aggression Archives

A world of behaviours

I recently saw a statement online that implied, possibly inadvertently, that there was a binary choice between behaviour that might incite aggression or violence by challenging the personal insecurities of affected (alpha) personalities and that which might invite approaches from those that prey on those they perceive as vulnerable.

I may have misinterpreted the statement, but the implication seemed to be that these were two sides of a coin. Acting in a way so as not to appear vulnerable would attract negative attention from those seeing it as a challenge to their imagined local social status, while seeking to avoid antagonising the latter would engage the interest of those looking for prey.

I prefer to see those points as distant (though not necessarily opposite) poles on a world of behaviours. As with the real world there are some places where the local physical or social environment may make it a very dangerous location to be without appropriate experience, training or support. But in common with the real world there are large hospitable zones where most people are very safe and supported most of the time.

Just as many people have the ability to travel or adjust their environment to make it less dangerous, most of us have the ability to move on our behavioural globe. Through our own agency or with the guidance of others (parents, peers, role models, teachers or counsellors) most people can adjust their self-perception and body language to the vast continents of calm confident behaviour that neither antagonises nor invites predatory activity. In fact, the infrequency of violent crime victimisation per person on average in most WIRED / WEIRD (Western Industrialised Rich Educated & Democratic) countries would indicate that most people manage this most of the time.

Personal behaviour is something that was alluded to by Gichin Funakoshi in his 20 precepts.

“When you leave home, think that you have numerous opponents waiting for you. It is your behaviour that invites trouble from them.”

Our behaviour and attitude to life determines much of our reality. Most abusive, aggressive or violent encounters can be avoided or negated through social awareness, respect for others, cognitive and/or emotional empathy, and confident behaviour. The thought of ‘numerous opponents’ is not an incitement to paranoia (which is the wrong mindset for safe and healthy living), rather a reminder that our behaviour has the potential to be an obstacle and can create opponents.

This is not the same as laying the responsibility for any victimisation at our own door.

Any individual has the potential to meet the wrong people in the wrong place at the wrong time. The ‘prevention point’ for most domestic or familial abuse is both early behaviour pattern spotting to avoid entering into coercive and abusive relationships, and environment and behaviour shaping in youth to prevent people developing into abusers. As children we have little to no control over the environments and events that the adults around us shape for us or that we are born into. These have the potential to fix us in behaviour patterns that can make us more vulnerable than others to different problems, just as others may react to poor environments and events by becoming embedded in behaviour patterns that make them cause issues for others in the future. Breaking such cyclical patterns requires multi-generational approaches because it’s not simply about preventing yourself from being victimised tomorrow, or deterring another person tomorrow, it’s also about helping the previous generation move on and working ‘early’ to prevent the next generation from repeating the cycle.

This rather neatly takes us full circle, because in attempting to expand on one over-simplification with regard to avoiding abusive aggressive and predatory behaviours, I’ve also moved to a gross simplification of some of the many complex factors that lead to people perpetrating or being the victims of such behaviours. It is human nature to want to simplify explanations, whether as advertising or teaching soundbites or as concepts to learn. As such I understand I understand the binary example given at the start, even though I believe the exceptions to its imagery are greater than the norm.

There is a truism that if you understand something complex you can explain it in simple terms, but such terms still remain simplifications. Everything that is complex is simple at its heart, and everything that is simple is complex.

De-escalation tactics – Part One

This four part series is designed to be a brief introduction to the field of non-violent resolution tactics.

Part One – Underpinning Principles

Part Two – Verbal Approaches

Part Three – Body Language

Part Four – Personal Psychology

PART ONE – UNDERPINNING PRINCIPLES

All aggressive and violent behaviours have underlying causes, which could be summarized under the headings of chemical factors and psychological factors. These are interrelated but for the sake of brevity are listed separately. Understanding and influencing these (through communication) is the best way to resolve conflict.

PSYCHOLOGICAL FACTORS

Motivating factors

These may be far more varied than the examples listed below, but can generally be categorized as immediate or primary causes and underlying or secondary causes.

Immediate causes affecting decision-making and behaviour:

Physical presence or (over-long) eye contact interpreted as a challenge, overly alpha or beta male body language, a push or stumble into a person, the spilling of food or drink, a vehicle accident, peer pressure, denial of a perceived need.

Secondary causes affecting decision-making and behaviour:

Family or work stress, suppressed anger (generally linked to the former but inhibited by potential consequence), racism or social/political beliefs, past experiences, peer pressure, the role and acceptability of violence and aggression in both upbringing and normal social environment, fatigue, past success in achieving aims through aggressive or violent behaviours.

Inhibiting factors

These could be categorized as physical and social factors.

Physical factors:

The relative sizes of parties involved, perceived strength and ability of the other party, the ‘known quantity’ of the other party, body language, perceived alertness, company (of either party), immediate consequences, likelihood of injury.

Social factors:

Peer reaction – acceptance or alienation, legal and family or work repercussions, the social acceptability of aggression and violence within the individual’s social group.

Through positioning, body language, listening and using appropriate tone and speech the underlying aim should be to attempt to reduce the individual’s motivation to continue to use aggression and possibly attempt violence, while strengthening their inhibition against such approaches.

CHEMICAL FACTORS

Drugs

Alcohol or other substances weaken inhibition and can reduce awareness and comprehension. This will affect the ability of another person to influence the individual’s motivation and inhibition.

Underlying medical conditions

Due to a pre-existing health condition the other person may not necessarily be on the same ‘operating system’ as everyone else and may not respond in the same way.

Adrenaline

Aural and visual exclusion along with other side effects of adrenaline may hinder communication and attempts to influence the individual’s motivation and inhibition.

It is unlikely that there is much that you can do once an incident has already begun that will mitigate underlying chemical factors. If spotted early enough then the effect of drugs such as alcohol can be reduced by slowing absorption into the blood stream by providing food and withdrawing further alcohol (if safe to do so), but these are factors that are largely outside your control.

It is important to be aware of the role of chemical factors as ‘tipping points’ in an individual’s behaviour patterns. Whether they are part of the primary or secondary cause of the problem they may lower the probability of a successful non-violent de-escalation.

Not seeing the wood for the trees

The techniques of karate kata have many possible interpretations. What each individual sees in the kata will vary according to their own experience and how skilled they are at identifying potential applications.

Not every application taught need be practical.

As a case in point in my Shotokan classes I teach a wrist grab defence using kata movements that isn’t the simplest or most effective method of escape, but is a very effective drill for teaching appropriate positioning, optimum biomechanics and principles of controlling and unbalancing. While doing so I always stress that it is drill about biomechanics and usually show the faster escape. In similar vein for my Heian / Pinan Sandan drills in both the older Heian Flow System and the more recent Pinan Flow System I included a spinning back elbow and back fist. While this has been successfully used in the UFC, it is not the most practical of techniques, but its inclusion was to a large extent to illustrate that point by making it an opening for students to unpredictably encounter a number of different positions and attacks which would lead to spontaneously training other drills.

When an application is specifically designed for practical use I notice that some people often fail to see the wood for the trees.

It is easy to over-focus on mimicking the techniques or sequences of the form but forget the overall context. If you need to strike, control or escape from another person then they will also have an agenda.

This means that they are unlikely to be holding you limply, are likely to be prepared to hit you, or may continuously be trying to hit you or get to a position where they can hit you unless you take steps to prevent that. Always protect your head and as much of your body as you can.

Unanticipated aggressive and violent confrontations tend to cause a significant adrenaline release unless you are very familiar with them and a non consensual or unpredictable event will cause different reactions to a predictable or fully consensual one. In such situations even very well trained people have difficulty utilising fine motor skills or targeting accurately and this should be reflected in applications. The same hormonal cascade (along with other substances) may render pain compliant / dependent techniques ineffective.

The context of the drill should be realistic if the drill is supposed to be for self defence. Appropriate habitual acts of violence (HAOV) rather than style or rule format specific attacks, and not over-skilling or under-skilling attackers / training partners. In similar vein you need to be clear whether what you are doing is legal for the envisioned circumstances if you are training it for practical purposes rather than historical curiosity.

Hitting or striking a resisting person isn’t as easy as working with a compliant training partner. As a general rule at close quarters (where most violent incidents occur and remain) you will need to strike to control and control to strike.

When people get hit, they move, even when you are holding them. Combinations should take this into account. This quickly becomes apparent when you are making contact or receiving contact in training.

The potential of practical karate kata application is incredibly vast, but when interpreting kata for such purposes the ‘trees’ of the individual skill sets should always be seen within the context of the wood that represents the nature of actual violent confrontations.

Creating and delivering self defence courses for women

Every year I deliver a number of single sex and mixed sex personal safety and self defence courses or lectures. A moderator on the online forum Martial Arts Planet recently approached me to write a short article about how I approach the subject of female self defence. The subject is far too large to sum up in a single article, but what I can do is give my opinions on the starting points for creating a worthwhile course.

Planning and Preparation

Know your audience.

This is crucial for creating course content. The age group (or groups), ethnic mix and general social background will determine both content and approach. Regrettably there is a high probability that within your group you may have women that have suffered some form of violence or abuse, and while the participants will normally have opted to take part, they have not done so to get traumatised by off the cuff remarks or generalisations, nor may they wish to share any experience. The audience determines both the content and teaching style of the course.

Trainers and the elephants in the room.

(i) Experience. I believe that honesty is the best policy. A trainer should give a very short summation of their background to help put things in context. A trainer should be open about their experience (or lack of experience) and knowledge and the basis on which the course is designed.

(ii) Gender. Can a man deliver a self defence course to women, as he is not a woman? Yes. I know some exceptional self defence trainers both in the UK and abroad of both genders. Their knowledge, experience and ability to empathise and teach are far more important than their gender. Some men will only listen to men talking about self defence and some women will only pay attention to a woman (or have suffered a degree of trauma that makes a same-sex instructor a better option for participation and engagement), but that does not mean that a trainer of your own gender is always the best teacher on this subject.

Teaching style.

Teaching style is a very individual thing and I have seen a range of different styles used effectively. Although self defence is a very serious subject, humour can be used, although I would advise against poking fun at students that you barely know. A good self defence course should be driven and paced by the instructor but provide the opportunity to include the students as what you say may encourage them to share something that has been weighing on their mind and such sharing may benefit both them, the other attendees and you.

Regrettably the length of the course (and each session) is often decided by the host rather than the trainer. Most trainers still take on constrained courses on the basis that providing some training is better than no training, but in doing so there will always be compromises on both teaching style and content. As a result it is important to prioritise. The mental aspects of self defence are more important, more useful and more permanent than any form of physical training and should be prioritised.

Personal Safety and Self Defence – the mental framework

The mental side of self defence is about empowering your audience through knowledge and personal motivation. What needs to be covered will depend upon the age and social background of your group. The following list and order is flexible as in forming a course certain elements will naturally tie together and cross-pollinate.

Use of force and the law.
Accurate crime picture (including risk) based on government, police and ED data (where available).
Natural human reactions to actual or potential abuse, aggression and violence, both in anticipation of, during and after events.
Rationales and motivation for action or inaction in self defence both before, during and after events.
Avoidance strategies.
Deterrence strategies.
Awareness – common tactics and patterns in abuse, sexual crime and violent crime.
De-escalation and no contact escape strategies – body language, use of voice, phrasing.

The list above is very much tied in with your credentials as a trainer. Being a martial artist or having personal experience is not enough. There is a huge body of high quality literature available for research (too much to recommend one single text) based on the experiences of large numbers of people.

Self Defence – the physical framework

Once again what can be delivered will depend upon the age and ability of the group and the time allocated. In my opinion the mental training is the key to unlocking the maximum potential of the physical training.

There is an elephant in the room when it comes to physical training. Realistically not everything works all the time, no matter how good a technique is. Skill, motivation, adrenaline and the element of surprise give an edge but so do aggression, experience and strength. With that said it is important that what is taught is material appropriate to the context of real scenarios and relative positions, is simple to do (even under pressure) and has been shown (to the training deliverer at the very least) to be reliable under pressure.

The following elements should form the basis of the physical part of the course.

Biomechanics and weak points of the human body.
Gross motor strikes that utilise otherwise natural and everyday movements.
Impact training.
Paired or group work based on HAOV (habitual acts of violence) to build confidence.
Optional participation in scenario training.

Environmental awareness

Environmental awareness is a crucial attribute in self protection. It is also something that is often given lip service without further explanation of what people need to be aware of or indeed how to improve their awareness.

The majority of self protection lies in the assessment, avoidance, deterrence, and de-escalation of aggression and situations where conflict is likely, but regrettably this is not always possible.

Training your physical skills against habitual acts of violence increases your understanding and recognition of their telegraphs, an attribute that can increase the likelihood of reacting in time to a physical attack or preventing one through pre-emption. Scenario training can increase your comfort in dealing with verbal aggression and increase your ability to identify the behavioural precursors to a physical attack (if these are accurately replicated in the training).

Unfortunately we can often miss these indicators due to our focus on trying to resolve the situation peacefully. Our brains can become overloaded by the tasks of watching the person in front of us, trying to hear what he/she is saying, trying to think about whether to talk or hit or run, wondering what our friends will do, or what our partner or children will do, working out what to say and watching other people etc… This means that despite our knowledge of the telegraphs – we often miss them.

One solution to this in regular training is to work pad drills from a fence practicing hitting (or ducking) while listening and talking and adding in additional distractions.

In this video students and instructors from a range of different styles get caught off guard and hit by role playing aggressors. I hope the footage proves useful to you in your own training.

While training for event management is good, improving your ability to avoid the event altogether is more important. The ‘Driving School’ method of self-narrating what you observe in daily life and thus highlighting things that you might otherwise miss or dismiss is a good way to improve your ability to recognise potential dangers and to have greater mental stamina with regard to staying alert in public. I’m very bad at facial recognition until actively engaged in conversation so I tend to read people by body language and location rather than recognition of known versus unknown quantities. With practise and experimentation people will naturally gravitate to approaches that work best to how they think, and rather than being an intrusive or ‘paranoid’ approach this should become as background and unobtrusive in our thought processes as checking for traffic before walking across a road.

Sticks and stones

Sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me.

Whoever came up with that particular saying might be shocked by how false it seems in the modern world. I’m sure that every coach / instructor / teacher or businessman/woman reading that phrase is only too aware of how damaging words can be. In theory reputations can be salvaged through litigation, but a word once uttered flies away beyond recall.

My opening phrase is not about litigation though. It is the adage that verbal abuse cannot harm compared with physical abuse. In this day and age of psychological study we can see the fiction in this as well as the truth, and those that work in any form of education or group workplace are keenly aware that verbal bulling can be as great a problem as physical bulling. What may remain a closed book to a number of martial arts instructors is that suffering verbal abuse can lead to an increased risk of physical harm.

I’m not talking about psychological trauma and self-harming here, but the damage that verbal abuse can do to our immediate physical state in a self defence situation. I train my students to make appropriate physical responses to physical attacks. I also teach my students pre-emptive striking techniques based upon their assessment of the probability of violence – in other words if they are unable to make a retreat and sense that their attempts to verbally de-escalate the situation are failing, and it is their honest belief that they are about to be hit, I train them to hit first. In this approach I may fall into a smaller group of instructors. In addition to this (where my surroundings permit) I have my students verbally abuse one another in role play simulations prior to the physical drill – and here I imagine I fall into a tiny minority.

So, why add in a verbal element to physical practise? This comes down to your training rationale. If you are training in a martial art for the love of the competitive element involved, then you would naturally spend the majority of your time learning to fight or perform within the rule set of your chosen competition – drilling and sparring in the attacks, defences and tactics used there. If however you are training in your chosen art for the purpose of self defence you should want to spend your time drilling and defending against habitual acts of violence (haov). That is a logical step to take. But a large proportion of violent incidents do not start with a push, a haymaker, a grab or a headbutt – they start with a verbal attack in the form of an argument, a misinterpreted glance or jostle, a torrent of unwarranted abuse, a demand or a con tactic.

As an example I used to do a drill where a person was pinned against a wall by their throat and threatened by and attacker’s fist. Students quickly became able to break out of this position using a combination of high and low movements. When the exercise speed was increased, and their attacker protected with body armour so as to take full physical contact, they continued to be able to do it. Then I had the attacker put their face only a hand’s length away from their ‘victim’ and shout “What the f*** are you f****** looking at, you f****** piece of s***. I’m going to f****** smash your f****** face in!” Suddenly the drill fell apart, the victim froze and the technique was executed after a delay and with less conviction – if at all. The impact of the verbal abuse reduced the ability of the target to access the gross motor skills they had previously been employing and left them vulnerable to physical attack.

Some people might note the over-use of the F word in the above phrase and I stress that the students chose their own language. We have become used to this and other words and probably use them ourselves under our breath or out loud, but rarely up close. We see and hear aggressive language in television drama and it doesn’t really affect us. Up close it is a different story. I suspect that the F word in particular is powerful up close because of the contortion it gives to the face, exposing the teeth in an unaccustomed way and shortening the nose. The combination of the volume of the shout and the primal (almost gorilla like) visual display gives it power and its aggressive use can sap confidence, awareness and conviction.

Gradually my students became accustomed to the verbal posturing. After they experienced it about five times on the trot they were back to about 50% effectiveness, a percentage that gradually increased with more exposure. But imagine what might happen to you if you never trained this scenario. What if you only did your techniques in a sterile environment? How certain are you that you would cope, that you wouldn’t ‘shut down’, that you would remain calm? The impact of words on our mental state should not be under-estimated.

What became clear from the performance of these drills was that although the majority of students had a low level of adrenaline running through their system during class, and had experienced high rushes of adrenaline in other activities, they were simply not prepared for the impact such intense verbal pressure had on their physiology. In this and in other drills many were caught out by the fact that their unconscious reaction was to step backwards and away from the noise, others by the difficulty they had trying to speak whilst their digestive system had temporarily shut down. As with normal physical drills, repeated exposure brought acceptance, confidence, and an increased ability to maintain dialogue – a key factor in trying to avoid conflict.

In the years since I have run many heavy contact scenario training days for my own students and for visiting trainees from a broad range of other systems. In these events it is not simply the contact and the use of haov that ‘de-skills’ the majority of first timers below their normal performance, it is the novelty of experiencing a personal verbal assault and the difficulty of making a decision under such pressure as to whether to pre-empt or to continue to attempt to talk. With each exposure trainees become desensitized and improve, and crucially it is not simply a matter of their physical skills improving but their physiological state improving. If the training is done well then they will experience some adrenaline, but not as much as before, which means that their heart rate is lower, they can access a slightly greater range of motor skills, and they are able to make more rational choices.

The Kiai used in paired kumite incorporates an aspect of this verbal assault, but I would stress that its effect at close range is insignificant compared to personal insults and threats. Some instructors might feel that they can’t do such things, even if they would like, because of the youth element of their classes. You will find that it is possible to work these scenarios without using ‘swear words’ per se; “Get back to where you came from!” is an unpleasant thing to say with the proper inflection, as is the challenge “what are you looking at?” I would actually advocate the use of such drills with classes involving children along a carefully designed word and intensity continuum, simply because although we might try and pretend it doesn’t exist, verbal bullying of this kind does occur and can frighten young people. Preparing young people for verbal aggression can help prevent problems and fights (at that age). There are a number of tricks that can be employed to encourage normally reticent people to shout at their friends and to depersonalise both aggressor and target. Whenever you are doing this form of psychological training it is important to be aware that if you are not careful in your methodology you may harm vulnerable adults and children, and while we want our training to be realistic and effective, it should not cause damage.

Whether you incorporate drills of this kind alongside your physical practise boils down to a simple question – do you want to teach something that is useful for self defence? Our physical skills are of no use for self defence if they cannot be accessed under pressure, and that pressure can come as much from having to process the visual and aural stimuli of a sustained verbal assault as any physical assault.

Train safely and have fun.

aggression

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