to act. IME on the second successful action the hindbrain will relent and you can act.
A related phenomenon is behavioral looping, doing the same thing over and over again when it is clear that it is not working. Sometimes, tragically, when it is very clear to an objective outsider that the action will certainly lead to death (Kyle Dinkheller). The mechanism is the same- death may be in the air, but the hindbrain only knows that what you are doing has not gotten you killed and any change might.
Switching maps is the slight hesitation freeze it takes to adjust to a change in situation. When you think you know what you are dealing with e.g. handcuffing a resistive but not dangerous drunk and it suddenly becomes apparent that you were wrong (a knife appears in your stomach) it takes a small amount of time to switch modes. Changing gears again.
Pure Cognitive Freezes are the thought process errors that can make you freeze.
If too much information is coming in, like a flurry of blows, you can be caught in the OO bounce (From Col. John Boyd’s OODA loop) getting new Observations before you have Oriented to the ones you already have prevents you from ever Deciding or Acting. There are two training strategies for this. Both require using the fact of the OO bounce as a stimulus in an OC stimulus response pair. When you perceive an information overload you either shut down the source of the information or remove yourself from the source of the information.
Because the OO bounce prevents cognitive reasoning, this response must be trained by OC. The nature of OC prohibits two responses to the same stimulus, so you can only train to one of these strategies.
Novelty- if you can’t figure out what is happening, you can’t formulate a response to it. As with any of the cognitive freezes, don’t think of this as purely a logic problem. It happens in a cascade of chemical fear. The phenomenon of “My life passed before my eyes” has been theorized as an attempt to scan memory for something that relates to the situation you are in. Two examples of this from my own experience: Face contact, especially open handed, among adults is a very strong taboo in our culture. When it happens it is a sign of great dominance or great intimacy. Criminals use this, sometimes opening an attack with a ‘bitch slap’ that reliably makes people freeze and fall into a submissive mindset. For most people, the last time they have been slapped was as a child being punished. The mind falls back to that mindset.
The second example- there is rarely a physiological reason to collapse when shot, barring brainstem or spine compromise, but I have seen officers in training, not actually injured at all, collapse and play dead when shot. After all, the only time they have been ‘shot’ before was playing cops-n-robbers as kids and if you don’t die, you’re a cheater. Are the officers who choose to ‘die’ in training the same officers who collapse and bleed out from non-lethal wounds in real life?
Novelty can cross over the line into cognitive dissonance. If your expectations of a fight do not match what you see, your brain is almost compelled to sort it out and come to an understanding. If the fight you are in doesn’t look, feel or sound like the fight you have trained for, you will freeze. This, IMO, is compounded in martial artists who are very certain that their training has prepared them for reality.
The next two are very closely related. One of the Tactical Freezes is for the purpose of intelligence gathering. This is only appropriate before damage happens. Once boots are flying or weapons are out you need to be doing something. One of the most common reported freezes is the victim trying to figure out ‘why’. Trying to understand is something you can do later, when you are safe. In the moment of assault moving, not understanding, is required.
Very similar is the desire to come up with a plan before acting. Each second spent planning is a second of damage. Damage decreases your ability to execute plans. You can easily die, doing nothing, while groping for the perfect plan.
The next types are the Social/Cognitive freezes. These are basically what happens when you attempt to apply your internalized set of civilized rules to an uncivilized situation.
Lack of confidence falls under this heading. If the person believes, on any level, that his training is flawed or unrealistic, that will compound with the hindbrain’s reluctance to work off the blueprint. This is not always a bad freeze- bad training can make situations worse. The cure is almost as bad. It is far easier to instill confidence than competence.
A friend in Montreal, Mauricio Machuca distinguishes between capability and capacity. Damaging another human being is a skill and almost anyone can develop the capability in a short time. Many, however, do not have the capacity to injure another human being. Some internal value or belief- that violence is always wrong or that gouging an eye is unacceptably ‘icky’ will prevent them from acting. In a training environment it is almost impossible to tell if a capacity has actually changed. It is more likely that the person has only convinced themselves that training is just a game and it’s okay to pretend to eye gouge. If so, the freeze is still there, waiting to be triggered.
I sometimes use the analogy of ‘slipping the leash’. Some people either do not have the capacity or it takes extraordinary provocation. Capacity can change under certain provocations. I’ve done it and I’ve heard of many other instructors who motivated a woman in a self-defense class who was not effectively defending herself by telling her that the bad guy was coming after her children.
The person’s identity itself, through the mechanism of denial, can also prevent him or her from acting. Whether it is, “I’m not the sort of person this happens to, this isn’t happening,” or the equally devastating, “I know what I should do, but I’m not the kind of person who would.” The identity, the perception the victim has, prevents action. Even, sometimes at the cost of life.
Ambivalence is a situation that Freud would love. It is the word for when what you want and what is expected of you or what you believe yourself to be come into direct conflict. Marc uses an analogy and an example for this. The analogy is engine and brakes. You really want to clobber your brother in law but you don’t want to listen to your sister bring it up for the next ten years. Less flippant, this is what happens when an officer involved in a deadly force situation starts thinking about lawsuits and the internal affairs process during a life-or-death encounter.
Marc also mentioned alphas pushing betas until the beta fights and that the resultant injury could weaken the alpha to the point that his status was in jeopardy. The resulting equation, fear of injury versus desire to maintain dominance over the beta, would tend to freeze the alpha. I disagree- in a healthy society the alpha doesn’t maintain his position through physical domination. I think the glitch/hesitation equation will come from the fact that going physical with an underling at all shows that the alpha is insecure in his position. Provoking the conflict would compound that. The alpha, in that example, has a lot to lose not from the physical injuries making him vulnerable but from his own actions eroding his reputation.
As people grow up in society, they learn a variety of skills to deal with conflict. But that is conflict between civilized people, low-level social violence. When faced with a true predator, someone who does not care about society’s rules or who the victim is, it is an entirely different world. I call this the ‘looking glass effect’. The rules- the social rules; how your brain and body work; what you have been taught about how to handle other people; or what people value no longer apply.
Suddenly finding yourself in an alien culture where you don’t know the rules and your life is at stake creates a pretty deep panic reaction. All of the physiological reasons can combine with information gathering and denial to make you a gibbering wreck.
Lastly, the Pure Social freeze. In essence, some people are trained to freeze. It probably started as or was intended to be submission, but the programming has gone far deeper. This trained helplessness is a survival strategy for long-term abuse where the abuser chooses to see any sign of independence or spirit as an affront to his social status. I have seen the effects of this training, but there are people far more qualified to write about the process and implications than I am. The similarities between some of the abuse stories and what the victims became have eerie parallels in Elie Wiesel’s “Night”.
Note to Marc-reference back to Roman’s and Barbarians, the Monkey Dance, Insecure alphas, denial, types of violence and anything else already on the site. I hand-waved the stuff I couldn’t source directly. If you want academic style footnotes for the mentioned books, let me know, but I won’t be able to get page numbers since I obviously don’t have my library. I think this is good to go.
PRINCIPLES AND DRILLS FRIDAY, JANUARY 16, 2009
Jodan uke. The upper block. We practiced doing line drills. Uke would step in with his right foot as we stepped back with our left. His right hammer fist would come crashing down in a big circle and we would punch our left arm up at the right angle. His forearm would slam into ours and, if the angle was right, glide off. Then he would step forward with the other foot and everything would be repeated on the other side.
There were a lot of things that went into a proper upper block. The arm was punched up, not raised, which delivered more power. The palm side was snapped forward at the perfect instant to drive the ulna as an attack into uke's arm. A bad angle made a bruising contest of power, the perfect angle could glide a baseball bat without bruising. Minimal bruising, anyway. A good snap could open up his whole centerline.
Then, one day when I was bored or tired or something, I did it wrong. In line drills I blocked the big right downward hammer fist with a right jodan uke, cross body. Most of the same stuff happened except it turned uke's entire body, made him lean slightly and I was on his flank, halfway behind him. I owned him. Playing around, it was even better when I didn't step back. Closed the distance. Hmmmm.
Chi sao, or sticky hands, is primarily a sensitivity drill. You face your opponents, wrists touching, and try to tag each other (I have a gift for oversimplification). The cool thing is that if you can maintain wrist contact you can tell not only what your opponent is doing but what he is about to do. Without turning it into a strength contest, you can 'steer' his attacks to safe zones.
Just for fun, next time you play chi sao, take a half step forward and apply the skills to his elbows. Not only can you control his attacks, you can control his entire body like he was a rag doll. If you don't piss away the principles you can even bend and fold someone much bigger and stronger. Don't take my word for it. Try it.
Lastly, referring back to an old post.
There are a lot of connected principles here. It is easier to steer a moving object than it is to stop one and the threat in a fight tends to be a moving object. Maximize your leverage and utilize structure- and know, in a body, specifically where the leverage points are. Get to a dead space (love that rear flank) or force the threat to present it to you. Learn how much you can control without even using your fingers. The whole body is connected, if you can control the threat's elbow, you can control his feet (when I use the phrase 'core fighting' I'm talking about using the connection through the spine and hip and shoulder girdles to influence or control part of the threat's body by another part. It's fun.) Lots of things work better at closer ranges than they are commonly taught.
Something to think about.
DRINKING THE KOOLAID SATURDAY, JANUARY 17, 2009
“They drank the koolaid” is our shorthand for martial artists who have displayed even low levels of cult-like behavior. It is a reference to Jim Jones who took his little cult to Guyana and convinced them (forced them? Some? All? Who was there who lived and can tell the whole story?) to drink poisoned grape koolaid. It offered them a chance to go to the next world as a unit, I suppose.
There are a few words I have to explain here that I may not use in the common way- bias, prejudice and bigotry.
Bias is just a statement of preference. I like steak better than cauliflower, as do all right-thinking people. Jameson’s Irish whisky better than Bushmill’s and Ardbeg scotch better than either. I don’t have a lot of trouble with biases.
I don’t have a lot of problem with prejudice, either. We all pick up clues based on appearances about what is likely to trigger our biases. I expect a green glass soda bottle to have something citrus in it, not a cola or root beer. I prefer to not eat at a restaurant that smells bad from the outside.
In human terms, I don’t like stupid, lazy or rude people. I just don’t. Those are some of my biases. My prejudices, however (and I try not to show it, that would be rude) are that I expect slow people to be stupid, obese people to be lazy, and loud people to be rude.
It’s not always true. It is true often enough that it is reinforced.
However I know and cherish people who have triggered all of my prejudices without proving them out.
Here’s the thing- prejudice only becomes bigotry when you cling to your belief in the face of facts. When you treat someone as if they are lazy or stupid when they have proven that they aren’t, that’s bigotry. These are my personal definitions.
It is related to the talismanic thinking in the martial arts.
We all have our preferences, biases. I’m an infighter. I know people who like grappling; who like striking; knife guys; gun guys; people who work out in pristine white pajamas and people who work out in their work clothes. It’s all good. Just preferences.
Then there are prejudices-e.g. “sports martial arts are better for streetfighting”; “grappling is the most practical”; “winning at (insert your contest of choice here) is the best way to find out if something works”; “the guys in white pajamas don’t play hard”; “the guys who wear camo are bad asses”; “older styles are more real”… These are just beliefs that people have about what constitutes a valid clue. If you have been paying attention, have both an open and a critical mind, you can use your prejudices to quickly narrow down the field and choose something you are likely to be happy with. Generally, that’s cool.
It becomes a problem when facts cease to matter. Actually, only a problem for me.
For most people, martial arts is about fear management, not danger management. It is a way to feel that they have “a pretty good chance” or that they can “take care of themselves”. It’s about the feeling, not the ability. So becoming blindly dogmatic, absolutely certain that your Purple Lotus of Screaming Death Style is the end-all and be-all vastly increases your fear management. It makes good sense, from that point of view, to ignore those annoying little things called ‘facts’ and even to shut out experience- in extreme cases, even your own experience. So it generally really isn’t a problem for the koolaid drinker himself (and no one seems to be able to call it koolaid while they are drinking it). It’s only a perceived problem, and only for me, because I look at it through that dastardly danger-management lens.
There are levels of koolaid drinking. People who believe that their master has a scroll that is older than the native country’s written language or that their unarmed style was designed to fight mounted warriors. Those are pretty extreme.
It’s a group thing, too. Martial arts (and other specialized societies) create tight little self-reinforcing communities. Sometimes it is formal- the hierarchy specifically discourages dissent. Sometimes it is informal with the students banding together to protect the integrity of their fantasy.
More later….
SWEATING KOOLAID SATURDAY, JANUARY 17, 2009
Writing about koolaid and martial arts cults had me all set to go off on a rant. I do know, personally and by reputation, people that I consider absolute frauds in the martial arts and training communities. Instructors who have verifiably lied about their past or changed their personal stories to reflect changes in research. People who claim ranks and experiences that never happened. People who were unsatisfied with the 'highest possible rank' and bought or created or manufactured yet a higher rank than the 'highest possible'. I also know people who I like who are absolutely committed to these frauds.
And some of those frauds are damned good teachers and/or teaching something pretty valuable.
I really wish stuff could be all bad or all good.
Often, these frauds are protected by a group (self-appointed in one type of cult, designated in another) who try to quell any dissent or discredit any other point of view.
Here's one of the things- if you can point at a leader and a group it is fairly easy to say, 'they drank the koolaid. That's a cult.' So I was all set to rant about the teachers that feed on this, the teachers that let this happen. Justifiable. The instructors like that are pukes and it does piss me off... but sometimes the instructor has nothing to do with it. Rabid fanboys on the internet display the exact same behavior and you know damn well that they have never rolled with their MMA hero or been in a gunfight alongside their designated infallible handgun guru.
Maybe I'll still rant about those instructors someday, but that would entail going very deep into what teaching means to me. Not yet.
Sometimes the students make their own koolaid.
When you enter into a student relationship, you expect the instructor to have knowledge, at least, and maybe even answers. So you enter predisposed to believe. If the instructor is good, and the definition of good is heavily reliant on the student’s previous knowledge (or ignorance) and experience, you get impressed. It is a very small step from there to dropping your critical reasoning. It becomes a point of epistemology, the instructor becomes one of the sources that you accept without fact checking, just like some people believe CNN or their priests or their horoscopes or Scientific American.
That, too, can be okay. It crosses the koolaid line when the student decides that the instructor's words are more real than reality. When what you train contradicts the world but the students agree that the training is right. Some students make their own koolaid, even if the instructor had no intention and would happily correct himself.
There's another dynamic that happens, too. Sometimes a good instructor, a damn good instructor can make almost anyone drop their critical faculties. In the book (“Meditations on Violence” was my only book out at the time. I was shy and thought mentioning the title would be seen as crass commercialism. Didn’t realize how pretentious calling it “the book” sounded. Funny. –RM2012) I talked about one "charismatic young instructor" who had gotten a veteran jail fighter to completely forget what he already knew. That instructor was Kevin Jackson, for what it's worth. Kevin didn't teach anything wrong and I give him the highest accolade in martial arts that I know- he once taught a knife defense class that wasn't stupid. But one of the fighters (not sparrers, not martial artists but fighters) that I respect most in all the world (That's you, Bill K.) was willing to go with Kevin's instruction without even considering his own experience.
I've rolled with some guy named Renner. I don't know if he is as good as his dad, but that young man was good. He was so good that he got an entire room of cops to absolutely believe that techniques they would never be able to pull off in body armor and a belt full of weapons (and some of which were pretty clear violations of force policy) were the best things ever. He absolutely believed that his stuff was the best, but Renner never discouraged questions, never did an appeal to authority, never made any claims that in any way could be interpreted as cultish behavior... but he inspired some very creepy cult-like behavior. He was that skilled. It was like he sweats koolaid.
How far does that go? Is everything koolaid to someone? The better one teaches, does that just give higher quality students a chance to drink a more rarified flavor of koolaid?
Is there any caveat or warning strong enough that what I say won't become koolaid to someone? When I say "Never, ever delegate responsibility for your own safety. Never, ever, ever take the word of some self-appointed 'expert' over your own experience and common sense." Will that, my talisman against koolaid drinkers, become koolaid; just words that people chant without understanding?
Sigh.
UNCONDITIONAL POSITIVE REGARD TUESDAY, JANUARY 20, 2009
One of my Psychology Professors espoused that all humans are looking for “unconditional positive regard”. They seek someone who will look at them (regard) and like them (positive) no matter what they have done or are doing (unconditional). I never really had much use for the concept.
I’ve never wanted unconditional love. Whatever love I had I needed to be worthy of. I did not want a gift of 'unearned grace', a dispensation from heaven. I wanted someone to love me for what I am, not despite what I am. Someone who loved a me that they saw clearly.
Same with friendship. I like to spend time with impressive people. Strong, intelligent, accomplished people. I also want them to feel that they are spending, not wasting, their time with me. It’s a great incentive to stay interesting. To work to become what I admire.
It’s one of the reasons that I so value the deeply honest friends, the ones that will tell me when I am full of shit or heading down the wrong path or playing with matches in the powder shed. If someone I admire sees me that clearly and chooses to stick around, it’s a very good sign.
Unconditional? I trust the people who I love never to cross these lines, but there are behaviors that deserve high-velocity trans-cortical lead therapy regardless of history or blood ties. My love is deep, but there is a condition never to turn evil. Or even really, really stupid. I have limits.
When a Psych Prof says ‘everybody’ and I know damn well it doesn’t apply to me, that really doesn’t mean much. By this time, so much of my emotional wiring is home-built after-market that it’s not funny. So I’ll consider it a ‘most people’ thing and tread lightly.
But, lately, a couple of things have come up in different places…
Absurd, silly things. The kind of things that I am confident if they were just pointed out one could only laugh… but maybe not. Both of the things I am thinking about were triggered as defense mechanisms. Reflexive responses to something I said, nothing more, but so impossibly absurd that I am afraid that pointing them out would trigger a deeper defense mechanism.
One of my assumptions (this might be a little complex) is that if someone pulls out a ridiculous explanation, something their adult mind couldn’t possibly support, in order to defend a position, both the position and the explanation were implanted very early and very deep. If you push it, especially if there is no real room to run, you are directly attacking identity. The backlash can be harsh. (No, not danger: just anger and hurt and all that emotional sludge that makes me tired.)
For the people intent on finding “unconditional positive regard” it’s probably a no-brainer. Avoid hurting feelings, pretend not to even notice contradictory beliefs. Smile and move on. Also for the very few people who genuinely have their identity centered around understanding themselves- pointing out contradictions and absurdities to those few is a rare gift. Not always pleasant, but they are usually grateful when the wounds heal.
But for many people, maybe most, the things that trigger a reflexive defense are some of the deepest things about who they are. Stuff they will refuse to see and deny, sometimes to the point of death or beyond. A wise friend once said that the things you can’t see are the ones that control you the most.
It’s just a data point, something to let go, I think. I like these people the way they are. There is no obligation to fix something that no one else may consider broken.
I guess that’s my version of positive regard.
THE DEAL WITH CHIRON WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 21, 2009
...and the thing about horses. Dr. Kevin likes horses. A lot. More importantly, he's doing some good work with them, healing some people who need something less monkey-minded than a human to set things right. Good and important works.
I don't like horses. They're beautiful and fast and powerful and all that, I see that, but so is an elk or an antelope or damn near any other large prey species. So I don't dislike horses. They just don't impress me much.
I was raised on a ranch (cue the fade out and flashback music)... or, technically more of a farm. Or a survivalist compound. And I did ranchwork when I was old enough to work. Horses were tools. But, unless you were doing competitive rodeo, they were extremely expensive, high maintenance tools. Not only could a pickup carry more, but over the years it was cheaper to run. The places a pick-up couldn't go? In rough country I was faster and more endurant than a horse. I'm sure the horse could have gone faster, but in that country no rider would let it for fear of the animal breaking a leg.
I had actually thought the horse was kind of a compromise- if you didn't have a teen-aged boy who liked broken country running and a pickup, a horse was probably your best option.