Principles-Based Instruction for Self-Defense (and Maybe Life)

Section 1: The Unique Problem of Self-Defense

Teaching self-defense is unlike any other subject matter. There are some commonalities with training soldiers, police officers, fire fighters, and emergency medics. In all of those cases, decisions will have to be made at high stakes, with limited information, and with very little time. All of those professions require proper execution of good decisions under adrenal stress, just like self-defense.

But unlike all of the emergency professions, self-defense is something the practitioner, if he or she ever needs to apply it, must apply alone. You will not have a crusty old sergeant to imitate. You will not have a Field Training Officer to tell you to pull your head out of your ass and tackle the guy. You will not have an experienced partner to help you place the IV when your hands are shaking.

It is also unlike martial arts or fighting. In a sport art, like boxing or MMA (Mixed Martial Arts), you know what you will be facing. On an appointed date and time, you will meet a single, unarmed opponent under bright lights, who will be your size, and you will both be allowed and denied the same techniques. Further, you can replicate sport reality in training. You can spar with the exact same rules and conditions that you will face in the ring or the octagon.

Training self-defense is difficult, and here are some of the reasons:

Section 1.1 Rarity

Emergencies, whether a sudden assault, an active shooter, or a nuclear accident are all extremely rare, complex, and vary not just by circumstances and intensity, but by the interaction of the event itself with available resources and knowledge. When an event is extremely rare, there is very limited experience available in how to deal with such an event. When my team was transitioning from riots and cell-extractions to full-service hostage rescue, I started looking for an instructor or organization that fit my criteria: I wanted someone who had successfully rescued hostages. Ideally, many times.

Here’s the deal-- if you define a successful hostage rescue as one in which none of the team is injured, all of the hostages are recovered at least as intact as when the team arrived, and all the bad guys were killed or cuffed-- can you name an organization that has met that standard five times? Four? Three? And yet there were thousands of people willing to sell their non-existent expertise.

There simply is very little experience in many of the high-risk, low-incident situations. Which means people wind up guessing about best solutions. And even with the best research in the world, until your approach is tested multiple times, in the real world, it’s just a guess. No more.

Sidebar:

I don’t teach gun stuff. I have hundreds of hours of training in it. I have gone into situations fully expecting gunfire. But I have only ever blown a hole in a person once. That’s not enough to know what I don’t know. This doesn’t mean inexperienced people can’t teach, they can. I choose not to.

I don’t often teach knife defense. I’ve had to deal with a threat armed with a knife five times. That’s enough encounters to get an idea of how much I don’t know. I would never consider going into a judo match under a coach who had only ever had five matches. That’s just dumb.

I do teach unarmed responses to threats. For unarmed encounters my Uses of Force are in the multiple hundreds. Understand, this doesn’t make me right. It doesn’t even make me confident. The next one could be different. Experienced people may be more confident, but they are less certain than inexperienced people. We know how variable chaos is, and that luck always plays a role. Certainty, in the field of violence, is a good indicator of inexperience.

Rarity equates with a lack of experience (both globally and personally for the instructor) and an equal lack of reliable information.

Even when information is available, it is often unreliable. People remember things poorly under adrenaline. Many stories are told to make some group or individual look better. Biases in gathering the information often make the conclusion worthless or actively misleading.

(For example: http://educate-yourself.org/pnt/amnestyintnl2006TASERreport.shtml

And my rebuttal: http://chirontraining.blogspot.com/2007/08/152.html)

There is very little good science in this field. No experiment on fear and danger would be approved by a university Ethics Committee. That leaves us with little more than anecdotes. (see Section 4.3.3 Assessing Sources of Information)

The modality of the information is also at issue. Even studying videos, while useful, omits the sounds, the smells, and, most important, the touch details. It is very easy to watch a professional fight in MMA or boxing and say what you would have done. It is an entirely different thing to act when it is your face being pummeled, and you can taste your own blood.

Last, there is an industry supplying fantasy disguised as information. Disaster survival courses, worst-case survival books, self-defense manuals, prepper lists-- never tested, entirely the product of fantasy. One generation of fantasy gets passed on without being tested, and in a few years is just accepted wisdom in that subculture-- whether the ridiculous assertion in certain systems of self defense that a certain technique will always get the same result (no one who has fought more than two people could possibly believe that horseshit), or the contention that one can use friction to start a fire reliably (try it at 100% humidity).

What does this mean to you as a teacher? If you have extensive direct experience, you are a valuable resource. If you don’t have extensive direct experience, you can still be valuable as a teacher, but be alert for what you don’t know. Be especially alert for things you are sure of if you can’t articulate a basis for your certainty. You just know a strike to the temple will knock someone out? How do you know? Have you tried it? Did you read it somewhere? Did the people who wrote that article actually try it? How many times? You (all of us) actually know very little with any reliability. But we tend to know a lot of things with great confidence, many of which are not true.

Watch your sources. Be skeptical (including with me).

Don’t fret too much. The nature of this beast is that the unknowns vastly outweigh the knowns. It’s about adaptability and options. If you obsess on perfection, you’re locking into a right answer that doesn’t exist. One measure of maturity, as my friend Kai writes, is your ability to function without being certain. And that is probably the primary skill your students will need.

Never forget that, as little concrete knowledge as we may have, humans are adaptable, and unless they are brainwashed otherwise, humans thrive in complex conditions with multiple manipulable variables.

Section 1.2 An Open System

In a closed system, there are known factors, and there are right or wrong answers based on those factors. Engineering is a closed system. A bridge constructed in a certain way, of certain materials, of a certain size, set into a specific type of ground can safely hold a known weight.

Fighting (and I hate that word, see Section 3.1.3) is an open system. The opponent is complex. Size can be a known quantity, but bone and muscle density, heart or toughness, and experience with violence and pain are unknown. Largely, these are unknowns both about the threat (that’s the bad guy) and yourself. Will you keep fighting after you feel one of your bones break? Does the unexpected sight of your own blood freeze you? These are things you cannot know until you have experienced them.

These two unknown factors will interact in a complex, moving, fluid environment. There will be little time, and your senses will likely be distorted. The underlying problem is one of incredible complexity.

One of the other hallmarks of an open system is that there are many ways to be right and many ways to be wrong. If a person is assaulted and screams, drawing attention, and the threat flees, that’s a win. If a person is assaulted and suddenly shoves the threat hard enough to create space and runs to safety, that’s a win. And if the intended victim lashes out and collapses the threat’s throat, that’s a win.

Conversely, if the scream draws no attention and the threat stabs or shoots the victim to silence him, that’s not a win. If the intended victim shoves and runs into a room with no exits, that’s not a win. And if the victim collapses the throat of one assailant without seeing the confederate behind her, that’s not a win.

And there are results that are only temporary wins. If the intended victim collapses a throat and gets away but can’t justify it to the authorities or can’t live with the emotional aftermath, it can be a very dark win. Prison time or turning to alcohol, drugs or suicide are all losses in the long term.

As complex as this appears, it is exactly the level of complexity humans were born to handle.

Section 1.3 Surprise, Fear, and Speed

No engineer will be asked to build a bridge until after she has finished her training. No engineer will suddenly be thrown into a bridge-building problem unexpectedly, with unknown resources, working on a bridge of unknown size with unknown material. No building crew will have to work with conditions changing every second. None will have to make every decision and carry out every action under a cascade of stress hormones. In modern times, no bridge builder worries about being killed if he gets a detail wrong.

The natural environment of a self-defense situation is one of surprise and fear in a complex and rapidly changing world. The stakes are high; the margin of error is slim-to- nonexistent. Whatever the student does must be based on what they can perceive in the moment. The information he or she works with will always be incomplete.

The student will have to perform the very first time. There can be no practice runs, there is no way to gradually build up skills through carefully graded problems.

As an instructor, you can never know when a student will need her skills. An engineer can be confident that they will not have to design a nuclear power plant until after they have completed training. You student may be attacked after the first class, or after a year, or never.

There is an established way to overcome these problems, and all force professionals use it. It is modeling, and it is not available to self-defense students. Police officers have their FTOs. Infantry soldiers are assigned to fire teams that already have at least one experienced leader. In a dangerous, high-speed situation, the best strategy is to identify people who have survived before and do what they do. No self-defense student will have the luxury of fighting off their first rapist under the guidance of another person who has already fought off a dozen would-be rapists.

Section 1.4 The Problem Is Longitudinal

Of all of the problems listed, properly handled, this can be an advantage.

A self-defense situation rarely comes out of nowhere. There are antecedents and after-effects. Before, sometimes long before the problem of physical self-defense comes up, there are signs. This gives incredible opportunities to make students safer by prevention.

On the other end, win or lose, there are potential physical, legal and psychological consequences to any act of self-defense. This must be part of your training as well.

When self-defense instruction ignores the longitudinal nature of the subject, it makes the student even more vulnerable. Practicing one hundred reps of escaping from a stranglehold is practicing, and ingraining, one hundred reps of putting yourself in a position to be strangled, and letting a strangler apply the technique: two reps of passivity for each rep of action. It encourages a reactive, instead of proactive, mindset. By teaching self-defense as a series of things to do in response to an attack, the student is always responding, always ceding the first move to the threat. That’s a deadly habit.

By ignoring the longitudinal nature, instructors can gloss over the fact that force incidents happen in the real world, and have consequences.

Section 1.5 The Problem Exists in the Real World

As a culture, we have been polluted by our entertainment. TV cops shoot a couple of people every episode and, at best, lip service is paid to the eventual Internal Affairs investigation, the eventual civil suit. Any officer who used deadly force more than a handful of times would quickly be relegated to a desk job. TV doesn’t address that.

In the Hollywood universe, the martial artist/hero/drifter goes to war against a whole town and when the smoke has cleared he walks away. He’s not hounded by federal agents for the rest of his life. Doesn’t lose any sleep. Doesn’t have friends who start to avoid him.

The bad guys go down, one after another. Corpse after corpse, and it never comes home, not to the protagonist and not to the audience, that when you create a corpse you also create widows and orphans.

Society does not like violence. Even when it is justified, even when it is absolutely necessary, mechanisms come into play to prevent a repeat performance: official and unofficial, overt and subtle, external and internal.

Officially, legal action might be taken. Injuring someone will be investigated, and even when the force is found justified, waiting for that pronouncement is a kind of punishment. The long wait for some strangers, people who were not there, to judge your actions, is nerve wracking. And even when the police are satisfied the actions were justified, there is always the possibility of a civil suit.

And there are unofficial sanctions. News stories that will question motivation and integrity. It may come up when you’re pulled over for a minor traffic infraction. People may recognize you.

The social network, an expected source of support, will react. Some will say the act was wrong, even if it wasn’t. Others will give words of support, but start to find reasons not to spend time with you. Force, no matter how justified, will be punished. Sometimes overtly, sometimes subtly.

Sometimes it will come from other people. Sometimes it will come from within.

There is a powerful taboo against using violence. For that matter, even the lowest level of force, merely setting boundaries, is being rude and we have all been taught from the time we were babies not to be rude. People want to be surrounded by other people who are predictable, safe, and polite. Using force effectively means that one is, by definition, unpredictable, unsafe, and capable of being extremely impolite.

Self-defense will always have consequences in the real world. Tough. Defend yourself anyway. Teach your students to defend themselves. It will change relationships, but not as much as being victimized, and in a better way.

Section 1.6 You Are Teaching Students, Not Subject Matter

If you are teaching self-defense, you are teaching students, not subject matter. This is the hallmark difference between self-defense and martial arts.

When I am teaching martial arts, I am teaching a system that has been handed down for many generations, and I have an obligation to teach certain things to a certain standard, in a certain way. When I am teaching martial arts, I am teaching a subject.

When I am teaching self-defense, I am teaching students. Every single student is different. They have different brains and bodies. They will be targeted for different types of crime. The 300-pound linebacker doesn’t need to worry about being dragged into a van by a serial rapist, and the 110-pound woman rarely needs advice on how to handle a Monkey Dance.

Every student has different resources-- mental, physical, and emotional. They all have different limits, lines they will not cross. Some are too arrogant to run, and some could never put a finger in an eye, not right away. To teach different people the same things is wasting their time and wasting yours.

Ego and instructor arrogance will come up a lot in this book, because, as an instructor, your ego may be the biggest danger to your students. What you can do has no bearing on what your students can do. Your solution to a problem may be physically or emotionally impossible for some of your students. You must give them the tools and the freedom to solve their problems in their own way.

Section 1: Recap and Conclusions

SD is an open, rather than closed, system

Skills must be used out of the box, completely without experience

The student will have to apply those skills in an unpredictable, chaotic and rapidly changing environment

It will be a high stakes situation with slim margins of error

The student will have to perform from surprise, under the effects of stress, and with only partial information

No way of knowing when a student will need it. You can’t know how much time you have to get the student ready or even what they need to be ready for.

The event has antecedents, and will have after-effects (longitudinal)

Many ways to win and lose, no right answers

The LEO/Military/EMS solution to these challenges is simply not available for civilians

Teaching students, not material. Each student is different on multiple levels

As you can tell, it’s not an easy problem. It is unlike most of the things we usually solve with training. That doesn’t make it impossible or insurmountable. There are philosophical approaches and training methods that do help. Most important, to my mind, is that nothing in SD is new. We are all the products of ancestors who successfully survived.

But we do have to examine and challenge our beliefs about teaching. There is very little knowledge about this. What follows is just my current best insight.

Section 2: Subject Matter Expertise

Though we are teaching students, not subject matter, that focus requires even more expertise. If you are merely teaching a curriculum, you must only know the curriculum. If you are teaching students, you must know the same curriculum, but also the exceptions to the curriculum, the situations that lie outside the curriculum, and how to adapt the curriculum to students with different physical and emotional abilities.

Changing the focus from subject to student makes nothing easier for the instructor. It makes everything easier and more practical for the student.

What follows is a list of the things I think you must know to the level of expertise to be a self-defense instructor.

Section 2.1 Knowledge of the Problem

In Facing Violence (YMAA 2011) I detailed the seven areas that, in my opinion, you must cover if you claim to teach self-defense. Leaving out any one of the seven makes your students vulnerable. There’s already a book, so I won’t repeat all of the information here, just an overview.

Section 2.1.1 The ethical and legal implications of using force

Self-defense, first and foremost, is a legal term, not a physical skill set. Most of the effective martial or combative systems were not designed with modern self-defense law in mind. Some are older than the concept of self-defense law, or came from a culture where the idea of commensurate force was an alien concept. Some came from military systems, which are about killing an enemy and have nothing to do with civilian self-defense. Most of the other effective systems were designed by criminals.

But self-defense is a legal concept. If self-defense is what you teach, you must have a thorough understanding of your local self-defense statutes. If you reside in one of the states or countries where SD is a common-law right instead of a statutory right, you must have a handle on relevant case law, or study and understand the current jury instructions for self-defense cases.

You must be able to explain the differences between the civil and criminal justice systems to your students; the flow of events in each system; their rights and responsibilities with respect to the systems and; whom to talk to, and when to talk to them.

Ideally, you should be able to recommend experienced lawyers in self-defense law, in case your students should ever need one or wish to put one on retainer. The Armed Citizen Legal Defense Network offers very good information, access to a list of attorneys, and what amounts to self-defense insurance. It’s a good group. http://armedcitizensnetwork.org

And you should be able to explain all of this and have your students less worried about legal entanglements, not more.

It’s a myth that knowledge of the legal system will freeze your students. Everyone knows the legal system is a dangerous, technical quagmire. Ignorance about a known dangerous is far more likely to induce a freeze than knowledge about that danger.

Actually, most people make good force decisions. Laws are a codification of the common morals of a given area, and people raised in that culture nearly always make decisions that accord well with the law.

Do you want to hurt anyone unless it is absolutely necessary?

Do you want to hurt someone more than is absolutely necessary?

Do you ever want to kill somebody if there is any other choice?

If you can answer no to those three questions, congratulations. Your personal ethics are completely in-line with the SD law of most of the industrialized world.

People make good decisions, and so my usual tack with teaching force law is to teach it as an articulation class. Your instincts will be good. Explaining something you did instinctively will be hard, and you may be abysmal at it. Crooks practice lying to cops. You need to practice telling the truth. A skilled lie will often beat an unskilled truth.

There are four exceptions to the people tend to make good decisions rule. Your students must be prepared for these:

1) Often, in a Monkey Dance, people subconsciously revert to grade school, where He started it is a legitimate defense. A mutual fight is never self-defense, and He started it is not a valid legal defense.

2) The threat is over. The student was attacked, did the right thing, and the bad guy is down… and in the rush of adrenaline and indignation there is the urge to ‘teach the bastard a lesson.’ A few extra kicks are thrown. Legitimate self-defense is followed by illegal battery.

3) Related to the second. Like all predators, humans have an instinct to chase. The bad guy flees and the good guy pursues, usually with a weapon, and shoots or beats down the fleeing felon. Good guy becomes bad guy.

4) The student has been taught excessive force. If the student has been taught to follow up a take-down with two kicks to the head just to be sure or been taught that a disarm is followed up by stabbing the now-unarmed threat, the student has been taught to go to