Knuckles&Knees

Well... culture is not the only factor. In my opinion people are made up of three *major* (not the only ones) factors: Their community (culture); Their family culture; Their own personality.

So, I'm not as courageous nor as violent as some young men from well-to-do suburban neighborhoods. My personality is just one that is more gentle (depending on which family to contrast too, so to my family culture. Same thing goes with neighborhoods)

So, you have gentle, or you have kind, or you have fairly friendly people, or you even have effeminate males in very *tough* and violent American inner cities or in Brazilian or Peruvian favelas. People have their own personalities and their own histories. This is true. This is fine.

But typically speaking the United States is one of the more aggressive and "tough" cultures in the world. I realize that word "tough" is pretty subjective and pretty vague and that's why I put in quote marks to stress it's implied meaning.

I'm sure Manchester, England is a far more rough and tough localized culture than say the localized culture of Waukesha, Wisconsin in the United States. I've never been to Manchester but I've heard its pretty tough. But my point is I do realize not ever localized culture in the United States is so called "rough" or "bada**" so to speak.

darrianation

Anyone can choose to be a warrior or choose to be something else, it is really a choice. If your training does not give the you the confidence in your skills and capabilities maybe this shows a flaw within the training model.

Besides this particular situation is a “giveme”… a gift from God because you can ambush him and finish him off before he even knows you are there.

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A liberal is someone who feels a great debt to his fellow man, which debt he proposes to pay off with your money. -G. Gordon Liddy

A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.
– George Bernard Shaw

Knuckles&Knees

Well, yes, choices are involved in everything but like most aspects of human social development its not so simple as that. Life generally has a bit of complexity to it.

I think cultural development goes in to people and is required in the formation of a warrior mindset. We had another discussion about this in a different thread the topic being *courage.*

I'm not being self-deprecating but I'm just being honest when I say I'm not naturally courageous. I'm not even that naturally aggressive. Left to my own devices in a different, much more loving and kind world, and I would likely have become a fairly gentle and kind male that played "rough" every now and then.

But life has away of stealing our innocence. I'm much more angry, much more mean, much more rugged, and much more at home to violence, acrimony, and vendetta than some people simply because my environments have been that. But naturally, my inclination is much more gentle. I'm not as daring as many males.

So, my training has been fine, my personality just has its own particular challenges or limitations.

I've had a lot of anger and because of that sometimes people view some of my actions or response to other men as courageous when in fact it's not. Anger can give false impressions. I can fight a thousand men when I'm angry - partially because I feel I have already died. You can't kill me twice. It is that feeling which makes me potentially dangerous.

darrianation

Some folks need help ramping up for the fight while others need to come down for the fight. Stress inoculation drills help folks calm down enough to fight without having the adrenal response get in the way.

As an example of the adrenaline problem, I had a discussion with a guy not to long ago who has been training in martial arts for many years. In the encounter which happened at his workplace with a homeless man who came into the building and had been harassing clients and refused to leave…anyway, this guy related to me that he threw a preemptive elbow that missed, he was complaining to me how embarrassed he was because folks (friends and collogues) who knew he was a martial artist saw him miss. I said “Awe adrenaline” and he admitted to being really hyped up, scared, and excited. Anyway, a classical example of how the adrenal dump can interfere with your control, timing, and distancing. There are drills that deal with this problem effectively.

However, in this case the fear is you won’t be able to ramp up enough “emotionally”. This takes a different approach than the first problem.

You want to anchor an emotional state. This is not hard at all, close your eyes and think back to a time when you were really pissed off, I mean really pissed off. Imagine being there again. Now, take that image and magnify it making the picture really big in you mind, see it through you own eyes and give it color, smell, touch, etc. Notice how you feel and how you are breathing, let yourself go and get angry again just like you were then. At the height of the emotional peak you want to anchor that emotional state to a trigger.

If you cannot think of a time when you were that pissed or angry, make something up…you brain cannot tell the difference anyway however, an intense emotional state that you have already experienced in the past often will be a stronger emotion. Imaging coming home to find your mother, wife, or daughter tied to the bed and a man standing over her with his pants down. You wouldn’t hesitate to attack him right? You would use whatever comes into contact with your hands (brief case, lamp, kitchen knife, stool, whatever) hitting him with it as hard and as fast and as often as you can until you have destroyed him right?

Setting the trigger-

Tactile stimulation, at the height of the emotion when you are really feeling it the strongest and the images are really vivid tap you shoulder or pectoral muscle hard, not hard enough to leave a mark but hard enough that it stings. This should anchor that emotion to the tap. When you tap again sometime in the future this should cause the emotional state that you have anchored to occur. Practice this and remember the more intense the emotion the easier the state is to anchor. Now, before hitting the bag or going into combat tap your shoulder in the same way for a change in state (there does come a point that you won’t have to do this anymore).

Verbal stimulation, this is an alternative method. It works the exact same as above except instead of using a tap, squeeze, or pinch you can anchor the emotion to a word like “GO GO GO” but not something that is so common that you use it a lot in everyday conversation.

Bag/pad work-

Every time you hit the pads or heavy bag imagine that scenario or another one. Imagine a scenario in your mind while you hit the bag and visualize the effect your punches/strikes are having on your opponent. Hit the bag to destroy it and imagine your opponent being destroyed by your punches/strikes. Do this every time you hit the bag/pads. Over time you will no longer have to use your triggers or mental imagery the act of striking or the thought of engaging an opponent will be the trigger for switching states.

The elite folks can do this at will. In other words the desired emotional state is at his finger tips and he can switch states like flipping on switch turning on a light. He can turn it on and off at will.

We have a saying within the tactical community that goes like this, “If the experience is intense enough there is no need for repetition.” This is refereeing to “owning” that state or skill. This is refereeing to anchoring--a form of re-wiring--the state to some type of trigger.

Athletes do this with their Hoo-yah’s, slapping each others shoulder pads, hi fives, and chants. Different variations of this are used in education as well. Badguys often do it when they are woofing you up, they are building up the nerve to strike/attack. This is stuff you do everyday in one form or another…it isn’t mystical, it isn’t voodoo, it is a natural way of accessing information like a math formula or someone’s name, a skill, feeling and emotion.

We do this in firearms training as well. A scenario I often use for my students is “your wife just got shot in the face. She is laying there screaming for you to help her. The badguy is now turning his gun on you…FIGHT!” The word “FIGHT” is his cue to start the drill. He has to engage the threat before he can help his wife. I want to him to move off line draw his gun from concealment and engage the threat with extreme emotional prejudice shooting the threat to the ground. He should pull his trigger as hard and as fast and as many times as he can while imaging that the target he is shooting is falling to the ground with his hits also following him down.

The idea is to be able to ramp up from 0-1000mph in a controlled way and for our purposes we want to be able to access the state without having a prolonged building up period. This takes some practice but it works and before you know it you can access this new state at a flip of the mental switch and you can engage your opponent with rage. This new state has replaced the old state such as fear and you cannot be afraid when you are pissed off or in a state of rage.

__________________
A liberal is someone who feels a great debt to his fellow man, which debt he proposes to pay off with your money. -G. Gordon Liddy

A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.
– George Bernard Shaw

Oraenor

omg those guys failed at life itself. How hard is it to drag the guy by the hood and drag the girl away. Another -1 fail moment. good job digging up the clip though

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America's solution to birth control- "Lets start a war!"

Liberty

I was once attending a seminar in a large Midwestern city. While riding one of it's dozens of local buses, checking out the sights, etc., I caught sight of two guys obviously up to no good, so I kept an eye on them. One of them went up to the front to distract the driver. Just as the bus pulled up to a stop, the other guy snatched a woman's neklace, near the back exit. At this point I had moved to the back exit, as if to get off. Ready to stop him - salivating for it! Itching to f*#ck him and his partner up! Sure enough, the guy came crashing towards me, yelling at me to get out of the way. I quickly opened the door as if to let him out, rapidly turned around and fired a couple shots at his groin. He went down. As he struggled to his feet, his partner attemped to knife me from behind. I grabbed his knife wrist and rammed that motherf*#cj=ker into a big tree with everything in me. At this point they both got up, told me to let them go, that I could have the necklace. I let them limp off... All the while, not one single person on this bus said/did a damned thing to help either myself or the woman. In fact, when I looked up from my little adventure, they were all staring at me as if glued to a televison set, a cross between horror and fascination on their face.

Me, I truly enjoyed standing up. Relish it to this day. There is almost nothing as enjoyable as f*#cking up one of these people! I avoid them when I can. But I will not let them get away with their way.

I have to believe that the difference between myself and those by-standers, that day was/is that I absolutley looked forward to stopping those two. While everyone else froze dead in their tracks, worried, I'm sure, about their own necks, litigation, being late somewhere or whatever. And who can blame them. It's a scary world sometimes.

I've seen a cop or two freeze up in that way, as well. Gun in hand, frozen, unable to fire....

Such that, Unless average people are first taught to overcome their "deer in the headlights," fright, rather than merely arming them, I'm afraid all we'll have is more guns for criminals to take from people.

Respectfully, Liberty

Liberty

Dude - your post is right on! I do this sort of stuff in my own training! I've posted the following before, but it fits here as well - the awesome Dan Inosanto, relates in one of his early books how that, once, while training with the late great, Bruce Lee, Lee instructed him to side-kick him with all he had. That, after several failed attempts at getting Dan's adrenalin going, Lee simply walked up to Dan and smacked the sh*T out of him. Dan relates how that, for a moment, forgetting the serious danger in front of him - Bruce Lee - he came at Lee with everything he had! At which point, Lee laughing, as he continued to easily keep Inosanto at bay, exclaimed, "That's it - only, without the anger!"

Try this, as you approach the bag, (no gloves, just the the hand wraps) smack the heck out of yourself, then smack the bag. (I probably stole that from Jake LaMotta,or is that Curly from the Three Stooges?) LOL!

KirkhamsEbooks.

HEY we just had a group of f*ing wussies watch a guy crash into his girlfriends car then beat his ex to death with the butt of a shotgun


ONE OLD MAN tried to stop him and got butted with the gun

Whimps - I sure hope they have trouble sleeping

Rick

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