The 5 W's of Personal Defense - What?

Okay, so we've talked about the who in a confrontation, or potential confrontation, how about the what. Well what breaks down to mostly the interpretation of external events. What is happening, presuming that we're not just going to assault someone just at random on the street. What is happening in the interaction is that we've first been targeted for violent aggression, and target selection is a whole different talk and quite an intense subject of itself. But we've sent signals, knowingly or unknowingly, what I call unconscious want ads, that we are at least in the range of the person that a violent criminal actor is looking for, to assault.

So we've been targeted, identified as someone that the assault would be successful against. That process doesn't happen within us, and there's not much we can do beforehand, actively, to stave it off. With the interaction way out of our control, what's the best thing that we can do in regard to the what? We want to assume that deselection is a dynamic process. That if we can look less likely, and it only has to be for that brief decision.

Violent actor decision making is very, very fast. To maximize the number of trials, they have to do it very, very quickly, so its a decision tree with no branches. They basically have a behavior pattern set in place and their only decision is go, or no go. Meaning, is this target inviting, or not. That's the gap we have to get past, its very brief.

It's not a contest of wills, or anything like that, its just looking less easy than the next potential person who might walk down the street. What we have to recognize is that whole time the violent criminal actor is, what I like to refer to as, advantaging. Changing the environment, changing the way we're interacting. Sometimes actively, let me help you with that miss. And you'll hear a technique called forced teaming, now we got that, and suddenly there's a we in place and a person has assumed a power dynamic where they're in a dominant posture.

Even interpersonally. Sometimes its a physically dominant posture, crowding someone against a railing. Even if they're giving the appearance of not noticing you, then backing toward you and so you have to accommodate their body structure. So they're always advantaging for dominance. Positional dominance, relational dominance, situational dominance.

And we have to be aware that that is happening and take countermeasures. What would those countermeasures be? Recognizing that encroachment in space, that doesn't respond to direct confrontation, is intentional or otherwise unexplained. Someone who's deaf who backs into your space and does not hear you say, "Excuse me, sir, you're standing on my foot." But very few people will not withdraw unless their purposes is malign. When you identify, hey, pal, get off my foot, or, sir, you're standing too close.

That requires a reassertion of personal boundaries and, in that case, physical boundaries and overt so that the potential threat is aware that we are aware of them and we've set a limit. That in itself can dissuade some people because you're not as easy as the next person who wouldn't even do that. Now, one of the things that my students have struggled with, maybe I've even struggled with to a certain extent, is determining, without being able to get inside the mind of the bad guy, the potential bad guy, is if you back away from someone who is encroaching you, does that show submissiveness and fear? On the other hand if you stay there does it show confrontation and defiance? How do you play that against that encroachment, that could be innocent or could be aggressive?

You will hear an appeal to predator, prey models. If you turn your back, predators will advance. There may be some remnance of that in the animal kingdom but they have true instincts, not mediated instincts like we do. We have the advantage and the burden of a big brain and we have instincts but we also have cognitive responses to them. My feeling is that when you do something unpredictable, when you disrupt a movement pattern.

Aggressive movements to a three or a nine position on the clock face, so to speak, are unusual. The response of the person that you're trying to deduce more about will tell you quite a bit about what was the status beforehand. When I make an aggressive move to three, or an aggressive move to nine, I'm not retreating and someone who was just texting and clumsy and backed into me will be very startled by my movements. By my change of the dynamic. Someone who was targeting me might be puzzled but their response will be very different.

That makes a lot of sense. What else do we need to think about when it comes to the what? The notion of targeting versus victimization I think is very important. You can be targeted many times and be unaware of it. One trainer referred to shopping malls as the watering holes of the modern world because there's so much wonderful position for observation.

You can be targeted over and over and over again and it has nothing to do with you and it'll never enter your conscious awareness. What we're looking for is a natural way of being, that results in us being de-selected. To be de-selected we have to be just difficult enough that it's not worth the effort and just for that moment of decision, because remember in that very pruned decision-tree, go or no go. I just want to be 0.001% more no go than go. That's all.

Not walking around in any sense threatening other people, or like, wow, he looks scary, or dangerous, but just unpalatable for that brief moment. Recognizing that being targeted is an external process. It's external to us and there's not much we can do about it. How we've prepared ourselves beforehand that leads us to a position to influence the judgment of a violent criminal actor quite a bit, much more than people are willing to think about. It's kinda like the advice we give people about home security.

If you're home looks like it would be difficult to get into, if your yard is well kept, if your lights work, if there's a sign that says alarm monitored. If people have the impression that you care, that you're paying attention, that burglary actor may go to the next place that looks a little less protected. Absolutely. A locksmith gave me what I though was precious advice for free, he said, "It doesn't have to keep anybody out, it has to look like it could." Right. And that's fantastic advice because it's not that somebody couldn't defeat your defensive measures, if they committed to.

It's not worth the risk to commit to when the next victim, the next target down the road, will have no defensive measure of any kind. A walk over!