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Tag Archive for: mindset

Be the Problem

April 30, 2019/0 Comments/in Training/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

“What did you do today to prevent being sexually assaulted?”

Jackson Katz, a social researcher, asked the men in the room that question; they laughed. Then he asked the women.

The data is telling: Women live in a very different world than men, and, on balance, already know the preventative measures. They think about them every day, and constantly make decisions and alter their behavior to avoid putting themselves in vulnerable situations.

I’ve learned so much about this from the women in my life — those who train with us, female instructors, my wife. Seemingly minor details like how her car only unlocks the driver’s door when she thumbs the key fob — something I found annoying as a passenger, having to wait while she opened her door, got in, and then unlocked the rest of the car — annoying, that is, until she told me why. With that shift in perspective it not only made sense — it was necessary.

This is why when I was asked to put together a video series of “10 tips for women to keep themselves safe,” I demurred. Women already know how to keep themselves safe. What’s missing is what to do when all those measures fail, and the situation goes physical.

We live in a society where women are not truly encouraged or supported in going hands-on physical for debilitating injury — oh, we pay lip service to it, *wink-winking* the whole time while death row inmates laugh at the resulting training. And so women are given weak-sauce options (“women’s self-defense”) based on socially-acceptable sporting frameworks put together by men who have no understanding of the real issues (i.e., not in touch with their inner psychopaths, so the solutions tend to be more social than operational). Everyone should be suspicious of any physical training for women that a man would not also find useful.

What’s lacking is verifiable, gender-agnostic information on how to put hands on someone so they can’t continue. I can recount as many situations as you’d like where something as simple as knowing how to take an eye would have prevented a murder. (See also: true crime TV shows.) These stories affect me deeply, because many times the outcome was entirely avoidable with the smallest bit of actionable information. The last three people who used what we do were women who found themselves over the event horizon of the physical — the place where prevention and social interaction cease to make a difference — so they doled out broken legs, crushed groins, unconsciousness, and gouged eyes instead. This is why we do what we do.

The real difference for women is in the profiles they’ll face — primarily being grabbed in an attempt to overpower them. But the solutions to those issues are found in injury, not in gender-specific moves. We trained the women mentioned above the same way we train military and law enforcement, the same way we train men. The same way we train everyone with a brain, a skeleton, and mass. In the realm of physics and physiology, minor differences in plumbing don’t affect the outcome.

So instead of telling women what they already know — and practice daily — I thought about what I, as a male hand-to-hand combat instructor, could offer as advice. After double-checking with the women in my life — those who train with us, female instructors, my wife — we agreed on these stair-stepped concepts:

• Do all the preventative things you already know how to do — but when that fails you must ATTACK & INJURE. Escape will occur as a side effect to you hurting him so he can’t continue!

• Your survival is up to you — and you alone. You can’t rely on others to save you. But you can do this. Don’t have a problem — be the problem!

• It’s not strength-to-strength — it’s effort-to-vulnerability. (Eyes-throat-groin & knowing what’s required to crush them.) A finger in the eye can change everything!

If just one woman sticks her finger in an eye instead of struggling to get away or, worse, doing nothing because she doesn’t think there’s anything she can do, then all our efforts as a training community are worth it.

— Chris Ranck-Buhr

When Is a Gun Like a TV Remote?

September 21, 2018/2 Comments/in Mindset, Training/by Taylor Good

During a training in Dallas, I visited my parents who live there, but whom I rarely get to see on account of living, working, and training in San Diego most of the year. While relaxing at their house between extended training sessions an incident occurred that got me thinking.

We had all decided to sit down and watch a movie, but my nephew, a toddler at the time, had recently been over to play and had moved the television remote control to an unknown location, as he is wont to do. My parents and I summoned what was left of our energy reserves to mount a thorough search of the house to no avail. I reluctantly suggested that we just go over and turn on the TV by hand and then manually select a movie.

It was at this point that my parents informed me that they did not believe manufacturers even put manual controls on new TVs — “Everyone just uses the remote these days,” they said. In utter disbelief I walked over to the set and scanned the edges around the front, along the side and just behind the display until I finally found what I was looking for. In the back there was a vestigial control panel with limited options that would not provide us access to some of the higher-end functions that were exclusively remote-driven, but would allow us to accomplish our basic goal: to turn it on, select a movie (any movie at this point) and relax my aching body on their very, very comfortable couch. With that done, I dissolved into that couch and tried to remember what it was like before the remote control.

Back in the day, if you wanted to turn your TV on or off, or even watch a different channel, you had to get up off your asset and physically go over to manipulate the controls by hand. As a result of this fact people tended to be more patient with whatever was on. Then along came the remote control to remove all that work. Soon, we became much more casual about changing the channel, and before long we became completely reliant on remotes to the point that TV manufacturers stopped putting manual controls on the front of TV sets. In fact, most people today, including my family, would probably tell you that you can’t actually operate their TV without the remote — however, if you know where to access the manual controls, you can still execute the basic functions of any TV set in the catastrophic absence of that remote.

In a way, firearms are analogous to the venerable TV remote control. Like the remote, firearms distill, into a handheld device, all of the hard work and intent normally required to motivate a person to the point that they are willing to take action — and all that control is at their very fingertips. Furthermore, as firearms have gone into mass production in recent history, people have become so reliant on these highly efficient labor-saving devices that they have forgotten how to roll up their sleeves and do that work by hand when necessary. It might even be said that modern people are incapable of implementing the tool of violence without a firearm. Sound familiar?

The truth is that firearms don’t accomplish anything that you can’t already do by hand with a little knowledge and elbow grease, and there is nothing inherently special about them — unless it has become your only solution to asocial violence. In the rare event that you are put in a position that requires direct action to take out a threat you can’t afford to waste time and opportunity desperately searching for your labor-saving device.

Keep in mind that you come from a legacy of violence: By necessity, your ancestors knew the principles of violence and implemented them serviceably when necessary — or you wouldn’t be here. Luckily for us not much has changed since the dawn of time. Gravity is still cruelly tugging our bones toward the unforgiving surface of the planet, the human machine remains just as vulnerable in spite of all our efforts, and the old “rock to the back of the head” is just as relevant today as it was for our ancestors’ ancestors. Handguns are just a little smaller, a little more convenient, and require nearly zero training and intent to cause objective injuries.

Weaponizing your skeleton is simply a matter of training in the core principles of violence. One of the great benefits of training is that it allows you to take control of the learning environment before it’s an emergency. And, with a little training, anyone can learn to hurl their mass through vulnerable anatomy. Nothing has changed in that regard. When you have a principle-based approach to navigating true asocial violence — with and without tools — you’ll never be unarmed again.

— Taylor Good

You Weigh the Same When You’re Scared

June 1, 2018/0 Comments/in Training/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

Your skeleton is just as hard, his eye just as soft — regardless of how everyone is feeling.

In the human world — the one that only exists inside our skulls — emotion is power. As we might use a hand to grasp an object so we use emotion to grasp other people’s minds. It lets us reach out and affect behavior; we read it in others to intuit their motives. It’s absolutely necessary for effective communication — without it any message comes across as stilted, creepy, inhuman.

But when we’ve moved beyond communication and into a state of nature where the only thing that will be measured is how physics affects physiology we need a cold, impartial focus because emotions are weightless — they don’t make you heavier, they don’t make you fall any faster in the gravity field, and they don’t make his anatomy any more vulnerable.

Which is to say that a 45-pound Olympic plate dropped awkwardly onto an ankle can break it — and that means you can, too, regardless of how you feel at the moment of impact.

The reverse is also true: His emotional state does nothing to protect him. Personality is not a force field — who he his and what he knows do nothing to shield him from physics. Everyone is susceptible to injury, and those who claim to be immune believe that their ego makes a difference. If they can get you to believe it too, then they win.

While extreme emotion can drive intent to do work (you can “get mad” at a weight or kill someone in a “crime of passion”) it’s a rough, inefficient way to drive effort — like burning an explosive all at once instead of injecting refined fuel into the engine to make diamonds in the exhaust. It’s the difference between a bomb and a rocket.

Intent and intensity ultimately come down to focus, the mind driving effort through the body to wield it as a tool. But emotion can be decoupled from that — you don’t need to get angry at a stalled car to push it as hard as you can.

When thinking about how emotion can drive or hinder effort it’s important to differentiate between biological fear and psychological panic. Fear is the body preparing itself for action — fight or flight — while panic is what happens when the brain goes looking for information on what’s unfolding in front of you… and comes back empty-handed. For example, if you know how to swim and find yourself suddenly dunked into a drowning situation you will feel fear — the adrenal dump, heart racing, changes in perception — and then your brain will go looking for preprogrammed schema (“Is this similar to experiences I’ve had before, either live or in training?”) and you’ll start swimming like an adrenaline-pumped superhuman. If, on the other hand, you don’t know how to swim, your brain comes back with OMIGOD WE’RE GONNA DIE and you start drowning like an adrenaline-pumped animal.

This idea that the brain can only go where it’s gone before is why training matters — you need to practice for the outcome you want so when you find yourself there, literally scared shitless, you sidestep useless panic with actionable information. (Think about it this way: you practice “swimming”, not “drowning”, right? This is why we don’t do “self-defense”. Defense is the drowning of violence.)

Ultimately, all useful interactions in violence come down to pure physics and physiology — and while how you feel about it can alter your ability to act earlier in the chain of events, and affect how efficiently you apply your physics to his physiology, emotion doesn’t change anything at the most fundamental level: you weigh just as much, your skeleton is just as hard, his eye just as soft. Feeling the sudden jolt of biological fear — which, if you’re sane and healthy, you will — can only stop you if decide it can.

I say choose resolve, choose training, cleave into biological fear and wreck him while you’re terrified.

— Chris Ranck-Buhr

Photo: PARCO ARCHEOLOGICO DI POMPEI

Stop Making Sense

March 23, 2018/0 Comments/in Rabbit v. Wolf/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

There are no contradictions in the physical world. At the scale of our experience the universe is a perfectly tuned machine that simply does what it does — everything can be mathed out in a predictable dance of cause and effect. Contradictions only exist in human language, a necessary construct to provide flexibility in social interaction. Our survival as a species depends on our ability to make non-deterministic, nuanced, judgment calls. We have a word for the kind of hyper-literal people who are incapable of that: psychopaths.

The cause and effect of violence — a simple physical interaction like a finger in the eye — contains no contradictions. In terms of monkey-see/monkey-do training, nothing could be more straightforward… until we try to make violence fit into a social framework, round-holing that square peg with the mallet of language, contradictions meant to make ourselves feel better about doing it and to communicate our sanity, stability, and continued trustworthiness to others. In other words, to convince everyone — including ourselves — that we’re not psychopaths. But there is nothing about “self-defense” that suggests the finger in the eye. Indeed, such language obscures the necessities of physical action, injecting our hopes and fears into the matter — thick strokes of contradictory emotional content that obscure the requirements of cause and effect — language that acts not as a window but as a painting.

Trying to make violence “make sense” is pointless, and even dangerous — violence is by its very definition irrational, an utter failure of everything language seeks to build. This is why the finger in the eye is not “self-defense”, and why “self-defense” does not communicate the physics of the finger in the eye. There are lots of ways to describe the simple physical act of breaking the human machine, and the most direct and straightforward are naturally repellent. Our response to this must be to understand that it is a separate thing from our emotional selves and our desire to cooperate with others — it’s not about maintaining our social standing, it’s about maintaining our existence during the very thin slice of time of our attempted murder. And it’s okay for the descriptions of the action required to hurt another person so they can’t continue to be chilling, disturbing, and otherwise uncomfortable. We’re describing facts, and the more we use language that gives us comfort or distance from them the less likely we are to be able to execute on those facts when our survival is at stake.

There are two ways to arrive at what’s required:

We can do violence every day, where we will learn a thing or two through trial and error, and how we do that work will begin to converge toward a specific point — form following function where all effective violence ends up looking the same, or
We can look at examples of that work (videos of effective violence) and emulate that movement on the mats, all the while seeking hard, spare language that describes that mechanical work (and the results) in the clearest way possible.

What’s required is the objective description of science, not the poetry of the heart.

— Chris Ranck-Buhr

VIOLENCE: If It Feels Right, It’s Wrong

February 22, 2018/2 Comments/in Rabbit v. Wolf/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

The way you’ve been taught to think and speak about violence is fundamentally flawed.

How do I know this? Because you’re taking the time to read about it here. Dangerous people, those who already know how to use violence as a tool, don’t go looking for answers on the Internet. They know in their bones the Iron Law of what physics does to physiology; they know that the person who gets it right first wins. They don’t waste time or effort on defense or protection. They know that the answer to every problem in violence is ATTACK & INJURE.

Imagine, if you will, a fancy dinner party where someone asks you about “that class you’re taking.” The entire table of pinkies-up dignitaries and chic-coiffed influencers pause mid-slurp to listen. So you say, “I’m learning how to defend myself from an attacker with a knife.” And the room makes an appreciative noise followed by a mild golf clap. Polite society approves.

Now let’s go back after you’ve learned the truth about violence. Someone asks the same question. So you say, “I’m practicing how to stab people in the eye when they’re not looking.” And the room makes the shocked sound of ruptured sensibilities, followed by you never being invited back again. What you said sounds crazy.

But how do you want to behave during your attempted murder?

Do you want to “try to defend yourself from an attacker with a knife” or “stab him in the eye when he’s not looking”?

Which one sounds more definitive? Which one would you bet your life on?

This is the difference between rabbits describing what wolves do, and what wolves actually do. When rabbits talk to other rabbits about wolf-stuff it’s with a mixture of disgust, fear… and queasy awe. But when a wolf comes for that rabbit, somewhere deep down inside that rabbit wishes it could do wolf-stuff. If only, in that too-brief moment, it could behave like a wolf.

That’s why we’re here.

— Chris Ranck-Buhr

Tag Archive for: mindset

Be the Problem

When Is a Gun Like a TV Remote?

You Weigh the Same When You’re Scared

Stop Making Sense

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