Scientifically Validating Experience

I don't have a fever, which feels strange. Soon it will feel normal again, but for right now it's a bit odd. And I'll miss the dreams. Somewhere around 103 degrees the dreams get very interesting.

Epistemology is a really interesting concept and a useful tool to analyze cultures, people, opponents. It is the study of how a group or a person comes to believe that things are 'true'. In some cultures, tradition is truth.  The night ascension of Mohammed or the midnight ride of Paul Revere are simply facts.

In martial arts, the epistemology can get really weird.  People have a need to validate their skills, but are rarely sure how to safely do so.  We can't line up ten thousand slaves and strike each one on a different point and see what happens (though in one kwoon I was told that this was exactly how their  vital points chart was derived- an unnamed Emperor experimented on 10,000 slaves.)  So do you take that story as truth?  If you do, can you then take the conclusions, the list of effects, as truth?  Maybe. Depends on your epistemology.  Can you 'experiment' or 'pressure test' in the ring or the octagon?  Sure, you can experiment anywhere you want.  Doesn't mean the experiment is valid, however.

In our culture, generally, we feel more comfortable if someone in a white coat with a PhD after the name gives us the green light.  Not always- the scientist has to agree with what we already believe or he will be accused of "selling out to big business" or being a "tool of special interest groups" but generally, we like it when scientists confirm what we want to believe.

My degree is in experimental psychology.  Psychology has drifted very far from scientific rigor on a lot of points, but one of the best things about that course of study was some extensive work in designing experiments, analyzing experimental design and the number crunching once the results come in.

So I see some of the martial arts instructors and (especially) entrepreneurs who claim valid and deep scientific backing for what they teach... and it's largely junk science.  Sometimes the experiment didn't conclude what the martial artist claims it did.  Sometimes the design itself, though published, was fundamentally flawed.  Sometimes it was 'entertainment science' like the National Geographic "Fight Science" where apples are compared to oranges.  Often the person using the study never really understood it.

The weirder part is that it doesn't really matter- it's all for comfort anyway.  The guys in white coats won't be anywhere in the area when you need to apply your skills to keep crawling for one more day.  Some of the conclusions work, even when they back them up with junk science.

Huh?

Yeah, because that's the way this stuff works, that's the way people work.  You talk to enough people, especially combat veterans and you hear things- "I was so scared I shit my pants!" "I couldn't remember how to pull a trigger." "My fingers couldn't work the bolt on my rifle." And you start putting things together.  This scared, this happens.  More scared, more happens.  Sometimes the martial arts instructor/entrepreneur (now a martial researcher! Yeah howdy!) does a study, often with no training in how to do a study or an experiment.  More often they start looking for research that supports their points, probably reading only the abstracts and not able to understand the actual experiment itself. So we have martial research on the effects of fear derived from the research based on running on a treadmill- because the researcher was looking at stress and he found studies based on a cardio stress test.

It doesn't matter because the researcher started with a good conclusion. Fact: the more scared you are the shittier you perform.  That is enough to start improving training.  Getting studies to back it up is largely window dressing.

But it can matter once it is established and starts to work the other way.  When you start extrapolating from junk science or irrelevant, poorly understood experiments and drawing conclusions from those.

One case, not related to MA because every MA case I know has the potential to hurt a friend's feelings:

Our local paper published a study a few years back about hunger in our fair state.  It had shocking and glaring conclusions that one in fifteen people right here were at grave risk of starvation. WTF?  I know some of the poorest people in the largest urban area.  If not for meth, the obesity rate would be astronomical. No one is starving to death. I was raised as a poor kid in the poorest part of the state. No one starved to death.  You would be hard pressed to find anyone who had starved to death, ever in this region who wasn't an elderly shut-in.  So I looked at the study.  Ever waited until a paycheck come in to do your grocery shopping?  That puts you at extreme risk for starvation.  Not for missing a meal, or living out of you cupboards, but starvation!!! Ever smell a restaurant and not go in because you didn't have money with you?  That's grave risk of starvation.  Buddy, you won't make it through the night.

The questionnaire was that poorly designed.  In and of itself it was a joke, just a tool for some folks to get worked up who wanted to get worked up. Relatively harmless.  Except people who either never read or couldn't understand the actual survey started throwing money at a problem that didn't exist.

They feel vindicated.  As far as anyone can name, no one has starved (other than shut-ins) in our fair state since the study came out... of course, no one did before, either.

Triggers and Stops

An author (and very nice lady) once said, "The only reason people ever resort to violence is out of great fear, great anger, or great desperation."  I smiled my snotty little grin and said, "I do it for money."  That might have gone really badly, but Jayel was wise and it became a talking point for a long time.  We both learned a lot.

Jayel is a good person and insightful.  I have no doubt that she did some deep soul searching and knew that she was capable of violence (a step up from a few friends who deny even that) and knew what her triggers would be- extremes of fear, anger and desperation.  It's a good insight.  It gets problematic when you assume that since those are your triggers, those are the triggers.

"I do it for money."  Not really.  Sort of.  Absolutely.  I deal with conflict and violent people as a profession.  I do get paid for it.  Far more often than not, I get paid for talking them out of making me use force.  But the force option is still always on the table.  As a job, though, it changes everything.  I can never use force out of anger.  If I use force out of fear or desperation (outside of an ambush) it almost always means that I let things get out of hand, or took chances or didn't see something coming when I should have.  So Jayel's triggers are there in me, but my triggers come into play at an earlier, professionally chosen time.

Violent people raised in a violent subculture have different triggers.  If you have seen the logic of violence- the first to attack the hardest wins- and have never been socially conditioned to see any moral problem with violence your trigger might be simple convenience.

If you have been conditioned to believe that certain tabus (the color of a bandana, someone saying bad things about your mom) must be dealt with violently or it will endanger your status with your group, your triggers for violence might be a complex web of social rules invisible to others.  That's a form of fear, too- the fear of being cast out or just losing status in the group.  I'm not sure it qualifies as great fear.

Fear, actually, is the primary preventative of violence.  For normally socialized people, a conscience is enough: fear of feeling bad, fear of disappointing parents and mentors and loved ones.  They would understand if you were forced to violence by great fear or desperation and maybe even forgive you for a great and justified anger.

Most of our violent criminals and even our low-level hustlers were never socialized in this way.  For normal people the concepts of guilt and shame are givens.  To learn that there is a large subculture without these feelings is jarring.  If you want some academic corroboration, pick up Fleisher's "Beggars and Thieves".  Personally after years of listening to criminals it took a long time to realize that outside of attempts to manipulate people I never hear them say that they "felt bad" about something or express any real sympathy at all.  Compassion is simply a skill used to find weakness in a potential victim.  When they do express sincere regret (talking to themselves or within their own groups) it is always for consequences to themselves.  Not for widows or orphans or scars that they have created but for time that they might serve.  Things they might lose.

Most prefer intimidation to violence because it is safer.  You stand a little too close and keep one hand under your jacket and ask for some money, you might get it.  The guy says "no" and looks like he's ready to fight, no harm in walking away.  You intimidate and the guy gives you money, that's panhandling.  There's an ordinance against aggressive panhandling, but that's at most a ticket and hard to prove.  You use force, and if a cop happens to see you that's robbery.  It will probably get thrown out: just claim the guy pushed you first and the money fell out of his pocket, but you still might spend some time in jail.  Which is okay, sometimes.  Worse, you use force and the guy knows what he's doing and you could get hurt.

When groups of people with that mindset are concentrated, as in the penal system, it would turn Lord of the Flies really fast if not for the officers watching, but they can't watch everything.  Groups form and one of their primary purposes is to provide a threat of retaliation should someone attack or cheat or steal from a member of the group.  The combination of fear of retaliation and fear of the disciplinary process is what limits the violence in jail (and jails/prisons are far more violent than most neighborhoods yet far less violent than they would be without this).

That's a huge and interesting divide between the population of citizens and criminals.  Socialized people need fear or something similar to trigger an act of violence.  For the criminals, fear is generally the only thing stopping them from resorting to violence as a first option.

C is Back

C is without doubt my favorite violent schizophrenic.  At his worst, he smears himself with his own shit and attacks anyone who comes near.  At the mid-level he walks in circles, never making eye contact with anyone, every muscle tense.

He was my 'project' for a long time. When he started 'decompensating*' I'd get a call, "Sarge, see if you can talk to C.  He's about to lose it."  So I would walk in long circles with him, usually not talking any more then he did.  He eventually started talking a little and then a lot.  One custody, he shared a goal with me. He wanted to work in the jail kitchen.  That probably doesn't seem like a big goal to you, but for him it was huge.

He had to work his way from Severe Mental Housing to Mental Housing to Mild Mental to General Population and then to the worker dorm.  That meant that his behavior had to continually improve until he wouldn't 'ping' the radar of the other inmates in custody at the level he was going to.  He had to stay on his meds. He had to consciously watch and modify his behavior. C took it very seriously and we wrote a contract, which was actually more of a list of things that he needed to learn how to watch: a cheat sheet for faking normality (and are any of us normal? Is there a difference between faking normal and being normal?)

The problem came in the transition from Mental to Mild Mental.  I was talking to him every day.  He seemed to be doing really well.  At the bi-weekly meeting of the Mental Health Team I made the case for moving him on... it was soundly rejected.  I thought he was doing better. Everyone else thought he was losing ground fast.  I made the case at the next meeting and the next... it was imperative that he didn't get the idea that we were manipulating him.  He had to learn from this that controlling his behavior worked- it got what he wanted.  That goal setting and planning worked.  It would be a huge disaster, and play nicely into some of his paranoid delusions, if he came to believe that the people who had developed rapport with him had only done so for our own purposes, to make him easier to manage.

I made the case again and one of the deputies sighed. "Sarge, he's complaining about bugs everywhere.  We can't send him to Mild, much less General, if he's seeing imaginary bugs."

Crap. "I'll tell him," I said.  So I did. I went up to his housing unit and told him that as long as he was seeing things, we couldn't move him.  Maybe a medication change...

No.  He was adamant.  There really were bugs and no one would listen to him.  I sighed. 'No one listening' fell right in with the paranoid aspect of his schizophrenia. "Show me." He brought me up to his cell.  It was crawling with little maggoty bugs.  The only cell in the whole jail.

Sometimes the bugs are real.  It was a good lesson for all of us.  Everyone had seen what they expected to see and stopped looking when they saw what they expected.  He made it all the way to the kitchen and did a good job until his release.

C is back in custody.  He's looking really good, keeping himself clean, holding a conversation. I even saw him play cards with other inmates.  Is he better or faking it? Does it matter?

*Mental health has almost as many cool euphemisms as law enforcement.  They don't say "Getting worse" or "Going off the deep end" the use "decompensating".  And restraining someone by force is a "physical intervention strategy."  Cool, huh?

Nikki Valentine

Most people's dark sides are pretty pathetic.  The evil that people imagine is sometimes great, but everyone imagines an open season on loud people or people who stop and block aisles in warehouse stores.  Few actually do it.  Then those who do are sometimes shocking in their...patheticness.  If that's a word.  More often than not the people who kill are whiners, needy and entitled.  Not getting what they want is a great injustice and they will do anything, without regard for others, to fulfill a desire.

This hit me in terms of tragedy today.  I was asked some weeks ago if I had ever loved someone so much that it made me cry.  I answered, without really thinking, that I had forgotten how to cry long before I learned how to love.  It probably sounds like a 'tough guy pretending to be deep' platitude. Sorry.

I remember the last time I cried and why.  Things today brought that memory very close to the surface.  Mirrored it too well.  So the memory was there and I poked at it... and it wasn't so huge a tragedy.  Remove the fact of living it and it is a very small story.  It wasn't "Where the Red Fern Grows" by any means, or "Brian's Song".  But, really, written with less skill would "Where the Red Fern Grows" have been what it is?  The story is small- a boy and a dream and his dogs and love and loyalty to the edge of death.  A small story, except to the boy, and to all the people who became that boy for a few hours while reading that book.

Goodbye, old girl.  I'm glad you had one last good spring.

Spinning Plates

Everything is quiet right now.  The last batch of training is finished and the next two phases aren't things I'm certified in so no more multiple extra shifts for a while.  The book theoretically went to the printer on Friday after a... I want to say marathon or epic editing session, but actually the editor made it pretty smooth and easy.  It took some time and most of the prep work on my end was done in a state of near exhaustion, but it went well.  The two other big things are pending, waiting.  Waiting drives me nuts, but it is a big part of life. The key is to do other things.

So I can relax, work on other projects. Maybe even bring this blog back to the more interesting subjects like bad guys and brawling.

Before I do, in this dead space, a couple of questions if anyone has input:

1) The publisher wants a list of organizations/reviewers who might be interested in the book.  Any ideas?

2) For some reason when I publish to the blog the first (or sometimes several) paragraphs are fine, and then it squinches down so that it is no longer double spaced. Any idea what is going on?

Death Poetry

A long time ago, with his kind permission, I posted some of Drew Rinella's poetry here.  A few days ago, Drew let me know about his websites, one for poetry and a new one for "stories".  Drew puts his heart in his poetry and laughs in his stories.  In the stories I see the gangly, sometimes goofy kid who walked into the garage dojo to learn some jujutsu.  In the poems I see the man who fights death and doesn't look away.

His blog had links, mostly people who do what he does. Some days that's holding a physical body together for just a few more minutes.  Somedays it is making hard choices while people scream and bleed. Some days it is making a little old lady feel a little less scared.

I followed some of the links.  Not poetry, not officially.  Just some stories about the job and lessons learned and fears faced and hope delivered.  Most people who get involved in Emergency Services don't write.  The ones that do often have a power.  I don't know if it is the intensity of the experiences one finds on the edge of death or a comfort and comradeship that I feel. They have stood over their bodies and I have stood over mind and we each felt what we felt.  Not so alien or alone when I read these stories.  Try this one

I know people who write poetry and sometimes describe themselves as poets who have spent their entire lives trying to write something with the depth and power of some of Drew's stuff.  I can barely read fiction because so much of it seems an inbred string of cliches with no connection, no comparison to the emotion or intensity of a real life.  I may be wrong, but I don't feel that a shallow life can produce deep poetry.

Synergy?

Synergy is a fun concept.  Sometimes the forces of the cosmos come together and linked things happen that could not have happened by random chance.  Coincidence takes on a feeling of intention.

Whatever.  The human mind is a fun toy and works hard every day to find patterns and make sense.  With tens of thousands of occurrences every day that touch your life in some way, is it any wonder that you will naturally focus on the five that seem to fit together?  More of a wonder, perhaps, that things that feel like synergy don't occur more often... but they do, of course. They just don't count unless you notice them.

Your mind can be set, also.  You can choose to look for blue things and your eyes will pick them up.  When you buy a new car you are often surprised by the number of cars of the same make, model, and color that you see on your commute. Surely there weren't that many yesterday... but there were, you just didn't have a reason to notice them.  In the same way, when you decide "No more of this! I'm looking for that!"  That will suddenly appear everywhere.

So I don't need synergy to explain things... but sometimes it feels good to feel special.  In that crazy busy week with the book going to new (to me) places- final edits, a talk with the publicist-and other things squeezed in (which I may not be able to talk about for a bit) two contacts out of the blue:

1) Been asked to write a peer-reviewed article for a martial encyclopedia and

2) Something wacky involving Hollywood. Someone in Colorado evidently thinks I'm pretty.

The first is solid.  The second I seriously doubt that I have the time, but it is intriguing as hell.  It would be very cool to talk to people from that world and see if they are as completely out of touch with the real world as their products tend to be.

Chaos Addiction

Chaos is addictive on a lot of levels. Once you get past the fear and uncertainty it can be kind of fun. The adrenaline rush of surviving, of being the one who walks away, is simultaneously intoxicating and serene and profound. There are few things that give as powerful a sense of accomplishment as going into a situation of deep and dangerous chaos and making it safe and right. There is nothing that makes you feel as special as deliberately advancing on a situation that everyone else is running away from.

Dealing successfully with chaos strokes your ego, increases your awareness, deepens you appreciation of everything and gives a trickle or a dump of neurotransmitters that feel pretty nice. Is there any wonder that there are adrenaline junkies out there?

The downside, of course is the nature of chaos. There is no scalar: "I am 9 units effective and this problem is 8 units bad, therefore I will win." Easy problems or at least things that should have been easy go sideways. You might be a 'ten' but I would reliably bet that you have some skills that are much lower, and you don't get to pick what skills you might need.  If you play the game long enough and hard enough, you will lose.

(And here's the essence of the Chaos Game: potential infinite variety of problem faced by a nearly infinitely complex person. At one level, if skills match problem, fine. But at another level humans can develop skills in extrapolation: "I don't know jack about X, but I'm really good at Z and it's only two letters away. Can I use my Z skill for the X problem? How?" Even though your skills are finite, your ability to play with and mesh and rethink those skills approaches infinity.)

And that skill- adaptability and extrapolation- gets really addictive.  You start to see problems in a different and clearer way. (There is a trap there, because almost every bad decision comes from someone who thought that they were seeing things more clearly than others.)  When you see problems in this way you can solve things in a way that looks effortless.  It feels effortless too  and that is part of the addiction.  It can spiral.  There is a fine line between feeling special and feeling like an outsider.

Some very successful people glitch on that feeling and meld back into the herd or burn out.  Some revel in it, and that can become another reinforcement.

Addiction has some bad connotations in our society.  Rightly so IMO- dependance on anything, whether a drug, a person, or a government program is giving up a piece of your autonomy, what Kai calls agency.  Anything you need from another person, any responsibility for yourself that you voluntarily relinquish is a piece of your soul that you are selling.

Chaos addiction differs because you can't delegate it.  The deeper you go the more you must rely on yourself.  It pushes you to be better.  Depending on the level and type of chaos it forces you to focus and to relax; to be strong and determined and also flexible.  It forces you not only to see your mistakes and weaknesses but to face them and fix them.

In other ways, though, chaos doesn't differ from other addictions.  Like anything else, the better you get at something the more challenging the things you try to take on just like a drug it can take more and more to get the same effect.  It can be hard on you mentally and physically: there are striking similarities between a thoroughly burned-out cop or paramedic and an old alky.  And you can overdose.  Bite off more than you can chew or get surprised when that level three problem goes sideways and it can be your body laying in the alley with half a face missing.

There are other pathologies here: 

• It is rarer than you would expect, but some few create problems so that they can fix them.  This almost always poisons the agency where they work. 
  
• People who fix problems often deal with peaceful times poorly.  Boredom can mimic depression. Alcoholism rates, I was once told, are the highest in cultures with a warrior ethos that are forced into peacetime.
• Complacency- the one I most battle with- Once you get really good at adaptability/extrapolation it becomes very tempting not to do your homework.  There have been incidents when I had time to research or plan and just walked in trusting I could "wing it".  Successful so far and I never do it when others might get hurt (he tells himself self-righteously, but there is extreme hubris in the presumption that I could know how far the chaos could ripple).

Trying to Write

It has literally been a crush for the last week. Writing has happened in snatches while waiting for other things. Some of those things might be serious and maybe they'll be written about here, maybe not.

Posts started and not finished include one on knowing your audience when teaching; one on progress with the book and one on how two very different things can get to something that looks like the same place- very specific things about how either nature or nurture, either alone can make a sociopath... and how those two kinds of sociopaths differ and how what might change one won't change the other. The two-way action concept and the convergent evolution concepts are powerful, if I can just keep from going off on tangents and stick to the idea.

So, now in the space after an interview and before work (and I'll try to cram a library run and a few more chores in there) I'll finally eat something and have some coffee and post this. While working on an expanded author's bio for the book. I'm thinking of doing it in the form of a personal ad:

"MWM H/W proportionate seeks adventure, new knowledge and insight. Already found true love. I enjoy long sword fights on the beach, spectacular sunsets in my opponents eyes and good scotch."

More to follow.

Busy Man

Galleys are in and very quickly comes a message that there will be one more trade of copies with the plan that the manuscript will be at the printer on Tuesday- so an entire review, last chances and BOOM. Done. Except for all the things that aren't.

Simultaneously I was tasked to design an eight-hour training day for dealing with the mentally ill. I got the instructions a while ago and wrote/designed what I needed to do and delegated the parts I wasn't qualified to write: psychotropic medications; the continuum of care; a catalog of community resources, stuff like that.

As it got close to crunch time, none of the delegatees came through. None. Zero percent. As the date approached, I called them on it. The answer was universal- they didn't believe that the program had management support, that it would help, that the students cared-- they wanted to bag it. Conscious or not, the inactivity was a passive-aggressive attempt to torpedo the program.

(Yes, people. In any large political organization you can expect management to be out of touch. It is our job to hold it together anyway. I know you're tired. I'm tired too. But we hold it together. Us. No matter how short-sighted or even stupid the directives, we hold things together. We make it work. The people who make the bad decisions won't pay for the consequences. We will, either us or the people we are sworn to protect. So we make it work, every day. Just do it.)

They said they would get it done, but they used the same words as the first time. I'm not qualified to write the stuff we needed. Crisis communication? Oh, yeah. Quick and dirty diagnosis? Limits of physical skills? All that. But not the stuff we needed.

So I called in the big guns. I think I've disagreed with and gone head to head with Capt. A more than anyone else at his rank in the agency. But for years I've admired his ability to deal with problem people (he actually has more trouble with motivated self-starters). I called him. He called a meeting.

It was an education to watch him work. He never even entertained 'why' or 'if' but jumped right to 'how'. The very people that were in full rebellion with me were assigned tasks and solving problems before they even remembered that they were supposed to be resistant to the idea. The captain handled it masterfully. Within a few hours, handouts and contact numbers started appearing in my email...

Which gives me two days to design a student packet, polish two classes, create a PowerPoint and get it all vetted and approved. While working on the galleys. And teach a First Aid class. Maybe get some writing done. A workout would be nice. Start learning a language...

Galley Slave

Rhino has made the magical transition from manuscript to book.  That's cool. Received the galleys yesterday.  This is definitely one of the neat "new author" feelings.  It's a PDF file and it doesn't have the weight of a book, but it has the look.  

For the next week (in my copious spare time) I'll be going over it, looking for changes I'm unhappy with or things that need to be clarified.  Books are scary in a way, because they are moments frozen in time.  This book is what I thought on these subjects in 1993-95.  There have been a lot of lessons since then, some entirely new ways to see things.  Growth is good but at first glance, I think the book is fine.  Growth also creates distance and Rhino (Published title will be Meditations on Violence) is far more accessible than a 2008 version would be.

Sometimes...

Sometimes people die.  Actually, everybody dies- but that's not the point.  Sometimes people die and you go over the situation examining decisions and what-if's and sometimes you find the place where something different might have saved a life.  Sometimes that is valid and sometimes it is NOT.  Sometimes the examination is a serious debriefing, professionals trying to learn lessons and find a better way to do a risky job.  Often it is one or more amateurs with an agenda trying to place blame... (and that's not fair. The real mechanism, often, is that someone who they love brought on his own deaths through his own actions... and that's too much, too much love and anger, too much to feel for one dead person. If they can remove at least the little piece about his responsibility for his own death maybe they will sleep better at night.  Maybe they can forgive the dead for dying if they can remove the need to forgive them for what lead to the death.) The amateurs will go to unbelievable lengths of twisted logic to believe that they have found a way.

There was a recent news article that enraged me, and maybe I will dissect it later- but Dave asked about the comment that sometimes people die no matter how hard you try.  A long time ago I mentioned without following it up that if a threat cannot feel pain, it almost guarantees a serious injury.  Those are all connected.

Dave was concerned that it might be personal to talk about.  Less for me, but I have restrictions based on confidences and other things, so this post will probably seem more oblique than most.

The force is over when the threat decides it is over.  That simple. Humans almost always give up.  Unless every long bone in the body is broken or the Central Nervous System is shut down the human machine is still capable of fighting.  The whole point of pain compliance (joint locks, pressure points and Taser) is to deliver enough pain that the threat decides to quit.  The next step above that does damage, but it takes a truly horrific amount of damage to make it impossible for a human to keep fighting.  It is some damage + a fear of more damage that makes the threat quit fighting.  The threat quits because of the fear. They quit psychologically.

The next step above this is lethal force. If it is imperative to stop the threat and damaging force has failed, that may indicate lethal force (that is not legal advice).

More often than not (and in almost every case that has made the papers lately and locally) though the officers could justify lethal force, they try to handle the situation at a lower level. Often a much lower level.  One example is "the swarm" where as many officers as they can get pile on the threat.  The idea is to tire the threat out. Use friction and body weight to cause an exhaustion that will do what pain and fear failed to do.  It is dangerous as hell. If you are trying to wrestle and the other guy is biting, clawing, blinding and may have a weapon, it sucks... and I know officers who have been permanently injured trying hard NOT to injure a threat.  Even if the threat doesn't have a weapon all the officers do, and the threat could work one out of a holster and turn it into a bloodbath just by chance.  So it is dangerous. It would be far safer and often justifiable to stand back and use firearms, but most officers are so reluctant to kill that they try this technique.

Usually it works.

Sometimes (look for "excited delirium") it doesn't.  Excited delirium is a condition that most officers are familiar with, but it is hard to pin down exactly what it is or what causes it.  It usually follows heavy stimulant use (PCP or cocaine) but sometimes not.  Often the threat has a history of severe psychiatric disorders, but sometimes not.  Sometimes it is just rage taken to a point that is inhuman.  The weirdest part, to me, is that some of the liver temperatures taken at autopsy, well after death have been higher than the body can withstand without brain damage, so there is something physiological going on.

What presents (and none of these are 100%): is someone who often strips naked, sometimes howls like an animal, attacks almost anything that moves and likes to break glass.  They don't respond to pain.  They fight when any normal human would long have collapsed into a heap.  They shrug off bullet wounds that are clearly lethal.  The ones I have dealt with have gone relatively well, but close friends have been involved in instances where a relatively small threat was literally throwing (in one case eight, in another five) officers around.

And that's the thing, Dave.  Because sometimes the threat just suddenly quits and you get handcuffs on and start to take a breath and realize that he isn't breathing.  He didn't give up, his heart gave out.

At great personal risk the officers addressed the threat at a lower level of force than they could have justified and he died anyway.  In the end, to the amateur debriefers, it's all the same.  If they hadn't fought so long and so hard, the poor boy would have lived.  They should have done something else.  What?  Taser?  But all of the cool tools that come under fire- Taser, VNRs (Vascular Neck Restraints, the fancy word for a hadaka jime), ankle to hand restraints, even OC tend to be used more often when you need the edge.  You need the edge most of all with excited delirium.  As seen from the liver temperature, some of the people in ED are on the fast track to death or brain damage anyway. 

 Here's the thing- it's possible that a certain percentage of these cases would die anyway, even if they never came in contact with an officer.  A rough analysis shows that the percentage who die in custody hasn't really changed with the LVNR and when the LVNR was removed from many agencies; when hog-tying was common and when it was discontinued; when the Taser and OC were introduced.

There's an international study working on in-custody deaths right now.  It may be years before they have solid numbers, but then we may have an answer.  Until then, the amateurs with an agenda will blame whatever tool or tactic was used, completely ignoring the fact that the officers had no choice about getting involved and risked their lives trying not to use deadly force.

Flush

My wife worries about me when I'm alone.  I rarely sleep ( being around people is about the only thing that seems to make me tired. With complete solitude I can go on 1-4 hours sleep every 26- and that's weird in itself because it seems that my natural sleep cycle is set to a 26 hour day). I don't eat much or often, just when I'm both hungry and not absorbed in something else, which makes perfect sense to me, but since it comes out to eating once every other day (plus whatever I graze as I hike along) she worries.

Then she finds out what I am eating (currently a ramen noodle soup with leftover ham and kangaroo) and worries more.

These tendencies don't come out much around people.  Left to myself I eat to refuel or for fun, and cooking is more fun than eating.  Sleep is a form of time travel for when there is nothing else to do.  Around people, it's different.  There are meal times, and people seem to get seriously grumpy if the schedule is off by much.  Social eating- which I understand, hospitality was a big piece of my family's moral culture- but people over time do notice if you don't eat and act concerned, which leads to caring conversation, which makes me tired.  Or they act hurt if they notice you aren't eating with them.  So I eat and I smile.

Conversation for conversation's sake is a grind. When there is something to talk about, I enjoy conversation.  Even debate and arguing, but especially exploring someone else's mind: What do you think?  What do you believe? Why? How does that affect this?  But conversation just for it's own sake, just for bonding is an effort and makes me tired.  If I spend time in your presence, I already like you, OK?  There is no need for mutual babbling to confirm the fact. C'mon.

Half a day alone today and I could feel the psychic human gunk of a very long week flushing away.  That's good. Now I'm going to eat my kangaroo (seriously, how could you have an opportunity to eat 'roo and turn it down?)

Mr. Rubber, Meet Mr. Road

Before I came to this job, I'd studied a fair number of things in a fair number of styles. I'd sparred a lot and loved it and excelled at it: everything from non-contact kumite to full; boxing; kick boxing; grappling (mostly under judo rules); no rules (with and without weapons)...

(One caveat- I have never trained both full contact and no holds barred at the same time. I have serious doubts about anyone who claims that they have. To put it in perspective when I was training true 'no holds barred' in classical jujutsu at light contact I averaged one broken bone and two dislocations a year. There is no way I could have gone a week with anyone who was decent without suffering- or inflicting- a crippling injury.)

Many years ago I asked a karate instructor why we practiced kata and kihon when we didn’t use any of the moves in sparring. It wasn’t anything like 'fighting'. He didn’t have a good answer.
Four years later after wrestling with a street fighter under a roulette table in a casino I drew a shaky breath and said, “Shit, that wasn’t anything like sparring!”

The casino security gig lasted a little over a year before I went back to college. I learned a little about criminals, a lot about intimidation and presence and talking people down. There were only a handful of major fights. The big lesson was that someone who really knew what he was doing could pull off things that a hot young martial artist couldn’t make work.

College and military after that, and then the Job. Corrections. Direct supervision- constant face to face contact with the inmates. No weapons, always outnumbered and expected to maintain control. I went six months without my first fight, and then had three in a week.

This last post in the series is kind of a cheat, because most of this blog is really about those lessons. The things I learned and am still learning. The things I thought I knew that didn’t hold up. The things I still hear all the time that are the martial equivalents of talismans and wishful thinking- or equally incorrect the dire predictions and certainties.

Some of those:
• I had always believed that there was always a way to avoid force. I hadn’t been naïve, I knew that there wasn’t always time to find the way, but I believed it existed. It wasn’t until I met two kinds of people that this faded.
• The people who should be on the front lines of training information were largely ignorant of some of the basic elements of survival fighting.
• I’ve been the rookie who almost got killed because I tried to rely on “academy approved” technique. I did what I had to do to win and learned a lot about skill and cognition under stress.
• Sometimes people die, no matter how hard you try to not hurt them.
• There are physiological and psychological conditions that negate everything you know about what X will do to a human.
• Dynamic and live trainings are a far cry from chaos.
• What you don’t know can hurt you.
• What you think you know that is wrong is worse.
• Doing things efficiently is easier than doing them inefficiently and efficiency is situational.
• Fight to the goal- this means you have to be taught to see various goals, pick the right one and work towards that. Fighting to run is different than fighting to stay and you can’t do both.
• People are rarely beaten. They give up.
• The more levels (tactical, physical, social, psychological…) you can work on the better you are.
• A short fuse can do more damage by surprise than skill (one of the most dangerous people I know is not dangerous because of his skill, but because the triggers that will explode him into violence are so easy to hit that he would explode long before I was even considering the threat.)
• The lessons from a raid or entry do not translate into self-defense and counter-assault.
• The lessons from dueling don’t apply to either (this is a hard one, because people, including me, become so enamored of their fighting skill… but it is nothing like surviving an assault, so totally unrelated that it is hard to put into words.)
• There are rules in a street fight, subconscious rules that can trip you up if you don’t see them and you can exploit if you do.

This entire post is a cheat, as my lovely wife pointed out. Each of these lessons has one (or dozens) of stories behind them. It is unfair to encapsulate it as bullet points in a single post, to treat it like a 'thing that is true'. But this isn’t about the bullet points, this is about the process: the person I was when I began this journey; the martial artist I was trained and forged into; and now the officer that the environment produced. The collision of three worlds, in a way.

I’ve seen a lot of different fights and a lot of different types of sparring, but it all boils down to that insight shaking and out of breath under a roulette table.

No Memory

A short break from the series. Last night an inmate walked up and asked if I remembered him. Six foot three or four, at least 240 pounds. I told him no, sorry. That surprised him. Evidently we fought fifteen years ago. He was looking at thirty years and had nothing to lose. He said he remembered how calm I was, that I kept giving him the option of the easy or the hard way and, being young and bull headed he insisted on hard.

Still no memory. It was fifteen years ago. I remember some fights from that era, significant ones... but I'm not sure what it takes to count as significant any more. We talked and he walked away. I turned to Mark, the deputy, "I don't remember it. How screwed up is that?"

"We've been doing this for a long time, sarge."

Yeah. Over fifteen years. I have a rough estimate of the number of uses of force I've been in, 400 or more. Most of those weren't epic. I remember clearly only a handful. Occasionally I find an old report that details blood and fast decisions and I have no memory of it. The ones I remember are important in some way. Things I learned, mistakes made, miracles sometimes.

Feeling a little old right now.

Martial Beginnings

I’d read and dreamed and played at martial arts (not watched- no electricity meant no TV, there are large swatches of popular culture that are mysteries to me). Played with every weapon that I could make or fake. Invented patterns. Worked on speed and form from books. At this particular time Martial Arts was considered the way to become a complete human being.

So, when I got to college I signed on with the first MA class I could find. It was luck, but it was awesome and set a pattern for the rest of my life: I chanced into Judo and had the privilege of being taught by a former member of the West German National team and a USA Nationals champion. They set the bar for what I considered good instruction. I’ve never stayed with an instructor of lesser quality and I’ve walked out of many classes taught by people with national reputations who simply didn’t meet my standards.
The other luck aspect was judo itself. No mysteries, no mysticism. Clean physics, good timing and superior conditioning. There are many things judo doesn’t incorporate, but there are very few bad habits built into the system. Unlike almost every martial art, I’ve never had to unlearn an aspect of judo to use it in real life. The school was extremely competitive, which drove you to the limits of your endurance. It was also very traditional. Within the school we were taught that weight classes were a mistake in overall training. Small people can and do beat big people, but not by fighting like they were the same size. (Years later, as a 154 pound sankyu I went to a dojo where the smallest person was 200 pounds. I threw or tapped everyone in the dojo, including the owner’s nidan son until I got to the owner- who simply picked me up and choked me out at arm’s length).
I lived, ate and breathed MA. I would skip classes in the morning to sit in on the other two judo morning classes as well as take the one I was scheduled; then work out with the judo team three nights a week. Most of the time I did Shito-ryu karate or fencing on the off days and TKD after judo. The shito-ryu guys were very good, very precise and demanded perfect form. I didn’t like it at the time and did it purely as a matter of discipline (and because one of the instructors was really cute). I loved TKD and had no idea how lucky I was to meet Al, who not only taught me how to kick but when NOT to, and wasn’t afraid to apply it with knives at bad-breath range and taught me how to take a full-power strike. On the weekends and in the afternoons I would work out heavy fighting with the Society for Creative Anachronism.
After college and in-between, I played at every thing I could. As a very typical and arrogant young martial artist, I’d been toying with blending all I was good at into a single system. My first exposure to Jujitsu (Danzan-ryu) had it all blended, but the instructor was a piece of work. He spent more time trying to convince me he was a “true master” than he did teaching. In the end, though I liked the system, I stuck with judo.
Judo was my home, and still holds the glow of a first love, but then I ran into Sosuishitsu-ryu and Dave Sumner. Sosuishitsu had the integrated blend that I wanted, but centered around a ruthlessly effective mindset. The system matched my experience with real violence. The instructor exceeded my expectations of what a teacher and a fighter should be. In my first week he took my forte, judo, and showed me three entirely new ways to put someone down. Not new techniques, new principles each of which could lend itself to dozens of techniques.
I still played, dabbling in karate and arnis and muay thai and kajukenbo …everything. But Sosuishitsu was my home. For depth and efficiency I haven’t seen anything close. Honestly, I’ve been drifting martially (not combatively), since Dave retired.

I’ve always had extraordinary instructors. I didn’t waste my time with:
• The guy with three black belts who had created his own system- I dropped his assistant instructor with only two months of judo training.
• No interest in wrestling- I got challenged by a kid who saw my gi. He’d been a state champion wrestler in high school. I strangled him unconscious in a few seconds. When he woke up he insisted that he “won on points”. Whatever.
• The jujitsu instructor who spent more time explaining why he was a ‘true master’ (?) than teaching. (Actually, I stayed with him for a couple of months- the system was really good).
• The other jujitsu instructor who cut his own throat with his knife defenses and didn’t know it.
• The JKD/Muay Thai guy who insisted I was doing something wrong because I was hurting him through his pads and said to do it his way because it hurt less (more stories with this bozo on request).
• The guy who claimed advanced ranks in about nine arts but wouldn’t let his students work out with the judo club next door.
• The group that said previous training may make it hard to see the purity of their truth.
• The guy with the sloppy footwork and bad stick work who claimed advanced titles in things he couldn’t pronounce.
• The guy who claimed to have won a Pan Am gold in a year it wasn’t even held (by charter, the Pan Am games are held the year before the Olympics).

So, in those different paradigms: I’ve been a serious competitor; a training fanatic; a traditionalist; an MMA guy before there was such a thing; a weapon guy; the devotee of an extraordinary instructor (and very lucky in that he didn’t tolerate any cultish behavior- he wanted men who would stand up, that’s what training was for); I did dojo arashi and parking lot challenge matches. Martial arts was a huge part of who I became.
Then the rubber met the road.

From There to Here: Background

This is going to be a short series- where I started and went and am…  There are stages that people go through- martial artists, cops, everyone who grows and matures.  Some of these are paradigm shifts, profound changes in the way you look at and relate to the world.  The thing is, before a paradigm shift, you can be pretty sure that you have a good handle on things.  You “know” things.  After the paradigm shift, not so much.  You still know stuff, but you also know that the stuff that you “knew” before was dead wrong- or maybe not, maybe just limited, blind in a way. Do it enough, have enough “knowns” exposed as myths or guesses or wishful thinking and you become skeptical of your own certainty.  That’s a necessary stage.  Without it, it’s very hard to open your mind to other people who have had different shifts than you and have much to share.  It seems that a part of the human condition is an inability to acknowledge that your “it” or “truth” might be an old and primitive stage to someone else.  A necessary step, but an early one.

Background: born in a thriving community with extremely intelligent parents.  My father was a contractor, road builder and blaster; a former army (Korea era vet) and Golden Gloves boxer, a bar brawler and a legendary tough guy (he once sat politely through a dinner party with a crushed foot, unwilling to disturb the guests until mom saw the blood oozing from his crushed steel-toed boots). Also an alcoholic with little time or patience for children who did actually teach me to swim by throwing me in a river and telling me I had no choice.  Mom was a former ballerina, fencer and gymnast, a yoga teacher and a legendary barroom brawler in her own right.  Both were raised pretty hardscrabble, by parents who made it through WWII and the Great Depression.

Hunting and camping were family events.  Bike riding in the desert, exploring caves and climbing were things I did alone or with a small group of friends.  Somewhere in early childhood I got the habit of being the first to do the dangerous things.  Not because I was brave.  I wasn’t.  It was just easier for me to deal with the risk of being injured or killed than it was to deal with the possibility of watching someone else be injured or killed 

Then the move.  Since the world was supposed to end we became homesteaders on a good-sized piece of land.  From the time of twelve on, I was raising and killing most of my own food.  Mom and dad did a lot of the butchering and dressing, actually.

I was pretty sheltered before this.  My old school had been very progressive and I had been trained that I was a pacifist, a higher order of being.  Being transplanted into a school in a town of 210 that averaged one murder a year (not counting the serial killer who was arrested while we were living there); where a good high school fight involved upward of four broken bones and a “fair fight” involved a confederate wrapping a coat around the victims eyes and throwing him to the floor where the fighter would be waiting to kick until the victim stopped moving…

It was an experience.  My early exposure to violence was that a moral and righteous truth was meaningless to anyone willing to use violence and must be backed up to be real at all.  That ‘fair’ was a word that ignorant people used and evil people twisted.  That no adult cared.  That no one had a solution.  That a righteous rage could overcome numbers and strength, but at a cost.  That plans disappeared when you felt a boot slam into your face.

It made me quick and alert and strong and quiet.  It made me capable of being harsh. So the first paradigm shift from this was that, “Violence is the last resort of the ignorant,” was a platitude that people hide behind and it swirls into mist when the violence is right there.

There was another paradigm shift too, a moment when I was very scared and had been told I would be killed and I decided and acted and watched a big (man? boy? Fifteen years old at most but 220 pounds, at least 130 pounds more than me) on his knees trying to scream and making no sound. I’d slammed my fingers into his throat and he couldn’t breathe.  I still remember his eyes sometimes, and sometimes I let my mind play with “what ifs.”  What if the first teacher there had not been a medic in Vietnam?  What if charges had been pressed.  What if.  The possibilities make an abyss. 

Enough on violence.  There was a spiritual side to it too.  I spent more hours alone in a year than I imagine many do in a life time.  This was the essence of my spiritual training: If you have a question, go into the desert.  Don’t eat or drink. You will get an answer or you will die.  You will always get an answer if you have the strength.

And meditation, constantly.  It became my normal mode NOT to have any voice in my head.  I lived in a constant state of what some consider a fairly deep meditation.  I vision quested on my own (fastest on record, since I fell off a cliff on the way to the place I had chosen and got the whole experience in the second or so of free-fall).  I considered, and still do, taking lethal risks as a form of religious sacrifice: Do you want me, Sif, Tyche, Athena, Odin?  Have I failed? Here’s your chance.

This was the ground-work.  Before I had an opportunity to study martial arts my spiritual grounding was solid; I’d seen enough violence to have a perspective; I had parents who set (by example) a very high bar for competence on all levels; and I had the work ethic that gets formed by cows that have to be milked and hay that has to be brought in.

Tired

Exhausted.  I'm not entirely sure what day it is now.

It started Wednesday with a phone call, "We've had a bunch of staff assaults.  Can you help us out?"  Oddly phrased:  A bunch? Can I help? Quick shower and too fast drive, not sure whether I was being asked to investigate, to coordinate a tactical response, as extra security or replacing one of the injured officers.

Officers, friends in the hospital. One badly bitten by an inmate.  Things haven't been finished in the chaos. I finish processing the inmate for disciplinary housing, talk him into agreeing to a blood draw. (Critical skill- if the source of a body-fluids contamination can be tested, it can save the victim a lot of worry and grief.  It is, however, a medical test and can be refused.  If the threat refuses it can take days for a court order to take a blood draw by force.  Always better, faster to talk them into it, no matter how you feel on the inside.)

Successful... and then not. It will take two days to run the test, or about an hour in an ER.  The local hospital refuses to test the blood unless they can register the inmate as a patient.  They even say that they can use the blood we have already drawn, but the patient has to be present.  There is no reason for it beyond 'policy', but policy is God.  We have to do a dangerous, senseless and expensive transport for a stupid piece of red tape.  We do it.

Then right to another shift at the regular job.

Then four hours of fitful sleep and a double shift, the first eight hours teaching rookies how to survive a fight.  They do well and it's a good group.  One is so bright-eyed and eager that it's like a puppy.  In conversation he hears about a time when I threw someone using only his back hair for a grip.  He glances at his forearms and asks, "Should I shave these? Should I start shaving everywhere? That sounds like it will really hurt."  I start to tell him about a salon downtown and how he should go in and ask for a "Combat Brazilian wax" and they'll know what he means... but I can't keep a straight face.  That would have been one of the best practical jokes ever.

It was good, too, teaching with Jose. We've shed a lot of blood and sweat together.  The rookies listened hard as he told about the cost of mental errors, about fighting the wrong kind of fight.

The second shift, as I got tired, other people's vulnerabilities were glaring.  It's a weird state- not so weird, maybe fairly common for me in an actual conflict- where I am acutely aware of weak lines of balance, exposed targets, perceptual locks or distractions in the people around me.  It hits their emotions too and I can feel their insecurities, their fears.  When I get tired it seems like my attention snaps on to any weakness.   Usually, it's a big piece of why I can talk people down.  I spent Thursday toying with and controlling the impulse to poke buttons.

Somewhere since then we moved fifty inmates, searched a dorm, did taxes and got a new cat.

And on and on.... almost four hours of sleep last night.  Tonight should be better.

What You Don't Know

"He who knows not and knows not that he knows not,

He is a fool: Shun him.

He who knows not and knows that he knows not,

He is simple: Teach him.

He who knows and knows not that he knows,

He is asleep: Wake him.

He who knows and knows that he knows,

He is wise: Follow him."

That's listed in my "Treasury of the Familiar" as an Arab Proverb.  It may be from the hadith, I would like if it were.

People can't see their own blind spots.  That inability to see it pretty much defines a blind spot, so that is okay. Still...

Too much pussy-footing.  Why is it that really, really painfully dumb people think that they are smart?  Is there a mechanism for that?  Probably something as simple as that people who are insecure about their abilities and intelligence keep learning and the people that are so sure either stop or simply cherry pick for things that confirm their own beliefs... which we all do to some extent.

Also, the strength of an opinion is almost inversely proportional to the strength of its basis.  I see this commonly in politics where things that we will not even understand for two generations or more, and decisions that were made with information that the opiners could not have are condemned or praised with religious zeal.  Speaking of religion... maybe it is just my extended circle of friends, but has anyone who has ever had direct contact with  a (what's the noun I want here? God? Great Spirit? Satori? Deep religious experience?) ever felt the need to kill the people who disagreed?  That seems the job of the ones who haven't.  Maybe. Counter examples welcome.

A friend challenges opinions with a simple formula: "First, tell me what you know. Then tell me what you don't know. Only then tell me what you think." I'd attribute it, but he stole it from somebody else.

If we're honest, we'll probably never get past the list of 'don't knows' even on a relatively simple subject.  Which is cool, because if you love the subject that is a list of research possibilities and new learning. Unless you already think you know it all. Ahem.

A tactical plan has a list of critical information: threats, hostages, weapons, history, dynamics, resources... it's a damn big list.  A lot of those will have UNK written beside them, sometimes right up until the situation is resolved.  You contingency plan a lot of it: If one hostage versus two; if hostages together versus hostages separate.  But a potential killer is to put something down as 'known' which is untrue.  UNK frees you to improvise.  Finding an error of fact from your briefing in the middle of the operation makes everything you thought you knew suspect.  It could be a trap. It feels like betrayal. Morale, decisiveness, team cohesion can all collapse in a second. It will only be recovered by esprit and decisive leadership.

What are your 'don't knows'? Especially in the things that you value most, the things that you consider yourself an expert in.  I guarantee you the list is long.  We are all 'simple' and can be taught.  If the list isn't long or (especially) if you fail the jikkyoshado rule and defend your views against direct experience (especially your own!!!) re-think it, baby.  That way is the easy path to bar-stool experts and arm-chair generals.

Letting Go

There was a monk, I don't remember the name, but he was a certified enlightened Zen master who walked away from the monastery and came back in a few days. He found it far easier to maintain his enlightenment in the calm of a monastery than in the hustle of a city.

Maybe that seems hypocritical to you. Maybe it seems that his enlightenment wasn't real if it wasn't universal. That call is up to you.

I think he was very wise. He knew what he had and didn't let his ego force him into spreading it farther than it reached. That is a sign of non-attachment.

Good martial arts (and real fighting} is in the transition. Victory happens less in the technique than in the spaces between the techniques. At the point of impact boxers, muay thai guys and karateka aren't that different, but what they do with their hips, their legs and their shoulders before and after are very, very different. Do you know why classical jujutsu does more damage in a strike than a "pure' striking art? It's because jujutsu teaches target preparation as an obvious and easy part of striking. Make no mistake- a good boxer hits much harder than I do, but 9 times out of ten, if I have to hit the ribs, the threat is bent over my hip with his spine extended and twisted and his ribs exposed and flexed to absorb the strike.

If you haven't been taught to prep the target, it seems like magic. If you have been taught, it seems obvious. A good fighter is integrated. Offense is defense. There is no separation between weapon and target. At higher levels your enemy is working for you, just another variable in an equation. A really good fighter integrates the threat, himself and the environment. An extraordinary fighter integrates luck.

The key to using luck is letting go. Luck can be defined as the things you didn't expect. 'Expectation' is the ‘what you believe’- your experience, your training. When you can accept it when training or experience fail, when you are cool with being surprised, you can exploit luck. Like anything, some people have a talent at it but it can also been learned, trained and practiced.

If you have ever been in the high desert of Eastern Oregon you have seen the steep hills. One of our fun childhood games was to run down those hills full-speed. The trick was to not rely on contact with the ground. Once you were at extraordinary speed you were effectively falling and, when appropriate, when necessary, when effective you would make a small contact with the ground to steer just a bit. It was control in the loosest possible sense. I never saw an adult play this game and it is just as well. The slightest stiffness, the slightest need to show more control than you had would lead to a hellacious tumble and broken bones.

It was good training. Life is like that- something like freefall. Control, beyond a basic ability to control yourself, is an illusion. Even that control is limited ( think how your skills will change with injury and advanced age and different blood sugars). But well-timed instances of control can let you ride out a storm or survive a situation that would crush the stolid and certain.

Proud

The radio blares "Duress alarm" and a location and I'm sprinting. Through a door, down the long corridor. These are always false alarms, but one day it might not be and a few seconds difference between a sprint and a stroll could be paid in blood, so I run, every time. It feels good, arms pumping, legs feeling light... a full-burn sprint of about three hundred meters, turning with the contours of the corridor, coffee cup still in one hand. Just before I get there, it's over, false alarm. Confirmed.

So back to the dorms, talking to inmates. I'm breathing a little heavily and imagine that when I was younger that never happened, but it did.

Two more back-up calls, medical only. Not worth the sprint. And the regular job: paperwork, counseling deputies, counseling inmates. It's already feeling like an off night. Jean makes a point of letting me know I'm not my usual chipper self. Maybe.

Then the first big one. Back up for a fight. Multiples involved. By the time it is over, a matter of seconds, five inmates are cuffed and removed. Several more may have been involved. Blood and pepperspray make the floors slippery. I cuffed one and helped with a second, but H and G were the heroes wading in early and hard. Enough inmates were involved to qualify as a riot in any other facility. If there had been even a second of hesitation from staff, it would have been a full-blown battle with racial and gang over-tones.

But this staff doesn't hesitate. Can you imagine charging into a fight with at least five involved and another fifty cheering and, without hesitation, taking control? Could you imagine doing it as a woman who is outweighed by at least a hundred pounds by every single individual involved? H didn't hesitate. I hope it was because she realized that she wouldn't be alone. We were all there in a few seconds. Still outnumbered, technically, but decisive action more than makes up for indecisive numbers.

The world happens at the same time. We were short staff. The next shift needed to be filled and officers reassigned and enforcement officers needed escorting and visits went on... and in the midst of that another fight, one notch less brutal. So much to do. So much to make sure got done. Reports. OC decontamination. Medical evaluation. The daily cleaning, too, and the regular day-to-day problems.

Sitting and writing reports afterwards it hit me hard how much I love these people. It can be an ugly job. There aren't a lot of praise and thanks and recognition. When things are slow we bicker and whine like a huge dysfunctional family. But when things go very bad, they are there. Fast, decisive and above all, professional. Despite the blood and numbers and force, we didn't injure a single inmate. One, later, tried to provoke force and only got a sad smile.

I'm proud of my troops today. They did good.

CCA

Sunday at 1400 (yes, a mere two days from now) I'll be teaching a seminar at Jeff Standish's "A Martial Arts Club" in Marysville Washington. It's kind of last minute, but it originally started as a trip to the Seattle area to say prospective good-byes to some friends.

One of those friends, John Darby, asked if he could set up a seminar. Sure. Whatever. John Bossert asked for the joint lock class. I think I vaguely remember that stuff...

So the talk part will cover the seven stages; the physical part entries, locking and probably environmental fighting. I don't at this point even know how much time is reserved...which just makes it more fun. If you're interested and in the area, drop by.

SUDDEN CHANGE. IT's 11:45 Sunday morning and the venue has changed. I found out by cell while driving to Seattle a couple of hours ago.

New venue is:New Life Center off Evergreen on Madison Ave, to the east.

the directions are on www.newlifecenter.org...call me (John Darby) 425-327-2152

Except...

A good talk with John Miglorie Monday got to one of the deep frustrations with trying to teach this material. The night before, at work on a very, very quiet night, one of the rookies said, "Yeah, but it can jump off in a second." It bothered me partially because he was a rookie, partially because he was exactly wrong and partially because he was exactly right, too.

Experienced officers are rarely surprised in a dorm setting. The mix of 75 inmates in an open room has a sound and a feel and you almost always sense when things are going bad well in advance. So the things that "jump off in a second" never really do. Most take days or hours for enmities and anger and indignation to build up... at the same time, these things can jump off in a second. The days and hours may have happened years ago on the street or in another prison. An experienced officer is rarely surprised, except when he is, and then he tends to be really surprised.

Someone breaks into your house in your sleep- do you make a noise to let them know the house is occupied? That would actually work for many of the low-level burglars. If, however, it was a home-invasion rape that's just calling the predator.

But what if you say you have a gun? Probably good, unless this was a process predator who had studied you and believed that you didn't. Lying from fear would encourage him. If you actually had a gun? Cool, except not announcing works better if you have to use it, announcing might work to prevent having to use it.

The assertive body language that discourages most predatory assaults might invite or even trigger a monkey dance.

The best research shows that survivors of vicious assaults fell back on an enraged and righteous mindset... but acting from anger instead of fear might negate a claim of self-defense (your lawyer will try to explain that anger was an expression of fear, the opposing attorney will argue that fear and anger are mutually exclusive and the jury will decide who had the most honest-looking haircut.)

I have to teach about the effects of adrenaline and the different types of freezes, but I rarely get them anymore. But I still can, and it is just as bad.

If you have trained to reflex so that the thug attacks and you parry and strike faster than thought and pull the punch a half inch away from his nose, he'll probably reconsider and back off and you will think you have done really well...except if the guy is experienced he will immediately know that you have just missed, pulling strikes is a reflex and you have thus been training to miss and he will bring a fight to you like nothing you have ever felt.

You will get cut in a knife defense. Believe it... but in my local circle of friends, including myself, we have twelve knife defenses and only one of us has even been scratched- and it was just a scratch. At the same time, it's a false sort, since the people who did get cut are far less likely to tell the story. (I could add two more data points, Jeff and Mauricio, but I don't have the details of number and severity of encounters.)

Action beats reaction. I live by this, but I've beaten it too, and so has everyone I know who survived a close-range knife ambush. Does the fact that I've done it mean my students can do it? It doesn't even necessarily mean that I can do it again.

That's a lot of hard truth that all boils down to uncertainty. Nothing works all the time, not even a .45 to the head. It is hard to teach confidence when the more you know, the less confident you feel. And for the record, the real job (and life for that matter) is to act anyway. You don't need confidence in a successful outcome to do the right thing (and that confidence would be false, anyway.) Every time you put your life on the line, it is an act of faith.

Broadly

David wrote:

"I really like what you're talking about, essentially maintaining a broad frame of reference (basically, what compassion is), but, how did/do you train to get there when violent situations rapidly narrow that frame? Is it just lots of practice?

Did you ever get emotionally traumatized from a violent encounter? Because that really locks a person into a certain magnification or frame of reference and keeps him from varying it, and I would imagine that then the reaction to any similar events would be the same again and again. How do you escape from that vicious cycle?"

First, defining compassion as having a broad frame of reference is completely new to me and it works in many ways. Thanks for something to think about.

Second: "...violent situations rapidly narrow that frame." and "... locks the person into a certain magnification..." and "... the reaction to any similar events would be the same..." Are assumptions. that doesn't meant that they are wrong, but you really have to look at where they came from, whether they are true and whether, even if they generally happen, does that make them automatic? When I talk about how people tend to be off when discussing the subject of violence yet so positive they are right, it often gets down to basic assumptions that are seen as facts.

Some people react to stress by focusing too broadly- "why is this happening?" often on questions that don't really affect the situation. Sometimes extraneous thoughts float into your head. Sometimes you are so focused on trivia that it fills your whole mind. Alexis Arwohl writes of an officer who was reading the cases of his partners ejected brass in flight while in a shootout. That's a pretty tight view. One of my contentions is that people confuse what they remember and the words in their heads for thinking. Most cognition happens so fast and below the surface that humans usually make good decisions before they have ever said the questions in their heads. My best guess (I puzzled for years why their would be both tachypsychia and the blur state, why your brain would evolve two different mental strategies for dealing with similar stresses) is that these aren't mental states at all as much as memory conditions. In tachypsychia, the conscious brain is given some busy-work so that the real brain can take care of business; in the blur state it is put in a closet.

So the key for me is a broader understanding of consciousness. In even an ugly fast fight, my decisions are my responsibility. They are conscious, but they are not handled at the level of talking myself through the decision process. That would be too slow and would miss too many levels.
That might have made things more confusing.

You may or may not lock into the same pattern next time. It will depend largely on whether what you did the first time was successful. Just be aware that the hind brain may have a very different idea of success than you do. When you see someone who has been repeatedly victimized without fighting back, the logical brain may say, "that is stupid, look at the injuries, this is a bad idea..." the hindbrain only knows that survival followed non-resistance, ergo non-resistance is the only proven strategy for survival so far. The hindbrain is reluctant to attempt ANY new strategy when the stakes are that high.

Which brings up another aspect of this that can contradict everything else. Really, really panicked people; people really surprised; people with no experience with what is happening; people who had very firm expectations that are completely thrown out of the loop by events tend to fall back into pure hindbrain mode and they fight (or freeze or run) like animals. Their training goes out the window completely. (The firm expectations are the ones that scare me, the ones I call kool-aide drinkers. The more sure they are, the more vulnerable they are.) This is the piece that can be helped hugely by experience, but there are levels to it.

Anybody can be surprised, but recovering from surprise is a skill that can be conditioned. That helps with that part. Experience is the guardian against not being able to tell what is going on- just as a good MA instructor can spar and give advice to another student simultaneously, I've been fully engaged with a bad guy while watching the rookies for levels of emotion and sending them on chores e.g. "Go get a a pair of leg irons." But, when the circumstances change, experienced people can be nailed because they go with their experience instead of the changing situation. If every other time I've done this entry I got surprise and spun the bad guy but this time he saw it coming and jumped up and away... many experienced people will continue the move that they planned instead of changing to what they need.

The third level is to just accept that this is chaos and luck plays a role and to have no expectations. I believe good teachers foster this from day one by saying that there are no right answers, nothing works every time and constantly encouraging students to adapt, to recover from mistakes instead of starting over. Never set up as an ideal something that is unlikely in chaos (and that's not entirely true either- I've taken down crooks with perfect form- good stances are just good body mechanics, but the focus and energy was never on the form but on getting the job done. Doing well, not looking right.)

how did/do you train to get there is the real question. Experience is huge, of course. Training to the problem is important, which means training for real bad guys using real attacks in a real environment under real rules. How do ambushes happen? How do criminals set them up? What do you look for in advance? What do you do if you are surprised? How do you deal with clutter and enclosed places- not just avoiding but using the gifts. Are you training to do stuff that will land you in prison?

The third, which I believe can be taught but am also aware that I have a natural inclination this way, is to be comfortable with uncertainty. I've never felt I had answers or know what would happen if or what I will do when... I've never had any illusions that I was ready. That is a huge advantage because I don't have emotional attachment to a plan and can walk away the second it ceases to apply. I deal with how the threat attacks and not how he is supposed to attack. THIS ONE IS CRITICAL: If something happens that I don't believe is possible I deal with it as it is before I try to fix my mental map!!! The reason nonsequitors work in de-escalation, the reason that karate and jujutsu were so successful in the early years and the Gracie stuff later is that people would stop fighting to figure out what was happening. Fight first, re-write your reality map later.

I'll talk about emotional trauma later, but... one example.

Without Contention

This is Mac-level stuff.
Steve commented on the last post that I hadn't addressed several of Bobbe's points. 'Course not. There was no reason to. I didn't really address his theme, either- just let it inspire some thoughts on another aspect of the same subject. So I'm going to be even worse here and run with something that Steve got me thinking- note bene: not stuff Steve said or Steve meant, just some stuff I read into his words that I rarely address.

Two people write on the same subject, one obviously after the other, their general conclusions very different. It can look like disagreement without being disagreement. One can write on how the trivia transmitted can overwhelm the function; the other writes that without a base it's possible to transmit nothing of value, or not transmit at all, and it might mimic someone avoiding trivia. No contention. It's like tracking with a friend- it's not a matter of being wrong, but of looking at different things. I might look at prints and miss the lint on the thorn; my friend might see the strange print configuration of four distinct paws on a direct register animal and not think to smell the dirt which explains it all.

Disagreement leads people to expect some emotional content. That leads, often, to an all-or-nothing mindset: if you really disagree, you must disagree about everything. (This is simplistic, I know. Bear with me.) I never meant to tear down Bobbe's house. I just saw a wall that could use some spackle. But that expectation flow: difference to disagreement to contention to total annihilation is expected in certain circles- in politics, in internet flame wars-

I don't hate criminals. I'm very aware of some of the most horrendous things done in this area. I know the people who did them. Sometimes I knew the victims. But I don't think I could do this job if I expended the emotional energy to hate. I would suck at the job if I turned a blind eye to how the criminals are as people (some are respectful, well-behaved, even wise when they are off drugs and away from a victim pool; some are good parents; most have hopes and dreams) just so I could preserve the integrity of my vision of them as criminals. This is not soft bleeding-heart talk. This is not an either/or. Both are in my head at all times: a particular person may be vicious, depraved and will continue to victimize people until somebody sticks a needle in his arm and a good chess player and mentor to fish who don't know how to do time. I can treat him with respect without extending trust.

This extends to use of force itself. Maybe the threat sees me as an enemy. Maybe he needs to. Maybe he needs to imagine that I am corrupt and evil and the blunt instrument of a repressive society. But I don't have to play the game. By refusing to limit the problem to a him-or-me, by refusing to see it in terms that are expected or demanded, I can choose to make it a problem and not a fight. Or even the step beyond and decide that it isn't a problem at all.

No one fights all out. Almost no one. When it is over and the cuffs are on, I try to recognize and remember that. The fight is over because the threat quit fighting. He chose to quit fighting. No matter who he or she is, the threat could have made the fight harder, worse, more dangerous. Might have won, if they had taken it to a place where my will had crumpled before theirs (and part of it is easy in that most criminals are very aware that if they 'lose' they will not be injured, a comfort the officer does not have. It makes it easier and safer for the threat to quit). Sometimes I say what I am thinking, "Thanks. You could have made that a lot worse. I appreciate that you quit when you did." It's not sarcastic and they seem to respond to the sincerity of it. It's been very calming for psychs and people on stimulants. I don't think you could use the words unless you feel it, but it opens up a door. If the officer is seeing something that allows him to appreciate ... what else is there to see? And, over the years, a lot of inmates have chosen to talk instead of fight when I'm available to try to find another way.

I couldn't access this if I saw conflict as emotion-laden or violent or total. It's just two organisms trying to work something out. Most of the time, the problem isn't even between the two organisms, but between one of the organisms and its environment. As an interested fellow organism I can sometimes share my perspective.

Lineage and Tradition

This was inspired by a Bobbe Edmonds post. It's worth a read, and some thought. I'm going to hit it from the other direction, though.

First things first- not everyone studies martial arts for the same reasons. I have no problem with people exercising or learning a culture or testing themselves in the arena. It is what it is. I have a little problem with people who think that all of those things- fitness, culture, sport- are the same. Worse when they delude themselves into thinking that those skills equate to either combat or self-defense (and those two are not the same, either). I don't have a big problem until people start teaching that they are all the same. Even there, though, it is not a huge problem- delusional people teaching other delusional people things that they will never test is like any other religion: a big problem, but not my big problem.
Anybody offended yet?

Second, though I get a lot of secondary benefits from study and practice, my primary objective in studying martial arts is to keep me uninjured though I spend a great deal of time unarmed while in close contact with violent criminals. (In person, I would go off on a tangent here about how broad and strategic a subject that is- reputation and presentation have prevented more bad events than skill has ever overcome).

People are fond of saying that there are only a finite number of ways the human body can move. That's true, but there is a nearly infinite number of ways those movements can be prioritized. For every ten things a person sees, there can be a hundred interpretations. Interpretations affect what we 'see'. What we 'see' and how we are taught to prioritize it, drives what we do.

From this perspective, lineage and tradition are important.

Whatever you study came from somewhere and it came through somebody. If the time difference between where it came from and you is great, then it was transmitted through several people. This makes for two obvious and important places where things can go very, very wrong.

Where it came from: Though there are athletic basics to martial arts, the 'how to fight' guts of a system came from one of two places. Either one or more people experienced enough cutting and bone breaking to pass it on or somebody made it up. That simple- in it's earliest incarnation, what you learned is either based on truth or fiction. Experience or imagination (well-reasoned imagination, probably... but we know by now how far off basic assumptions can be). Is it possible for an imagination-based art to be workable? Sure, for two reasons: sometimes random chance works. The art may be workable just by luck. More likely, though, it is because of the ingenuity of humans. A great natural fighter can make a shitty system work. People hate losing and certain people are very good at winning (the art of advantage is a very broad-spectrum skill). All bets are off when you have someone good. The converse is also true- in one of the arts I most admire for it's sheer tactical efficiency and ruthlessness, I know two instructors who couldn't fight their way out of a paper bag.

This is also why it is important to know what your system was for. Military arts are very different than civilian arts. Arts of last resort are completely unrelated to dueling arts. What an Okinawan peasant needed to know to prevail in a bar fight or a fishing rights dispute is vastly different than what a soldier needs to know for sentry removal and both are completely different than the skill the sentry needs in order to not be removed. Things stretch, but they only stretch so far. The most valuable techniques on my list for ambush survival are nearly worthless sparring. Things are what they are.

So tradition, in the sense of where it came from and what it was designed to do, can be vital.

Transmission The second source of problems is in how the lessons are taught. As Mr. Edmonds pointed out, you have only ever learned from your direct instructor(s). Sensei Billy-Bob may have learned from someone who learned from someone who learned from someone who learned directly from Shihan Smackemdown but you have only learned from Billy-Bob.

The whole point of teaching, really, is to bypass the experience issue. . I want students who can do what I can do without the (feel free to ignore, it's been written before) screws in the knee and the fists that won't close all the way and the memory loss from concussions and the eye that is permanently blurry from the scratched lens and the wrist that pops loud enough to wake me up and the fingers that go numb.

Combat is rare enough and messy enough that very few people will ever gather enough experiences to have much insight. It is weird, too in that everything you have learned about human psychology and civilization ceases to apply under rage and fear; that everything you think you can expect from your mind and body changes under extreme stress. On a very fundamental level, the 'you' in an assault won't be the same 'you' that trained for the assault. People don't accept this. People are funny, too. They can't leave simple alone; they feel a need to 'improve' things even when they don't understand them... and secretly, they think that they are smarter than everybody else.

So the fact that someone gathered and the experience he or she transmitted is now at the mercy of how well each generation of instructor can pass it on. And each generation will be tempted to 'improve' the product. Each generation may lose or forget something or accidentally change something. The changes become part of the tradition.

Rote memory can avoid this, sort of. If you make a standard high enough, information can be passed down word for word and motion for motion even if no one understands it. The problem, of course, is that people come to believe their skill is measured by precision and not by adaptability, by how they move and not how they think or see. It is the essence of the dilemma between moving right and moving well.

One of the cool things about the rote system is that it can get information, intact, to people who might use it generations down the line. I've never seriously studied karate, but I see more good fighting skills and wisdom in karate kata than almost any karate instructor I know. But in a lot of ways, it is like teaching answers without questions.

Bottom line- are tradition and lineage important? If you have neither, you're just making stuff up. Unless you have a good amount of first-hand experience with the subject it is just mental entertainment. If the tradition arose from somewhere else that applies, the seeds were there. If not, you are just indulging in someone else's fantasy. If the seeds were there but the teaching was flawed... the seeds are usually still there, but you will have to find them on your own. My preference is to learn things that have proven useful, passed on by people who understood them- but I'm funny that way.

Character and Skill

This is one of those issues that can get philosophical very fast. (Strange, isn't it that philosophical, which used to mean 'love of learning' has become almost synonymous for "blowhards with agendas?") Nature/nurture, the limits of training and back to the old question of "heart".

It is possible for someone to do something badly because they don't know how to do it well. It is also possible for someone to do something badly in exactly the same way because of who they are. One is a training issue, the other a character flaw. One is a relatively easy fix. The other may not be fixable.

This problem hits a lot of buttons in our society. The word "flaw" is very judgmental, and that is frowned on. The idea that some people might not be able to learn something seems clearly discriminatory and possibly even elitist.

These buttons exist side-by-side with other facts, that are rarely challenged but just the same things in different words. All people are different. Personalities are defined as the collection of character traits that last over time. It is okay to say that everyone has a talent (though some seem to very clearly not) and it is sort of okay to say that everyone has a weak spot... but when it extends to 'certain people are incapable of certain things', we glitch.

Theoretical example: a rookie police officer who uses excessive force. It may be a training issue in that he lacks the skills to handle things at a lower level. It may be an experience issue that he doesn't have the confidence in himself to handle things the softer and riskier way. Those are both fixable. But he may also be prone to panic, and when the fear kicks in he lashes out in a blind flurry. Or he just may be mean. Those are character issues and harder to fix, if they are fixable at all. One of the problems is that in an actual incident mistakes or bad behavior can look exactly the same regardless of source. A rookie with training issues can be an asset given time and effort and experience. The same rookie with a character flaw will be a detriment and a danger to everyone for as long as he has access to victims.

It's similar on the criminal side. Every human being has criminal impulses. It would be cool to have instant gratification and if it weren't for this stupid conscience and this nagging, quixotic belief in the humanity of others we could go to town, baby! Relatively few act on the impulses. A smaller number have no hesitation. What would be an impulse in another person is just the way things are- the humanity of their victims doesn't even register... and you get a career violent criminal. (There's more going on there, of course- just an illustration)

So which things are character and which are training? How much of the self-help industry is based on attempting to train away problems that are deeper than knowledge? If someone believes that they are largely jellyfish adrift and controlled by events (what psychologists term an external locus of control) can you really just teach them to take control of their lives and be assertive?

(And this hits another snag in the discussion- there are deeper levels of teaching, some of which can affect character, but often not reliably or it doesn't last. Or people will say or even believe that their character has changed, but their behavior doesn't. Buyer beware.)

How sure do you have to be to declare something a character flaw? When do you take away an officer's gun?
Again, in most lines of work, the difference might not matter much. But in a profession where the person will be subject to high levels of stress and must make high stakes decisions under that stress very quickly a character that freezes or over-reacts can get a lot of people hurt.

Even more, since I am a monkey and have to complicate things- what are the gradations of character and where do you draw the lines? I am very, very good at staying objective under stress. Partially training, a lot due to experience, but much of it is just temperament- for whatever reason I don't feel fear as an emotion with a lot of connotations. I register the adrenaline but it's not a pleasant or unpleasant thing. It just is. So, what about the guys who are just very good at it? Or good? Or okay? Most human traits are scalar, not binary.

This is just a discussion here but in another place and time it is a harsh decision with potentially drastic consequences. As a teacher, as a supervisor how much risk at what stakes with what evidence...