by Rory Miller
For de-escalation to work, you must know what kind of threat you are dealing with.
The next three aspects (4-6) cover an actual attack, and we’ll do those in the next chapter. For now, I’d like to discuss another aspect of violence that lies at the edges of the actual attack. That’s the aftermath.
7) The last element of conflict is the Aftermath. Any time you use force there is the potential for criminal or civil legal entanglements, medical complications and psychological issues.
The better you understood force law going in, the better you will do with the legal aftermath.
There are also medical implications. Even winning is rarely free. In the rush of adrenaline you may not know if or how badly you were injured. A good blow to the head may not affect you at all until the swelling starts to squeeze your brain and you pass out (potentially die) hours later. I had an inmate who didn’t realize he had shattered his hand until a half-hour after the attack. (He was the attacker, but he kept hitting his victim in the head with his fist even after several bones broke.)
A friend didn’t know he was stabbed in the ass until he felt his shoe squishing when he was trying to unlock his car.
Even if all goes well immediately, there is a potential for blood-borne pathogens. Many of the people who initiate violence, especially for drugs, do not live extremely hygienic lives. Just being involved in a brawl can put you at risk for HIV and Hepatitis C.
The psychological aftermath is getting a lot of lip-service in fiction now, but without depth. Here’s the deal.
We all have stories of who we are. This is our identity, and it is about as real and consistent as a wisp of smoke. Like all good works of fiction, this story is heavily based on conflict. Fortunately (or not) real conflict is vanishingly rare in most people’s lives. Ergo, much of our internal story, our identity, isn’t really based on anything.
When someone is exposed to violence for the first time, who they thought they were rarely survives. The big tough guy may crumble and usually freezes. People who always thought they had dignity beg. People who have studied yoga and meditation for years to keep negative energy out of their lives find out it was all a lie. Martial artists find out that their black belts only cover two inches and if they want to cover the rest of their asses, they need to do it themselves … and most can’t.
So, there’s the first big issue. In a big episode of violence, identity tends to be shattered. What happens next, internally, is that the person starts writing a new story. Creating a new identity. It is hard because much has been proved false and no new truths have stepped in to replace it. Susan Brison in “Aftermath” describes her own process of this. It isn’t a book that I recommend for survivors. Many of her decisions afterwards were disempowering but she chose to see them as empowering and fragile readers may not notice that. But I heartily recommend the book to people who deal with survivors, or write about them.
The second big issue is the sense of isolation. Most people today have never experienced serious violence and aren’t sure what to do or think. Friends want to ask, but are afraid of bringing up memories or causing damage or seeming like vultures, so they stay silent. The survivor sees the look followed by the silence and reads it as condemnation or fear.
Simultaneously, strangers with no boundaries may butt in and ask. Some physically lick their lips when they do it. They are vultures. I can’t speak for everyone, but knowing that there is a subset of young women who hit on me because they believe that I am extremely violent is pretty damn disturbing. A different personality type would exploit that.
PTSD doesn’t just come from the event. It comes as well from a sense of being betrayed or treated unfairly. People who came from hard lives, the “children of adversity” who thrive in the special operations world are far more resistant to PTSD because they didn’t expect life to be fair, easy or good.
People who have had one ugly violent encounter are at risk for PTSD because their basic beliefs about how the world works were betrayed.
People who have repeated encounters with violence do better than those who only have one (Exception: there is a victim personality that either jumps from abusive relationship to abusive relationship or is serially victimized by different predators or both). The first violent encounter you find out what was false. After that, you start learning things that are true. You also find out that some of what you thought you learned (OMG I froze! I’m a coward!) aren’t really true, either. Most times, people freeze because they can’t figure out what was going on. That’s not the same as fear. No cowardice involved.
But it takes multiple encounters to figure out what is going on and where you fit in the Looking-Glass world of violence.
Multiple encounters ease the first problem—shattered identity-- but can compound the second problem, isolation.
Dealing with violence demands a different thought process and often results in a very clear ordering of priorities. It winnows internal bullshit like nothing else.
Many of the angsty things that drive drama have no meaning for me. Everyone that I love knows it. To love someone and not tell them, not give that tiny gift when I might die tomorrow is stupid.
And I don’t care if they love me back. The world is not about me, and I’m not going to live through it anyway. I don’t love to get something in exchange. It is just a fact. “I’m in love” is very similar to “I’m bleeding.” Just an observation about my state, which may have some obligations attached. The world doesn’t owe an attachment to me.
Few enough people look at the world this way (including immature violence professionals) that it can be hard to spend time with other people and hard for them to spend time around us. That increases the isolation.
There is a persistent myth in the martial arts that young men went to the temple to study fighting and achieve enlightenment. They believed this because of all of the very wise monks who lived there, men who could puncture certainty with a koan or love without attachment.
None of those old monks achieved enlightenment in the temple. At that time, the temple was the one place where an old warrior could peacefully retire. What they learned of truth and enlightenment (which is not the presence of wisdom but the absence of bullshit) they learned on the edge of death.
Recap:
-Violence happens in a context that includes:
-The legalities of the world
-The personal ethics (conscious or unconscious) of the people involved
-Predictable patterns and types of violence
-Opportunities to prevent or de-escalate violence
-Potential medical, legal and psychological aftermath
Chapter 3: Mechanics of a Physical ‘Fight’
We have to define a couple of things. I put ‘fight’ in the title because I really don’t have a better word. That said, fights are generally stupid and I don’t do them.
This may mess with your writing, but you need to know something. Fights aren’t dramatic. Professionals, whether a SWAT team or a mugger, do everything in their power to keep fights from being dramatic. One side gets the advantage early and keeps it. That’s the goal.
Most people think of fighting in the context of martial arts (almost always based on a dueling paradigm) or from fistfights they have seen. The fistfights followed a script. Both sides, usually young men, follow a script:
Hard stare (the other usually locks eyes or starts the next step)
Verbal challenge e.g. “What you lookin’ at?” (witty repartee follows)
The approach, both trying to look bigger and tougher
A push to the chest or finger poke (sometimes push back, sometimes next step)
An overhand looping punch. The fight is now on.
This is called the Monkey Dance. It is stupid. Professionals do not play this game. Good guy or bad guy, if we can’t handle it verbally (downcast eyes and apology works; as does raising the stakes “Son, I’m on parole. If this fight is going to cost me two years in prison, believe that I will
make it worth the time.”) we jump steps. Take him out before he gets to the chest push stage. By jumping steps a professional almost always get surprise.
The Monkey Dance appears to be biological, just like the way Big Horn Sheep fight. It is also designed not to do serious injury.
For too many people, this is what they think of as a fight. It is not serious, not dangerous and never self-defense. There are too many opportunities in the Monkey Dance to just leave to call it self-defense.
Most professionals do not ‘fight’ people. They take them out. They put them down. They do everything in their power to prevent the target from fighting back.
Of the seven stages mentioned in the last section, we skipped the three that compose the fight. Here they are:
4) The ambush. Good guy or bad guy, the person initiating the attack works to get an effective move in right away, and keep up the pressure so that the victim never recovers. In a military ambush, this is the initial coordinated fire with, say, small arms and RPGs. In an entry (like when a warrant service team goes into a house expecting armed resistance) flashbangs, shouting and constant movement usually work to freeze the threats’ minds, which usually allow the officers to do something very dangerous without killing anyone. A flurry of hits from behind with a brick works for a mugger.
On the receiving end, things will get bad here. The appropriate response is to have one thing trained to reflex that works on all the things you are likely to encounter. The military trains soldiers to charge the ambush, firing (this is US, some other countries must radio for instructions under fire. Our system gets fewer people killed.)
It’s hard for cops to train one thing because they can be attacked at different ranges. What they need to do for a sniper or taking gunfire is radically different than the best response when someone lunges at an officer with a knife or grabs for the officer’s gun from behind.
Martial artists train for reflex response in some cases, but they tend to train many responses to many different attacks. If the attack is one of the ones they have trained against and the training has either been very long term or is really fresh, they’ll do fine on the first attack … if they saw it coming.
5) The next step is the freeze. Everyone freezes when attacked. Some only freeze for a fraction of a second, some stay frozen until the assault is over, sometimes until they die.
There’s lots going on and lots of different elements to a freeze, even different types of freezes.
At the minimum, when you are ambushed, you have to switch from your day-to-day mind to your fighting mind. Even soldiers on patrol must switch from watch-walk carefully-listen to SHOOT. With experience, this can get really fast, too fast for most people to notice.
One of the worst freezes, and the one that cripples people who are not used to violence, is thinking. Thinking takes time and under assault time is damage. To think, “I need a plan” while taking damage will not help you. By the time you come up with a plan, you will have taken too much damage.
Completely untrained people hit four times a second. Trained and experienced people can more than triple that. If every second of thought is four solid hits to the head, by the time you think your way out of it you may not be physically capable to execute the plan.
Worse than this, even, are the people who freeze on, “Why is this happening?” It has all the drawbacks of the planning freeze but with the added problem that getting the answer wouldn’t help in any way.
When you are taking damage and scared, a bunch of neurotransmitters dump into your system. They can freeze you like a deer in the headlights or make you go limp and lose bladder and bowel control. You have probably heard of this as the fight or flight reflex. Biologists call it the Fight-Flight-Freeze reflex and freezing is the most common in the wild. Freezing doesn’t draw the predator’s eye and, if the attack is already on, the predator may become bored with a limp catch if the predator isn’t that hungry.
Freezing often feels pretty nice. There’s a warm kind of floaty feeling and everything looks crystal clear. There is often a roaring in your ears like the ocean. You feel comfortable. The words in your head are so clear that you must be thinking logically: “Wow, is that my blood? It’s so red.”
A professional will likely, but not always, recognize this feeling as a freeze. An amateur rarely will. It takes an extreme act of will to break out of it. The primitive part of your brain wants you frozen—its millennia of experience says frozen animals are less likely to be eaten than moving ones and all this newfangled training is a pipe dream.
There is also (later in the fight) a possibility of freezing in motion. Sometimes very scared people repeat the same act or say the same things over and over again even when it clearly isn’t working. One officer repeated over and over again, “Drop the rifle, drop the rifle” instead of shooting. He locked into that verbal loop until he was shot. This can be a hard one to watch. My personal copy has the dialogue subtitled.
The murder of Kyle Dinkheller.
6) The fight. If your protagonist survives the ambush and breaks the freeze, the fight is on. Ideally, if he or she had a good counter-ambush response, the bad guy will have frozen as well and leveled the playing field.
At this point, most of the things you think of as fighting (fisticuffs, martial arts, sword play, shooting) apply. With a couple of caveats:
-The threat is not automatically in front of you and you will have to deal with that before you can deal with the threat.
-Fights are dynamic affairs. One of the reasons that shooting at the range is so different than gunfighting is that gunfighting involves a lot of running and ducking. Taking time to aim makes your head a good target. Martial arts defenses against grabs often ignore the fact that grabs are rarely used to hold people in place but to yank them into the air and force movement. It is much harder to hit someone with power when you are both moving than it is to hit a heavy bag.
-Fights happen in places. There are doors and walls and obstacles to trip over and improvised weapons everywhere. A lot of techniques that work great in training work less well in a toilet stall, but on the other hand, misdirecting someone’s head into a pipe does more damage than a fist.
-Fights are stressful. Under the stress hormones you may not feel pain, but you may not feel your fingers either, or be able to find the safety on your weapon. You might not be able to hear anything, even gunfire or words of warning. Tunnel vision is common. So is remembering everything in slow motion. Basically, if you have not been exposed to enough fights to get some control of the adrenaline, you will be clumsy (fine and complex motor skills are hampered) partially deaf and blind; and not thinking very well.
There are also two things that your experienced protagonists may experience in the fight.
The first is hitting the zone. It’s been described as an optimum level of adrenalization. Senses, thought process and coordination are all at peak. You can tell what a threat is about to do. Tachypsychia (the sensation that everything is happening in slow motion) kicks in, but you can use it. You’re in slow motion as well, but you can use the time to be supremely efficient and weigh options. In the zone, you can use all of your training and all of your instincts. You can pull off things that seem impossible.
Two examples from my blog:
http://chirontraining.blogspot.com/2007/02/character-flaw.html
http://chirontraining.blogspot.com/2007/02/perfect-predator-moment.html
The second is battle joy. There is a second when you know that the fight will happen and there is no way out of it and suddenly all bullshit falls away. You are you, the best body, mind and spirit all together, everything you have and are and it is all on the table to live or die. It is a feeling like your soul is just behind your ears and it is singing.
I have hit that battlejoy and gotten a manic grin that shut down a whole room of prisoners. Whatever signal it sends, when you touch that, people can feel it. Not to get too spiritual on you but … On the inside you are not human but a force o
f nature. You know you can be killed, but you feel you can’t be stopped, at least by any human.
Details on the Survival Stress Response
When humans go under extreme stress, such as a fight for life, they get a cascade of hormones and neurotransmitters that greatly affect how they perceive, think and move.
Perception changes. Many report tunnel vision, an inability to see anything beyond what is right in front of their eyes. Some see, or remember seeing everything happen in slow motion. Some remember incredible details, such as reading the brass ejected from a partner’s gun. At the same time, someone thirty feet away might be remembered as close enough to touch.
Many report not hearing gunfire, even their own… or just a soft pop pop pop. And yet breathing can seem unbearably loud.
You lose feeling in the extremities, a godsend when you are being eaten by a tiger, a disaster when you are trying to work a safety catch or load a single bullet.
Thoughts can seem crystal clear, but irrelevant. You may notice time going slowly but instead of using the time, you spend the slow motion time wondering why you aren’t using the time. Random, irrelevant thoughts may wander across your brain and seem very important at the time, “What color was my first girlfriend’s eyes? Wouldn’t it be horrible to die and not remember ….” People often get stupid—making a bad plan—and then get stubborn about it. Something that is common in other forms of shock as well. And everything makes perfect sense at the time.
Because of the blood loss to extremities, you become very clumsy. With even mild stress reaction, fine motor skills (like threading a needle or aiming a gun) go out the window. At extreme levels, all that your body can do is a shambling run (the trope of the terrified maiden tripping and falling in a slasher flick is one of the most realistic depictions in there) or flailing with hard overhand hammer-like swings.