Your Emotions in Surviving a Brutal Self-Defense Attack
Saturday, January 24th, 2009Most self-defense and martial arts programs avoid the emotions altogether. Others limit their focus to a somewhat over-simplification of emotional response during a self-defense situation. But, other than being scared or angry, what role do your emotions play in dealing with a dangerous situation? Did you ever think about that?
Other than being reactions to the moment-to-moment occurances as we move through our days, what role do our emotions play. For most of us, it’s kind of like our blood type. Apart from knowing what it is so we don’t end up with the wrong one if we need it, it and the emotions are just things that we “have” and have no control over.
In reality, our emotional states are actually tied to our body’s own natural, human, defense system. That’s right. Your body is already hard-wired for self-defense by design.
The trouble is that, our modern brains, social systems, and cultural, academic, and familial education has virtually made us completely clueless that we have these abilities and functions.
So, what’s the function of our emotions, and how can they help us for self-defense? Excellent question.
It’s not the focus of this article to explain all of the inner workings of your human brain. Let’s just begin with some very simple responses to stimuli from the world around us.
You see, everything that we encounter, causes a feeling, or response at a base, primitive level. This occurs without your even being conscious of it, and also happens below the level of what we normally call our emotions.
These base “feelings” or responses can be generally identified as feelings of:
Attraction – we like it
Aversion – we don’t like it, or…
Apathy – it doesn’t cause us to move either way
Don’t confuse these simple feelings with higher, more involved emotional states like:
Love
Hate, and…
Ignorance
The ones I’m talking about are much simpler and tied not to the higher brain functions, but actually come from your primitive “reptilian” brain – also known as the R-complex – the part of your brain that is primarily centered on self-preservation activities like eating, procreating, and not-dying.
“Why,” you may ask, “do I want to know all this scientific mumbo-jumbo? All I want to do is pick up some moves to defend myself?”
And I would answer, “you don’t have to learn anything.”
Not if you just want to learn your “moves” and then hope that you’ll be able to use them in a real street self-defense situation.
Remember. When you’re training in a martial arts or self-defense class, you’re in a different state – pumped up, happy, having a good time. Right?
Looking at the base feelings I described a minute ago, that would put you in “attraction” mode, where you like what you’re doing and want more of it. The activity – the training – it feels good and, while challenging, probably not very threatening or dangerous at all.
Now, it doesn’t matter if you’ve ever been in a real fight, or ever been attacked by an enraged individual out for blood, I’m sure you can imagine what that’s like. Can’t you almost see his eyes and the angry look on his face. Add to that, the pressure and aggression he’s projecting and the smell of him – we can’t forget the smell and feel of him as he moves in on you.
Are you still in “attraction” mode? I bet not. And you’re not even in the real situation. I’m just describing it and you’re having an “aversion” response.
How do you think it’s going to feel actually being in the heat of the moment?
Absolutely. Very different than in class or your own personal training sessions where there is no real danger.
If you get the idea of the role and great value that your emotions play in keeping you safe. And, if you learn about what role they play in spearheading your body’s own defense mechanisms, then you can also learn to tap into their power and use them as tools for your own defense.
Realizing this will help you to tailor and adjust your current training methods to accomadate, acknowledge, and exploit your emotions as the valuable tools they are.
Remember, any monkey can learn the moves, but a real expert – a real master – takes advantage of things that most students don’t even know about, or don’t know exist. So, do you have to study and use your emotions in your self-defense training? No.
But then, you don’t “have” to breath either. But I’d highly recommend it!
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Author: Jeffery Miller
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