Training in Context: Three Fights

Here's another important video from the Personal Defense Network. Throughout the personal defense video series. We talk a lot about the how to defend yourself and certainly the when. The why should be obvious. It's when you believe you need to, when you're threatened or someone you care about is threatened.

But part of the background of that why and the when and even the how, is understanding the preparation, the actual conflict, and then the aftermath. The three fights theory comes out of the personal defense readiness approach to combatives in the spear system research developed by Tony Blauer, his cadre of self-defense and law enforcement military instructors that help people to not only prepare themselves for combat, but to think about combat and defensive situations in a way that makes sense. We break every conflict down into three separate phases. The first phase is your preparation, watching this video, purchasing a firearm, thinking about how to get out of your house or talking to your family about which room they use as the safe room all of these things are part of your preparation. The first and most important part of preparation is awareness awareness that bad things can happen and that you can do something to prepare yourself to defend your family yourself, your home when you need to.

And that awareness is incredibly important. Gonna talk about that in regard to the warrior expert theory. But first let's concentrate on the ways you can prepare yourself. Ways you can prepare yourself, in addition to watching this video series include, having the tools that you might need, a flashlight a cell phone, good locks on your doors, good lighting, maybe crime prevention through environmental design and understanding that the way you trim your hedges and trees in your front yard may affect the way someone decides whether or not you could be victimized or your home could be a target for violence or burglary. Understanding that your preparation and the way you dress, the way you carry yourself, the parts of town you go to, the type of car you drive and how alert you are when you're moving through a new area looking for that avenue of escape or looking for something that might be threatening to you.

And that may be as simple as a dark alley isn't as safe as a well lit street or it may be something like where you park in a parking lot. But that preparation, that awareness that alertness to opportunities to make yourself safer to understanding what tools might be useful such as a firearm. If you live in a place where you can own a firearm and carry it for self-defense and get the training and the permits necessary to do so legally and responsibly then that might be a great option. Similarly, you might live in an area where that's not an option and you're gonna look to something like a pepper spray or a baton, or maybe unarmed skills or even a taser to defend yourself and your family when you're in a public environment. Understanding preparation, that first phase fight one it's incredibly important.

We talk a lot about the actual conflict when it comes to self-defense and that's that how do I defend myself, when someone pulls a knife, when someone pulls a gun, when someone grabs me from behind, when someone's in my house threatening my family and of course that's critically important. Putting that into context is incredibly important and also understanding that the when is not gonna necessarily be controlled by you. Someone is going to choose to try to make you or someone you care to defend a victim. And that's when you're going to be in that physical conflict. That's when someone actually tries to hurt you and you need to use your environment, your training, and certainly the tools that you have available to defend yourself.

Fight two gets a lot of focus in the self-defense arena. When we start thinking about actually having to defend ourselves from an actual attack, that's fight two that's the conflict, but it's important to understand that we define the existence of conflict by the existence of a result of an aftermath. If someone passes you on the street and you just don't feel right about the way they go by you and you decide to stop and pretend to be window shopping while watching them out of the corner of your eye, that was a conflict. Even if they continue on and do you no harm, meant you no harm that conflict caused an aftermath, caused you to stop and take time out of your day to pretend to be window shopping while you were actually evaluating the situation because your alertness, your intuition, your feeling about the situation caused you to have to take action. That action is incredibly important.

And recognizing that conflict by its aftermath will empower you to feel more comfortable about conflict in general, understanding conflict from any level and recognizing that your ability to deal with even low level conflicts is incredibly important. Can really be empowering. If you always think of conflict as someone grabbing you or jumping out with a ski mask or firing a gun at you or pulling a knife and demanding your wallet that can be pretty traumatic. Realizing that you deal with conflict every day and deal with the aftermath and the resolution of that conflict is incredibly important. It's that aftermath, the fight three that lasts forever and probably doesn't get nearly enough attention in the world of self-defense or in the thought of defending yourself or your family.

Aftermath does last forever and it takes many forms, medical, professional financial, social, emotional, all these ramifications of an actual critical incident are incredibly important. For example, if you get attacked and defend yourself let's say some violent way. And you took things to the level that was appropriate under the circumstances but had to do something like shoot someone or you hit someone over the head with an object that was close by to defend yourself with and they fell down and they landed in the street, they got hit by a car. Well obviously this is a pretty traumatic situation and there's gonna be a lot of aftermath here. There's gonna be some medical aftermath for you if you were injured, there's a financial aftermath, you may have to miss some work.

There's a professional aftermath, but that social aftermath is something that a lot of people don't consider. How are your neighbors and your family going to look at you knowing that you cause great injury to someone, regardless of the fact that it was in the middle of a conflict and they were trying to hurt you. People may look at you differently and even treat you differently. If you had to do something violent in order to defend yourself or others. And we don't like to think about that but it's an important consideration.

Anything that you do when you think about the how and the when of self-defense really needs to be tempered with the why as well, because it's that why that's going to get you through that aftermath phase. When we think about aftermath one thing that I definitely tell all of my students is that the aftermath, no matter how bad of any critical incident is always going to be easier to deal with if you took action. If you weren't just a victim but you actually did something to defend yourself or others you took action to survive, you took action to take control of a situation. Whether you consider yourself a winner or not during a conflict isn't really important. And it's probably not even good terminology psychologically to use.

If you understand that just by trying to defend yourself by doing something to change the circumstances, no matter how bad the outcome the fact that you took action and you were not simply a victim of someone else's aggression or someone else's violence is going to help get you through that aftermath. Fight three lasts forever. The last thing I want to say about fight three is that it's fight three that actually turns into your next preparation phase. You can take the lessons that you learned from your critical incident, from your conflict whether it was low level or high level, and work that into your preparation, use it to analyze whether your original preparation was appropriate whether it helped you, whether it didn't help you whether it was useful in some ways but not as much as you thought it would be. And that can help you prepare better for the next potential conflict that you're going to enter into.

Understanding the three phases of conflict is very important. Fight one is preparation, fight two is the conflict and that's what we usually focus on. Fight three is the aftermath and it lasts forever. Check out more videos, just like this one at the Personal Defense Network.