Active Listening

There are good skills that people don't use. AADs, for instance. Sometimes they don't understand the skill itself. Sometimes they don't understand the utility. There are some things that work really well in practice that seem like fluff in a classroom.

One of these is "active listening." It's a very common training- I would hazard that most cops and counselors and business people and teachers have had specific training in the concept. Listen. Focus. Don't start formulating your answers while the other person is talking. Mirror body language. Open-ended questions. Feedback.

It can seem like a lot of buzzwords. It can seem artificial and tricky, too... but that's because of an inherent trap. If you are thinking about the technique, you aren't listening.

It's useful, very useful and I'd go so far as to say that it is THE hallmark skill in talking someone down in crisis, but it's also very useful for keeping your wife happy. There is no downside to getting good at this.

Most people don't, however. They go through the motions (eye contact and feedback and...) but you can tell from the results that they aren't really listening.

Because of ego. Because saying is so much more important than hearing. Because expressing is so much more important than understanding. Because 'I' am so much more important than 'you.'

That last is not just a statement about me, it's pretty universal. Someone close to you gets hurt, you feel sympathy. You get hurt you feel pain*. This self-centeredness isn't wrong or unnatural, but that doesn't make it effective, either. And effectiveness depends on you. If your goal is to feel good about yourself or get attention, then active listening is a waste of time. If you goal is to help people or change behavior or defuse a crisis, then it is no longer about you... and you have to listen.

The people I've seen teach active listening usually lose the audience, especially the tough-guy problem-solving audience, because they present it wrong. "Why listen? To help some stranger solve his problems? Half the time he is the problem..."

Here's the deal, plain and simple: active listening is intelligence gathering. You want the other guy talking because everything he says and the way he says it tells you stuff about him. Stuff you can use. Likes and dislikes and enthusiasms and blind spots and lies.

And every time you talk, you give away the same kinds of information. Active listening (and keeping your own mouth shut) is a supreme tactical skill.

*Yes, someone will bring out the old saw that they would give their lives to protect their children. How few will give up careers to spend time with them? It's easy to say something that will never be tested.

Obvious Epiphany

Another super-obvious training epiphany.

One of the key concepts in survival fighting is to always fight to the goal. You do not do the same things to escape that you do to neutralize a threat. You do not defend yourself the same way that you defend someone else. Sometimes drawing attention is a more achievable goal than prevailing in the moment… and other times you don’t want attention. Goals (and parameters) dictate strategy, which dictate tactics, which dictate technique.

So one of the basic training items is to change the goal. Groundfighting? Person A wins by submission, but person B wins if he gets to his feet. Fighting out of a corner can be practiced primarily to get skill at fighting in restricted space or the goal can be changed to get time and space to run.

The minor epiphany is that in self-defense training, the goal change only applies to one person. Noticed this the other day practicing response- bad guy (BG) attacks, good guy (GG) takes him out as normal. When GG was supposed to fight to the door, the student playing the BG subtly changed attacks to prevent escape.

You see things in training that profoundly affect real life.

BGs, in real life, are going to do what they are going to do. They have their own goals, strategies and tactics. The victim’s defensive strategies are both unknown and largely the BG doesn’t care. His tactics have been honed and he is used to the victim being too frozen to respond at all.

So it becomes an interplay of known and unknown strategies. That’s just a cool insight, another way to look at conflict.

For training, however, it becomes critical to ensure that the uke, the student playing the BG, is performing his role as a BG, with his agenda, as if completely unaware of what tori (GG) intends. That keeps some of the training artifacts from creeping in.

A Little Something From Mac

This will mostly speak to the LEOs, but in his ongoing series of different things people train for Mac wrote:

"This shows the heart of defensive tactics – not wrist locks and pig piles, but control. Control; first and foremost, of yourself, no matter how you feel about it – control of your slamming heartbeat, dry mouth, deadened ears, trembling hands that cause the front sight of your gun to disappear and the face of the man who may be about to die become huge, distorted into gargoyle-like ugliness. Control of your tactics, your partners, the perp, the environment; control of the outcome. This is very unlike, and infinately harder than the simplicity and single focus of combat (kill) and self-defense (escape). In defensive tactics, you have to exist outside yourself, be a witness to the action, in order to stay objective. You have to control your mind, body and spirit as if all three were tools, and still remain focused, and committed to, the mission, the outcome. Can this kind of objectivity be trained, be learned?"

Good stuff.

Drills, Free Play and Scenarios

David T asked about scenario training. I want to expand on the answer here.

First a caveat- this isn't encyclopedic. There are lots of ways to train: from the kihon-kata-kumite paradigm; basics versus fundamentals; technique-based or principles-based. Levels of resistance. Different types of randori. Attributes training. What I'm writing about here are things that can be build-ups to scenario training.

For me, a scenario involves roleplaying a specific scene- actors, props- trying to make things as real as possible. Somewhere in the middle there is practice for problem solving and free play.

One way to envision the difference is to start with a problem. For an example, you are pinned up against a wall. The threat has his left forearm across your chest, gripping your left collar in his left hand. He has a knife in his right hand against your throat.

For Drill training the instructor tells you exactly what to do and you practice it. Ideally it is a short, scripted and damned efficient set of motions that solve the problem. Even here there are elements of scenario training. One of the biggest, something that is always critical but more obvious in a scenario and often lost in other levels is to fight to the goal.

What the instructor drills will be heavily influenced by his or her own trainings and beliefs. Ergo, if the goal is to escape, the response practiced may be very different than if the goal is to neutralize the threat. It will get even messier if the instructor confuses strategic goals (escape or neutralize) with tactical goals (control the weapon).

Anyway, drills are set and scripted. They can be invaluable for instilling quick responses to specific situations. Properly evaluated, they can give quick and accurate insights on efficiency at all levels (are the goals realistic? Do the body mechanics actually work? Are the motions enhancing or inhibiting each other?*) It's especially important to practice drills at variable levels of resistance or with strangers. Often students have been subtly programmed to help things along that simply don't work on other people.

Somewhere in the middle between drilling and scenario is free play- put the student in the same situation and it is the student's responsibility to figure a way out of it. This is interesting because a lot of factors come into play here. This is where the student gets the first taste, often, of applying principles instead of techniques. This is where they learn to adapt things to fit their own size, strength and temperament.

One of the big glitches comes up here as well: you see the students eyes dart as they try to remember what they are "supposed" to do. The best thing, IMO, an instructor to do is 1) to give the student permission to be sloppy and 2) put a very short time limit so that the student doesn't have time to remember. Or even think.

It's easy to train a student to do something faster than thought. It's much harder and infinitely more valuable to teach a student to improvise faster than conscious thought. And that is really what surviving in a dangerous encounter is all about.

If you ever, as an instructor, catch yourself telling a student they did something incorrectly that worked, give your ego a double-check.

Freeplay can be expanded a lot. Sometimes subtle differences in the situation require more reliance on principles and lest on rote technique. Giving permission to deal with the situation at a different point in time, early, can give the student a chance to deal with force dynamics rather than static position- another critical skill that both makes things harder (more complicated) and much, much easier (the more variables you can exploit the more you can accomplish with less effort.)

Then the scenario. Good scenario training requires props and roleplayers. Further, the roleplayers must know how people (both real threats and real bystanders) act under stress. They have to give realistic feeds and precursors to the student and respond realistically to what the student does.

• If the roleplayers don't act like real threats, the student gains little valuable from scenario training. They don't learn how to spot a potential threat or do a threat assessment or scale force.
• If the facilitator is constantly trying to 'trick' the student by not having the bad guys act realistically or setting up ambushes from people deliberately scripted to appear 'safe' it can create either a learned helplessness** in the student or a student who over-reacts to everything. It decreases the student's potential for survival.
• If the roleplayers don't respond realistically, if they stay on their script despite what the student does, the student misses polishing other skills, like defusing and avoidance. It goes back quickly to learned helplessness.

Like a lot of things, bad scenario training can be more damaging than no scenario training at all. Good scenario training allows a student to develop as not just a fighter, but a tactician, a strategist, a diagnostician of violence, an observer... It also forces the student to practice in tandem with laws on force and realities of legal violence.

Scenario- You're watching a pool game in a bar. Several people including the players are walking between you and the table, so they get quite close. Some are talking among themselves. A group of three men and a woman were giving you flack about looking at the woman earlier in the evening. The bouncer quieted the situation down.

So you have obstacles (pool table, bar stools) weapons and potential weapons (cue sticks, pool balls, beer steins and potentially concealed knives and guns), distractions (extraneous people, music, lights) witnesses and legal and ethical issues. The instructor has already given one of the people involved (who has a motive, it does no good to try to get the student to expect to be blindsided, the goal is to raise student awareness so successful ambushes become less likely) a practice knife with instructions to try to get the student pinned against the wall as in the drill.

The student gets to practice seeing things coming. Winnowing important information from a mass of detail. Identifying attack pre-cursors.

The instructor will go over it later:

Instructor: Why did you stay on the wall?

Student: Because you told me... oh. That was stupid.

Instructor: When did you know it was going to go bad?

Student: When those three people were arguing earlier.

Instructor: So why did you stay?

.... On and on. Were you fighting to win or fighting to leave? Was the one who attacked working solo or with the other two? How many people in the scenario were armed? Why did you (or not)*** use an improvised weapon?

The student has an opportunity to handle it strategically e.g. by leaving; socially e.g. by talking threats down or calling on allies; tactically with or without force e.g. by accessing a superior position and weapon; fighting the initial energy; spiking the pre-assault;....

And maybe that's one of the reasons that scenario training is hard. Maybe most instructors aren't ready to coach a multi-leveled reality.

*Sometimes footwork and handwork complement each other; sometimes they detract. That's why it is hard, but not impossible, to hit hard while retreating- the feet are subtracting power from the arms. Sometimes people are trained to evade with the body while trying to shock with the hands- you have to be careful that the hands aren't slowing the evasion and the evasion isn't weakening the strike...

** You can train a student, a child or even a lab rat to be helpless. By putting them not in no-win scenarios, but in scenarios where winning and losing are arbitrary, decided by an outside factor, you create a personality type that becomes progressively fatalistic and quits trying.

***Another thing- a lot of stuff that the student will do isn't right or wrong. Bad debriefers try to tell the student what he did wrong. Good debriefers get the student to examine his own reasoning and especially his or her subconscious reactions.

Purity of Intent

Going down to the core, trying to winnow what is from attribution. Then trying to put it into words.

How artificial, exactly, are social conventions? The monkey dance and all the posturing and ritual of day-to-day interactions between humans seem amazingly contrived, sometimes pointless. Often silly. That doesn't mean they are unnatural.

They feel unnatural to me, but that is because of a baseline established long ago. I know when I feel most me. In a situation that will require extreme physicality and allows no mistakes; where the body and mind have to be simultaneously utterly free and utterly disciplined is the best of me. Those times bring out the best not of who I am but of what I am.

Nowhere in there do I find the faintest echo of social concerns. No angst. No fear of looking silly. “What would so-and-so think of me know?” would be a suicidal distraction and has no place in that mindset.

There are emotions at that level. But they are very few, less nuanced, and they feel more pure than the many, many things our social brains consider emotional.

There is joy: it is a pure, soul-singing state of elation at the beauty of the world, or the connection felt with all things, or the grace of survival. Beyond words. My mother once told me that a religious fanatic is what happens when a person only feels this once.

There is fear: Not “False Evidence Appearing Real” but the supercharged, battery-taste-in-the-mouth animal awareness of impending and inevitable death. Can’t even really write around this without changing it into ‘fear of’ or tacking some philosophy on it. It’s not even fear of death, because death is too abstract a concept for this mind. It is just a feeling, another soul-singing but at a different pitch.

Maybe there is lust. There is a deep level, but since lust centers around another human I don’t think I’ve ever felt it without some social attributions impinging.

That’s all, perhaps. Anger doesn’t make the list. Personalize a fear and decide to do something about it and you have anger, a purely social thing. The simple (in theory) and very effective (in practice) trick of learning “don’t take it personally” wouldn’t work so well if anger was pure.

Not love. When joy is felt it is often misinterpreted as “universal love”… and romantic love is one of the few social emotions that approaches that pleasure and intensity, so the attribution is sort of understandable… but love, whether romantic or social or agape or patriotism are profoundly social and profoundly constructed. The notion of romantic love was invented and even today hasn’t spread to all cultures.

Not anxiety, obviously. Nor despair. Certainly not indignation or jealousy.

Assuming I’ve written this non-word concept well enough to be understood: Are there other pure emotions?

More on War and the Hunt

Telling comments on the last post. I apologize for bringing you all into a conversation in the middle.

Here’s the deal: certain forms of violence hit humans, particularly men, at a very deep level. When Robert E. Lee says, “It is well that war is so terrible or we would grow to love it too much,” or a French survivor of the German occupation after WWII says that it was horrible and she never wants anything like that to happen again BUT she has never felt really alive since…

We need to look at that. Not pretend it doesn’t happen. Not arbitrarily decide that since it sounds icky to us, anyone who says that kind of thing must be crazy or deluded or wrong. It’s an important data point. If peace is important to you, you will never do anything about it by ignoring the aspects of violence that you want to disbelieve.

If humans are important to you, you do a great disservice to yourself by ignoring or denigrating things that don’t fit your worldview. No matter who you are, your experience with the world is very limited. Approaching disagreements with curiosity almost always works better than doing so defensively.

Do I love war? No idea. The time I spent in a war zone was pretty mild. I dislike the idea of war, but seen both good and bad results from it. I won’t pretend to have an opinion without a lot more input.

Now that that is out of the way-

Monkeys don’t hunt elephants. That’s important. Personally, I don’t see a lot that I like in chimp social dynamics, either. Those two thoughts are related.

It hasn’t been an exhaustive study for me, but almost everything negative in human society can be found in chimps- betrayal, punishing the different, bullies, even ritual murder. The chimp idea of altruism and self-sacrifice is to spend a few hours picking lice or share a bit of food. Monkeys don’t hunt elephants.

Humans do hunt elephants. With primitive stone tools we hunted a lot of big animals, some to extinction in North America. Canoes of men armed with stone tipped spears would go after whale in the Pacific Northwest, challenging some of the biggest animals alive in some of the cruelest conditions.

These are the things I see in humans that I don’t see in chimps and (don’t always see in humans, for that matter). But when I do see them, I see humans at their best.

Teamwork in dangerous conditions for the common good. Self-sacrifice up to and including death for people you are not even related to. The ability to set ego aside and follow someone else’s plan. Innovation towards a common goal. Team planning. Respect based on merit. Reward based on need (not all humans do this, but many do and did- children eat first from a hunt; potlatch; “Sergeants eat last.”)

There are other things too- the hunt and war drove technology, and tool use made human life what it is today. It is a straight line from the first obsidian or flint hide-scraper to the laptop I’m typing on now.

Hunting may have driven the development of language. Gathering doesn’t take a lot of words and farming only a little more and neither require speed and precision of information.

These are all very human things. These things we do better than chimps. These are things that got us to the moon and one day, hopefully, will take us to the stars.

Not many people hunt anymore and those that do have a huge technological advantage. It no longer requires the teamwork and careful planning of hunting a mastodon with spears. Few hunters are at risk except from each other.

Hunting is still important. You can talk all you want about the circle of life and man’s place in nature and ecology and Gaia but until and unless you have killed your own food (and wild food if you consider yourself a back-to-nature type) you’re just blowing smoke out your ass. It’s all platitudes. Hunting is still important for that, but it’s not like it used to be, far less a community necessity. It no longer drives technology.

People doing dangerous jobs in dangerous environments are the ones who still need and most often show these things that I consider hallmark human virtues.

I think this is part of the attraction of war- it’s certainly not the smells or the deafening noise or the terror. It’s not the snuffing out of irreplaceable individuals or the possibility of being snuffed out yourself. It is a place, one of the few places left, where the unique human traits of the hunt, the ones that have driven everything extraordinary that humans ever did, are valued over the monkey traits of maintaining the status quo and catering to feelings.

The best of humans comes out, but also the worst of monkey society: fear leading to acting out; violence used in ego or status defense instead of survival or to accomplish a mission; turf wars over information or credit that cost lives; ‘othering’- cultivating a racism or classism to make it easier for the monkey to kill*…

(Simultaneously, this is all bullshit to an extent. The people I hang out with are professionals, the ones who have made a conscious, experienced decision to deal with bad things. I don't spend time with the others, if I can avoid it. Hence there is a lot of sampling bias here. Were there professionals making what I cavalierly describe as human-level decisions in the Rwanda genocides?

Even if you don't spend time with people who are reacting like monkeys, even the best have chosen, or been born into, a side through social forces.)

* That’s another parallel, the high-end, most professional and effective soldiers and officers that I know work hard to understand the enemy culture and have profound respect for what they face, just as humans long ago often worshipped (that word is somewhat of an anachronism, maybe ‘reverenced’?) the animals that they hunted. Othering propaganda is necessary to get the monkey emotions involved.

The Sacred Hunt

Mac made me think this time, with one of his essays. Here's what he made me think:

The best of being human came out in the hunt. Hunting big, dangerous animals some humans taught themselves what comes so naturally to dogs: team work, loyalty, leading and following, self-sacrifice for the good of the pack.

It was also a place where some of the monkey stuff was revealed as untrue- your value as a hunter and a man depended on your heart and skill, not on your ancestors or connections or politics. And it was the place where some of the better primate stuff, the things that made us human, allowed us to dominate the world: tool use and communication and planning.

The hunt was violent and it appeals to certain people. The social bullshit of the normal monkey world is bullshit... and in violence or the hunt, it falls away. In that moment, everything is real and so much outside of that moment feels artificial. So, I think, violence is natural and important to those who are striving towards our learned, recent better nature... and terrifying and unnatural for those who live for the social monkey games.

The monkeys have always needed someone to protect them, but they think (and they may be right) that evolution is going to a purely human/monkey social world where all conflicts are handled by a Monkey Dance in boardrooms or negotiations. I think if it ever does we will lose the best of being human- the loyalty and self-sacrifice and stuff we learned in the hunt.

The thing about coming to love war is that if you value those virtues, war is where you will see them. It may be terrible-- what I saw of it over there was pretty mild, but the violence I have been exposed to had it's terrible aspects-- but it also brings out the absolute best in men. And it brings out the worst in monkeys.

Never and Always- Thinking

Training and application are context specific. That’s not really news, or at least it shouldn’t be. Sometimes common sense is context-specific as well. We tend to forget that.

A friend, months ago, made the statement that “…never and at no time and in no way have the major hip throws been used in combat. You will never find anyone in a combat zone who will voluntarily turn his back on the enemy. They are purely sport techniques.”

He’s a smart man and not one to throw around words like ‘always’ and ‘never.’ He couldn’t find a record of someone having done a full-entry hip throw in combat and, combined with the common sense that it would be a bad idea, he felt comfortable making the pronouncement.

I wanted to argue- because the word ‘never’ pushes my buttons. I thought about it for some time and couldn’t recall a specific example. I’ve used a lot of sweeps and leverage take-downs at work, but can’t recall a true hip throw. I know a few guys who have used the wrestling version of o-goshi, but without seeing the specific incidents, I don’t know whether they turned their backs entirely or not.

Reviewed the older kata that I knew and half-entry hip throws are common, but not the full entry. I didn’t have anything to argue with. Maybe it was a never and I just need to quit whining when my panties are in a twist.

Then last night I was brawling with my son. And I hip threw him, full entry. But I never turned my back on him.

The thing is, we forget stuff- people don’t kill the way they spar. In any kind of close quarters battle, emphasis on the battle, I’ll do anything I can to get behind you. So will most people who have trained in a place where blindsiding is encouraged. It’s way easier to beat people up (or kill, or subdue) from behind.

My son has been training with me. He snaked past and got to my back. He wanted the facemask leading to the choke, I think, but he executed it a little too sloppy, so I threw him.

There are two, maybe four important thoughts here:

1) Gifts, one of the universal principles: The threat, by action or position, gives you the body you will be acting on. He supplies the openings, he supplies his own vulnerabilities. If you go in with a scripted plan it will only work if the threat, by pure chance, offers you the right position and momentum. One of the most important skills is the ability to see, recognize and exploit the gifts.

2) Bad guys don’t attack in the same way and for the same reasons you might be preparing for. There was a class long ago (I won’t name the style, but within the style they were very good competitors) where the contestants would deliberately turn their backs on their opponents because striking the back didn’t count and might even get the other guy disqualified. Maybe your training flaws don’t seem so extreme—but neither an enraged housewife in a domestic or an ex-con uses a knife anything like an arnisador does. Training for flowing cuts with full mobility is just as irrelevant to the problem at hand as training to turn your back.

3) Some of the things that don’t make sense start to make sense when dealing with assaults. Common sense informed by dojo training or armchair visualization is context specific. Your conclusions (and hence your training methodologies) may be a complete mismatch for how a bad guy attacks.

4) Some of the hardest parts of training and competition are handed to you in real life—there is a serious art and science to making the 180 degree spin to a full hip throw in a judo tournament, but the bad guy may start in that position, close in, tight and from behind.

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The guest entry I wrote for Kris Wilder's Striking Post Blog is now up.

I lost contact with Jason Pittman a few years ago. He's a good friend and a good fighter. When we met, he was in charge of security at a very active trauma center. He was getting more fights in the Emergency Room than I was in a jail. He wandered off to pursue his dream of competing in Mixed Martial Arts and I went to Iraq and we kind of lost contact.

Jason’s back, and coaching at 503 West Coast Jiu Jitsu, a new facility. The space looks great, the crew (instructors and students both) have a great energy.

I’m really happy for you, JP!

Re-Cap. Ho Hum

End of the year is a good time for a wrap-up.

2009 was intense on a lot of levels- I made friends I will never see again, and some I am sure I will. Names that can't go on the internet among them. Found out I can be lazy for as much as three months before I start to go stir crazy.

Found out I can kick out a decent book very quickly- but gained almost ten pounds doing it. Sometimes people talk about balance, but sometimes you make great strides when you go off balance, falling or throwing yourself into something with your whole being.

Still hate getting older. Not sure I would notice if not for old injuries... and there is some psychic drag developing which needs to be jettisoned. As a young man, I'd try anything. I needed a reason to NOT do stuff. More and more, unless I find a compelling reason, I'm giving a lot of things a pass, things that might be fun. That needs to change. I think tomorrow will be a good day to jump in a cold mountain lake.

I lost my journal for several months early in 2009, and then really didn't work on it for the rest of the year. Between daily reports and a work log, everything felt like it was being documented well enough. Still- the continuity and ability to look up dates would have been nice.

Memories of 2009? Kissing K in an Irish castle; A punch bowl full of emeralds in Istanbul; sparring with my son; dancing in Kurdistan; a present for General A; BBQ with the Pariah Dogs...

Strangely, but exhausted as I was, I have no memory of arriving in Portland after Iraq. I remember Kuwait and wish I could forget; and out-processing at Benning; and the sunset from the plane... but not the arrival, seeing my family. No memory. How odd.

For 2010? I think it's time to let myself get out of balance and practice being young again. I'll let you know how that works out.

Process

Had a long talk with Kris Wilder the other day. It made me introspective, as talks with Kris are wont to do. He comes off as the classic bluff and hearty good ol’ boy… sometimes it takes a few minutes to realize that he was talking about some very deep stuff.

He’s also incredibly analytical, which you will see in a lot of his writing, and he lives truer to his beliefs than most are willing. All good stuff.

But enough about him. This post is all about me and, in a way, all about the blog and my writing and how I see teaching-

He gave a good analysis of what happens on most martial arts blogs- uplifting stories, analysis, descriptions of classes or techniques. Which grows readership? What speaks to who?

Chiron isn’t about growing readership and I’m not writing for you. We all know that. What readership there is appears to be from word of mouth and google searches- but there is readership and it is growing. Despite the fact that there are very few technique posts, not much uplifting, and even if I do skewer sacred cows I don’t do it with the entertaining glee of the dedicated iconoclasts.

(I also use big words, sometimes, which is a no-no on many martial arts sites.)

It’s a matter of how versus what, I think. Because the writing is for me, it isn’t about what I think. I already know that. It’s about how I think. The deeper it gets, the more it is exploring a process. There are a lot of epiphanies here, and questions and doubt and mysteries. Those are what I think about, those are the things that writing helps to explore, the way others talk to themselves.

I think, maybe, the difference with Chiron is that you can go to thousands of martial arts sites and read what ‘masters’ and experts think… here you can read how a working professional thinks.

The blog, writing, and teaching as well. It’s not about what you know but how you learn, less about what you do than how you decide what to do. Not about what the student thinks, but how the student thinks. My interest isn’t in the end product (except as a measure of effect) so much as in streamlining the process.

The language gets weird, here. A fighter is not something you are, but something you be. Grr- there’s no really active verb for existence. You can be a painter or be a painter. You can be a painter with efficiency and intensity, or you can be a painter lackadaisically, wastefully. The painting part doesn’t interest me as much as the being part.

Thanks, Kris.

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Kris also asked me to do a guest blog on his "Striking Post" should be coming up soon. It's an idea I've been working on for a while...

The Rules

My first on-line article was many years ago for Fabien Senna, the webmaster of cyberkwoon. I'd mentioned that it always bothered me when people said that there were "no rules in a street fight" because there were rules. Laws matter, sure, but there are also subconscious rules that people get stuck on. Fab asked me to write a little about some of the rules, so I did.

Along with the rules I'm coming to understand that there are scripts as well. Off and on over the years I've described several of them here without realizing it. The bad guy gets angry and expects you to either show fear or get angry back; the basic monkey dance; threat displays and dominance games...

A lot of the successful de-escalations have been by refusing to play the role or follow the script that was expected.

It would be easy to say that the scripts are social, but watching body language, even non-human primates do very similar things. One pushes and gets aggressive and loud, the other responds. Often both look to the bystanders to see if public approval is on one side or the other. Often they rely, just like people, on being separated by friends, getting to feel like they stood up without the danger of actually getting hurt.

When you start looking for it, you see this monkey behavior everywhere. And it seems so petty. There is great power in seeing the game and choosing not to play- it is almost a superpower to be able to focus on the problem and ignore the social mine-field surrounding it.

That's very cool, but in a way it is sort of a trap as well. When you step away from the monkey games it is easy to forget that all the people you deal with every day are still primates. What looks silly and petty when you are dealing with avoiding death and injury is the very definition of what others see as human... and when you cease to come across like a person, they have to figure out who and what you are.

I think this is why so many good operators get 'reined in' by their bosses even when they have done nothing wrong. It's not punishment and only partly a power play. The bosses are just reassuring themselves that the operator is still a human, still a member of the tribe and still knows his or her place in the tribe.

To be anything else is to be unreadable, possible a stealth predator, a wolf in ape's clothing.

Get Out of Your Way!

If you break down the koshi-waza, the hip throws, there are really only two: a full entry hip throw where you turn so that the opponent is completely behind you and your butt, ideally, hits him just above the knees; and a half-entry, where your hip bone takes him about in the crotch.

There are slight variations in how high or low to hit, the vector... but those are pretty much just things to argue with over a beer. The real difference, the reason that there are so many variations is that it is pretty hard to get your own arms out of the way.

We never explain it that way. Each of the grips has advantages and disadvantages, a place and a time. Morote seoi nage works very well for shorter, stronger judoka; ippon seoi nage is nice when you have the room to fling an arm and is much easier than morote if you are slightly taller than your opponent. That's what we tell our selves.

What is really going on is that a hip throw requires a really tight connection between the two bodies. Especially in a full-entry hip throw, your arms aren't really designed to hug something behind you. The elbows push things away, the shoulders don't go there. The key to the variations is that they are just different ways of overcoming the fact that we are physically in our own way to accomplish that goal in that position.

Making a 'proper fist' is a really big deal for beginning karate students. It is taught in great detail, great precision and the student practices again and again until his or her fists ideally become little bone clubs on the end of an arm.

It's cool, but it's completely unnecessary. I know. Shock, horror. The first time someone explained this (it was Mac, by the way) I reacted as if someone had pissed on one of my religious icons. There was no way I had worked that hard to do a simple thing right that was completely unnecessary...

But it was. The idea with a punch is to focus the power through the ends of the metacarpals. Curling your fingers tightly beginning with the distal joint and working in then locking them down with your thumb accomplishes that. So does simply letting your fingers relax and hang down. You can hit with the exact dynamics of a karate seiken with completely loose hands. Both are just techniques for getting the fragile fingers out of the way.

In individuals this happens mentally as well as physically. People drop into sport mode when survival is the order of the day. They, sometimes, grip the weapon arm when they don't have the leverage to hold it even when the grip keeps them from getting the solid blow to the brainstem that they need to finish things.

And mentally- whether we call it the inner critic as writers do or a fear of success; whether it is self-satisfaction or laziness or complaisance-- we spend a lot of time getting in our own way. If you are like most people, the biggest obstacle in your road to success is you. What are you going to do about it? How do you plan to get out of your own way?

So Close...

Argh... reviewed the pictures for the book and there are four that need to be retaken. Four poses, that is, each will require several shots. It will take time to return to the same place with the same model to do them... Or I could have totally incongruous pictures today. I think I'll wait. Alain has given me the thumbs up on the legal sections as well as a few very nice suggestions.

Confirmed with Kris and we are a go for a seminar February 20th, 1000-1600 at his dojo. I'll put together a lesson plan, a flier and get an e-mail list going.

Intriguing suggestion to work directly on a class (maybe videos? A book?) specifically for cops who need to attain control and side-step the Monkey Dancing. Primate behavior gets a lot of play in the next book, but saying, "Don't do X." Is easy. the challenge is training behaviors to replace the 'don't' and get a good effect. A lot of the strategies for people/cops whatever (like yelling or being bossy) are used because they work. But when they fail, they fail catastrophically. Need to outline the concepts and see what format will get the point across most clearly.

An old friend, a former thug who thinks a lot, may be coming up for air after a long hiatus. Might join us for the weekly brawls if his schedule permits.

Decisions to make. Things to plan.

Frame of Reference

My lovely wife reads books for a local award. Some of the books, she assures me, are amazing. Many are dreck. Sometimes, to help her get through a really awful one, I'll read it aloud, doing the voices, emphasizing the unwittingly horrible turns of phrase.

K is a writer and she picks out why specific things didn't work, where the author got confused but wrote it as the protagonist got confused... stuff like that. I noticed something today and realized that it is one of the reasons I gave up fiction and, indeed, one of the major problems I have with people who live primarily inside their heads.

I read two sections today. In one, the character was dealing with emotional questions- is this really love? will it last? That sort of thing. In the second section, the characters were trying to decide what to do about someone trying to kill them.

The emotional weight, the vividness, the drama, the feeling about what the stakes were in the two sections was exactly the same. I was left thinking, as I often do, that the author had only experienced emotional pain and angst, and was trying to extrapolate that to physical agony and the terror of potential extermination.

Steve recently linked to an essay by Harlan Ellison. In the article, Ellison talks a little bit about a brush with violence. It was just a brush. He was neither the victim nor the perpetrator. For that matter, he tried very hard to avoid being a good witness. It still shook him.

That was one encounter, one step removed. As good as Ellison is at writing, as profoundly as it affected him, no matter what you feel when you read it, he barely got his toes wet in the shallow end of the pool.

He was never the target of such an act. Never been the force of nature who could do that. Certainly never been one of the people who step between the violent and the victim. For those who have, it is very different- different by orders of magnitude. Just being on the periphery, Ellison found it horrible. (I'm curious to read a before and after of his stories, see if they changed after this event).

This isn't about being a bad ass. Nor is it about 'people who live in their heads are wimps'. It's about teaching. Because this is the big issue with teaching: Many of the students have absolutely no frame of reference to understand what they are trying to learn. Neither do many instructors. How do you teach this aspect to students whose closest frame of reference is having their feelings hurt?

Universal Wristlock Escape

Small joint locks do work. I've used them, very successfully, many times. Even on enraged freaks who were huge.

They work best, however, on people who have had a little martial arts training. Put a martial artist in a sankaju (inside turning wrist lock with elbow up) and he obligingly goes up on his toes. Put him in kote gaeshi and he twists with it and goes down (or sails through the air, if he has been taught to do that.) The skilled ones go with the lock and try to essentially outrun the pain. Sometimes it works.

Interestingly, completely untrained people, especially if a little drunk, tend to do the same thing when placed in a wristlock. It doesn't matter which wristlock- whether you take out yaw, pitch or roll or any two of the three or all of them, the escape still works fine.

It works better than any technique I have yet seen from a trained martial artist. It is simple.

They reach out with the other hand, say, "Ow!" and pull the trapped hand to their chest. It works beautifully. Give it a try. And don't forget the 'ow'- consider it a primitive but pure kiai.

There is a valuable lesson here...

Caveat Lector

My mother told me that when she was little, the Catholic church discouraged reading the bible by yourself. It was considered too big, too complex, could bring up too many issues... so you were supposed to have a guide. Someone educated in what the book was supposed to mean, so that you wouldn't stumble over all the things that it inconveniently said...

There have been a lot of books written by criminals, and I catch myself wanting to fall into the same trap- they should be read, but they should be read with guidance. That's silly. It offends me when a power group says it about the bible... but I catch myself wanting to say the same thing.

People, the people who buy and read books are largely good people. They know good people. Consciously or not, they extend their assumptions about the people around them to authors.

Criminals, especially those doing serious time are not good people. They have gone into that place where they can kill or rob or sell drugs (the rapists almost never write books, or if they do they leave the rapes out) and are okay with it. When they write the books, they want you to be okay with it, too.

Violent criminals do a lot of mental gymnastics to justify their crimes. It takes a lot of mental gymnastics to rationalize sodomizing an eighty-year-old woman or stabbing an eleven-year-old girl or blowtorching another criminal to death. But not only are they good at living with themselves (most like themselves and some will brag about their stabbing a child as a proof of iron will) but they are good at getting other people to be okay with it as well. There is a reason that even after a savage, vicious killer dies resisting arrest his family will go on TV to say he was a "...good boy." It's not just looking for a settlement. Some really believe it.

They are master manipulators. It is how they survive. And the ones with the skill to write, to really write, are better at manipulation. Literati seem to want to believe that beautiful writing can only come from a beautiful soul. It's not true.

So I will, reluctantly, include a few books written by criminals in the bibliography of "7". But read them at your own risk. Don't read them for how the criminal sees himself, his victims or the world because he will almost surely be lying about that. Read for how he manipulates you, the reader. How he convinces you that he is either the victim, the hero, or both. How he gets you to question your ethics... even though you have never murdered, robbed or raped.

Done... Mostly

We were going to take some pictures for the book today, but Kevin had to cancel at the last minute. Added some sections today (every time I go to sleep I wake up in the middle of the night thinking of some critical detail I left out).

But it is done. Mostly.

Confession time- I've had the shakes after a big thing and sometimes trouble sleeping for the first few hours, but as far as I remember I've never had what is called an 'adrenaline hangover'. Sometimes I'm sore from injuries I didn't notice at the time...

If anyone has a source or experience, now would be good. The thing is, unless I'm really sure I'll cut any mention out of the book. I think that's why MoV was both so short and got so little friction- I just left out all the stuff I couldn't personally confirm.

So, pictures to take, captions, indexing... and off to the publisher.

Putting it in Words

At one of the Orycon panels the moderator, Nisi Shawl had contacted us in advance and asked us to bring something to read.

The panel was about writing from the point of view of cultures you didn't belong to. It was a cool panel, and Nisi was the stand-out in terms of insight and compassion. It was a little jarring, as it sometimes is, to listen to people whose lives center around things (like writing fiction) that I can't quite see as real.

I didn't have anything to read written from another point of view, so I decided to read something from "7" about dangerous ground. The idea that sometimes you step into a new place where the rules, particularly the rules about violence, might be very different. How do you know? How do you learn the rules? How do keep from making a fatal mistake while learning the rules?

As I read, part of my mind was racing. I could be very wrong, but reading it felt like no one, ever, had put this stuff into words before. How to specifically read a room. The patterns your eyes must follow. When violating space is a violation and when it is a cultural norm. How to pitch your voice, your attitude. Where your gaze rests.

There have been masters of this skill- Lt. Sir Richard Francis Burton comes immediately to mind. Any skill I have would be rudimentary compared to his... but did he ever write down how he did it? He documented how he mastered languages in as little as two months, but not, as far as I know, how he could blend in with a foreign culture and not be spotted.

It's nothing new, lots of people do it from cops to method actors to taxi drivers... but there was an undeniable rush of creation in writing the words. Maybe it's false and the knowledge is so common it has never been written. Or some author that I've missed but everyone else knows well has already covered it...

But it didn't feel that way. It felt exactly like the first time I made a fire by friction, taking two pieces of wood and from them drawing forth an entirely new, living flame. I see why writers get hooked.

Chapter List

This is what you'll be getting:

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

CHAPTER 1: Legal and Ethical

1.1 Legal (Criminal)

1.1.1 Affirmative Defense

1.1.2 Elements of Force Justification

1.1.2.1 The Threat

1.1.3 Scaling Force

1.1.4 Civil Law

1.2 Ethics

1.2.1 Conscious Stuff: Capacity

1.2.1.1 Beliefs, Values, Morals and Ethics

1.2.2 The Unconscious Stuff: Finding Your Glitches

1.2.3 Through the Looking Glass

CHAPTER 2: Violence Dynamics

2.1: Social Violence

2.1.1 The Monkey Dance

2.1.2 The Group Monkey Dance

2.1.3 The Educational Beat-Down

2.1.4 The Status Seeking Show

2.1.5 Territory Defense

2.2 Asocial Violence

2.2.1 Predator Basics

2.2.2 Two Types

2.2.3 Two Strategies

CHAPTER 3: Avoidance

3.1 Absence

3.2 Escape and Evasion (E&E)

3.3 De-Escalation

3.3.1 Know Thyself

3.3.2 Know the World You Are In

3.3.3 Know the Threat

3.3.4 The Interview

3.3.4.1 De-Escalating the Monkey Dance

3.3.4.2 De-Escalating the Group Monkey Dance

3.3.4.3 De-escalating the Resource/Blitz Predator

3.4 Altered Mental states

3.4.1 Rapport Building

3.4.2 The Psychotic Break

3.4.3 Excited Delirium

3.4.4 Fakes

3.5 Hostage Situations

CHAPTER 4: Counter Assault

4.1 Foundation

4.1.1 Elements of Speed

4.1.2 The Perfect Move

4.2 Examples

4.2.1 Attack From the Front

4.2.2 Attack From Behind

CHAPTER 5: Breaking the Freeze

5.1 Biological Background

5.2 What Freezing Is

5.3 Types of Freezes

5.3.1 Tactical Freezes

5.3.2 Physiological Freezes

5.3.3 Non-Cognitive Mental Freezes

5.3.4 Cognitive Freezes

5.3.5 Social Cognitive Freezes

5.3.6 The Pure Social Freeze

5.4 Breaking the Freeze

5.5 One other Habit

CHAPTER 6: The Fight

6.1 You

6.1.1 This is Your Brain on Fear

6.1.2 And This is Your Body

6.1.3 Training and You

6.1.4 Mitigating the Effects

6.2 The Threat(s)

6.3 The Environment

6.4 Luck

6.4.1 Gifts

6.4.2 Managing Chaos

6.4.3 Discretionary Time

6.5 The Fight

CHAPTER 7: After

7.1 Medical

7.1.1 As Soon as You are Safe

7.1.2 Hours to Months

7.1.3 Long Term

7.2 Legal Aftermath

7.2.1 Criminal

7.2.2 Civil

7.2.2.1 The Threatening Letter

7.2.2.2 Difference

7.3 Psychological Aftermath

7.3.1 Story Telling

7.3.2 Change

7.3.3 Feelings

7.3.4 Questions

7.3.5 Victim Power

7.3.6 Friends, Society and Alienation

Afterword

Further Reading

Busy Bak Son

It's been a busy bunch of days.

Updates:

The Book. Working title is simply "7." I decided to evade the whole circles/arenas/stages thing and also the very clever suggestion to keep using "Violence" in all the connected titles Maybe "Meditations?" The title will be an editorial decision anyway, and David is smarter about this stuff than I am. He's the professional. The book is in rewrite, I'm waiting for one SME critique. I'll post the table of contents in the next few days.

Orycon- Sat on lots of panels with some very amazing people, notably Pat MacEwen, a criminalist with a very cool collection of pictures. Also some friends, like Steve and Bart and Guy and Mike and a few acquaintances that would be nice to know better. Got to see some of my favorite people as well. You know who you are.

The thing that always amazes me about cons and fans and writers is how huge the rift can be between their fears and beliefs and mine. In one of the panels on writing about other cultures (which I was on, I think, because I routinely work with other cultures) the question was asked, "How do you know if you have offended someone?" The authors were thinking feedback from readers. I was thinking that when the General's bodyguards reach for their guns it's a big freakin' clue you've crossed some kind of line.

The other big insight was from a panel on peace. There are people working for peace who are afraid to look at violence. You can't get there without that step. They seem to want to get to a pretty place but only travel through pretty places to get there and not see the bodycount they help to create on the way or the value that violence has for those who use it.

Disturbing moments, but the con was a good time.

Hands-on: I had the chance to do two hands-on classes at the Con as well. About 20 participants and ten observers in each. Wide range of skills, aptitudes and mindsets. There is a saying that 'the excellent is the enemy of the good'. I tend to go the other way- everything connects so I try to cover too much. They got a lot of concepts, but without the time or equipment for them to practice with any depth. Some of the class was recorded and it's good for me to watch.

I listened to a speech yesterday, and a politician who I really respected (disagreed with on almost every issue, but respected) lost my support. He made the statement that since he had written letters to the families of war dead and seen some of the coffins delivered that he knew "first hand" the cost of this war. It was delusional and profoundly disrespectful. Profoundly disrespectful gets used as a whine a lot. That's not what I mean here- to know the names but not the smiles or touch of the people in the coffins; to compare watching and writing from safety to wondering if you will get a call tonight or if the incoming alarms are real this time is not only profoundly disrespectful for those who are in danger. It is also profoundly disrespectful to the very concept of truth. There is no parity of experience between those who watch and those who do. Only the most self-absorbed of the watchers can even pretend that there is. I had thought that this man was far, far above this. One of my budding heroes is hollow.

Interview tomorrow. Prepared pretty well. Have to wear a suit.

--------------------------------------------

Thanks to everyone for the condolences on Beast. Death is strange- not quite real and yet the most real and certain thing there is. It doesn't feel like loss but does feel like sadness. I expect oblivion for myself but still have long conversations with 'my' dead- Dad, Rick, a nameless baby in Ecuador, Ryan, Frenchy, Samson, Miro...

This isn't one of the things where I feel a need to understand or control. We'll all know soon enough.