by Rory Miller
Violence Professionals and Relationships
There is a stereotype that men are threatened by strong women. I can't speak for everyone, but in a strong relationship a strong woman is empowering, not emasculating. The emasculating paradigm only works if the guy has a need to dominate (which is common, maybe the baseline for most cultures).
"Can't you control your woman?"
"Partner, you couldn't even keep up with her."
When both members of a relationship are in high-risk jobs, the relationship can be very difficult. Lots end badly. Lots start badly for that matter. Some of the reasons:
Shiftwork. Your character may work or will have worked some of the lousiest hours there are. I was lucky in my agency--we had three shifts and bid annually by seniority (theoretically in my 22nd or 23rd year I might have a chance at day shift with weekends off). Some agencies rotate weekly between day, evening and graveyard shifts. One that I know of works twelve-hour day shifts for four days, takes three days off and then works four twelve-hour night shifts. It is damn near impossible to keep any relationship (social, going back to school, volunteer work) going on that shift. Or get a sleep cycle.
Nothing to talk about: I think this goes for most couples. If both are doing the same job and living together, they were there for most of the things they would normally talk about.
Nepotism, or accusations of: Unless both members of the couple have dead-ended or decided to dead-end in the job (lots of people choose to stay on Patrol, I had no interest in becoming a lieutenant, since that was exclusively a desk job) one will promote faster than the other. That can hamper their careers and create a headache for scheduling, especially in a small agency since most have policies prohibiting family members supervising family members. If one of the members rises to sufficient power, the other one (no matter how good) will face whispers and gossip over ANY positive action-- getting promoted or even getting a medal for valor.
Out of about five hundred officers in my agency, I only know of four long-term relationships where both were on the job. One has a wide disparity of rank, but seem to be doing fine. The other three couples were pretty troubled. There were other relationships and marriages that all ended badly and most quickly. A lot of it has to do with maturity, with mature expectations for a relationship and understanding of self, others and the job... but I still have no idea if a good relationship fosters that maturity (I believe it did in my case) or the maturity enables a good relationship.
When only one of the couple is on the job, the stresses are different. And most are avoidable. It is very easy when you spend your workday dealing with the part of life that civilization seems designed to deny, to come to believe that no one understands you. That you alone see the real world. That everyone else is no better than blind sheep … and in a few years you start saying, “You can’t handle the truth.”
It’s bullshit. This is something we as professionals do to ourselves.
It’s true that most people can’t understand. When someone dies, you see something leave their eyes, and it is a different feeling when it is someone young who desperately wants to live. Children should outlive their parents, not be killed by them. Telling someone that a brother is dead is hard enough … I never want to tell a child he or she is an orphan.
There are aspects of this that people who live safe lives will never understand. But they will listen. And they, largely, will accept that you deal with it.
This is something that ties in to the long-term solid relationships. We share. We talk. I used to have a fear that the more icky stuff I dealt with, that it would somehow rub off on me, infect me. It’s not true. Maybe because I work to spend time with good people, and the good people are the reason for all of this.
Good people don’t need to understand. We do this job largely to keep that world away, to keep the good people not only from ever being victimized, but from ever really having to look at it closely. But good people will accept, and that can save your protagonist’s mind.
For the partner who is not in the profession, it can be hard. The unpredictability of it can be hard. Most of these jobs are relatively safe, most days. Most soldiers come home. Almost every cop comes home every shift… but some don’t, and that is always scary.
Some partners live in happy oblivion and just never think about it. Some obsess on it and that is very hard on the relationship, since the obsession won’t go away unless the marriage breaks up or the other leaves the life. Some express faith, whether faith in a higher power or (sometimes ridiculous) levels of faith in the partner. Some partners require constant reassurance, and that is a horrible, wearying strain on the operator. Others are a constant source of reassurance.
I go home, every day, and see why I do this. It is worth it.
Recap:
-Men and women were raised to have different attitudes toward violence
-They have different biologies, especially regarding responses to fear
-These differences serve an evolutionary purpose
-The differences get misinterpreted, hormones seen as emotions
-Women in violence professions have to adapt to a new culture
-Relationships between two violence professionals have challenges
-Relationships between citizens and violence professionals have different challenges
Chapter 7: Survival Stress Response (SSR)
We’ve touched on this a number of times. Here is a fuller explanation.
The survival stress response is a fancy term for the effects of extreme fear. When your body and hindbrain perceive an immediate threat, hormones are pumped into your system that change your mind, body and senses. I’ll use the phrases ‘adrenaline’ and ‘adrenalized’ but adrenaline is just one of a cocktail of chemicals involved.
Changes to perception:
I’ve been told that the eye physically changes shape. I don’t know if that’s true. But most people experience “tunnel vision” -- a sharp focus on things right ahead and a complete blindness to anything even a little bit to the sides. I’ve used this to get close to people fighting and break them up.
Things in that focused area can seem unnaturally clear—Dr. Alexis Arwohl writes about an officer who was reading his partner’s brass as the expended cartridges flew through the air. This clarity can make things seem bigger and closer than they actually were, and sometimes results in people seeing a bad guy as very close who was actually quite some distance away.
“Auditory exclusion” is the name for the deafness of combat. Some people can’t hear gunfire, including their own, or hear something that would normally be a deafening blast as a distant ‘pop’. Sometimes all you hear is the rushing in your ears.
Between the tunnel vision and auditory exclusion, normal people never hear or see a third party joining the fight from the front or flank. Most don’t even register when a friend shouts a warning.
Blood is pulled to the center of the body, an ancient mechanism to keep you alive as long as possible when an animal is chewing on your arms and legs. This makes your hands and feet very insensitive. It is difficult, even if you remember, to feel textures or the ground beneath you.
Physical Changes:
Your body changes, and many of these changes are reflected in the perceptions. Your insensitive hands and feet are also clumsy and writing, working a key or any fine manipulation (like carefully aiming a gun) are difficult.
Some people develop great short-term power, and that’s good. But it is clumsy and exhausting and a few injure themselves, pulling muscles and straining joints, and don’t notice until later.
Coordination is impaired. At lower levels, fine skills like writing are disrupted. You start dropping things. You can’t dial a phone. At higher levels of fear, you can’t work your hands and feet together. All of your martial arts training seems to be forgotten. A notch worse and all you are capable of is a stumbling run or swinging your dominant hand over and over like you are trying to club someone with a branch. At the hig
hest level, you just freeze and your bladder and bowels let go and you don’t even notice.
The more adrenalized you get, the worse the physical effects are.
There is a zone where everything is working beyond normal: senses are at peak acuteness, coordination is spot on and the brain is working fast and subconsciously. Few people reach this stage. I have never heard a reliable account of anyone achieving this in the first fight.
Mental Effects:
It is sometimes hard to distinguish perception and cognition. Did the officer read his partner’s brass? Or did he merely remember that he read it? Your character under stress may be the ultimate unreliable narrator, or may be experiencing things that people who live in a comfortable, safe world simply can’t imagine.
Often, everything seems to go in slow motion. Unfortunately, you’re going in slow motion as well otherwise it would be a super power. Some people get hooked on the slow motion and start thinking, “That’s weird, everything is so slooooowww….” And completely waste it. A very few can use the opportunity to choose more efficient actions.
Your brain will do dumb things a lot under the SSR. Really strange and irrelevant thoughts will float through your head… or completely relevant thought that cries for action and you stand there frozen, not really distinguishing between thinking about things and doing them: “Is that my blood? Should I be doing something about that?” Or worrying about missing work when you see your hand being carried away by a dog.
The slow motion feeling is called tachypsychia. Sometimes there is another state. Especially when you survive an ambush and do really well, you will have no memory of it at all or just a blur.
All of these effects are mitigated by experience. An experienced fighter can usually bring himself to the zone with just a little warning and some snap into it when attacked with just the tiniest freeze as they switch gears. When a professional sets up the attack, he can use specific calming behaviors (rituals, stretches or breathing exercises) to get to the zone prior to the attack.
However, if the type of fight is novel, the warrior returns to square one. I had enough hand-to-hand fights in the jail that at one point I realized I was bored and planning the paperwork while taking down a convict/boxer. Shortly after that I shot someone as part of a tactical operation and had all of the adrenaline responses just like I was a rookie.
The veteran of a hundred gunfights will not be psychologically prepared for the up-close messiness of his first knife encounter. Stuff like that keeps the world fresh and exciting.
Recap:
-Under extreme stress, hormones are pumped into your system
-These hormones affect your perception, cognition and motor skills
-You can become inured to specific stresses
Chapter 8: Unarmed
It’s a little artificial to break this up by unarmed, impact weapons, edged weapons, firearms and less-lethal, but I’m going to do it anyway. The actual mechanics and use have a lot of things in common. For instance, in most cases, aggression beats skill. A skilled knife player (say silat or arnis) usually chokes when confronted by a prison-yard-style shanking. A good shot tends to be killed by someone who charges blasting away. And blackbelts getting crushed by untrained streetfighters are almost a cliché.
It works the other way, of course. Aggression coupled with good skills and tactics makes an incredible foe. Add the clear predator mindset and it is more a force of nature than a human being. Mix timidity with bad skills (or, especially, bad skills with false confidence) and the person is almost more a danger to himself or bystanders than he is to the bad guy.
First break down: How people learn to fight unarmed.
1) Martial arts. What follows are generalizations and include a lot of my own prejudices. Just be aware that these are informed prejudices.
1A) Traditional martial arts: These are the things practiced by rote, usually in a uniform in a nice dojo (Japanese for “place to learn the way”) or kwoon (Chinese training hall) or dojang (Korean, same name as Japanese). People from these traditions sometimes learn really good physical skills, but most have no idea of what they will be facing. They practice against techniques that bad guys don’t use at ranges that bad guys avoid. The rules and rituals are as important as the technique.
That said, most of the traditional arts arose in very violent times. I find the body mechanics to be superb for a real assault. The weakness is that most instructors, having no knowledge of violence, tend to guess how things happen and how techniques should be used. They rarely guess accurately. Main point: unless your character has great instincts, some real world experience to put things in perspective or an extraordinary instructor, martial arts training tends to be a very visually interesting way to lose.
1B) Martial sports. This is stuff like boxing, judo, Brazilian Jiu jitsu (BJJ) full contact karate and Mixed Martial Arts (MMA). Again, the training usually misses the context of a real assault. These guys don’t train against the ambush and they have to limit techniques for safety (there is NO SUCH THING as no holds barred and full contact sport in the civilized world). However, they tend to take solid hits in training, something many traditional martial artists miss. Since they have a very real possibility of being hurt, they tend to train much harder than other martial artists.
1C) Reality-Based Self-Defense (RBSD) schools. These range from weekend workshops to entire systems. The idea is to either from the ground up or using a traditional martial arts base create something effective for real assaults. The results are mixed, largely because anyone can start such a system and the definition of ‘reality’ or ‘research’ varies hugely. Basically, some of the systems are completely made up. Even the good established systems, such as Krav Maga, Systema (a Russian art derived from folk wrestling and filtered through Russian Spetznaz—special operations) or the Fairbairn/Applegate WWII combatives have a wide variety of instructors. A good instructor in this system can give your character a great edge. A bad instructor can pass on his bullshit macho fantasies to your character.
1D) Miscellaneous. This stuff mixes, and some of those mixes make for very good training. I trained in an ancient system of jujutsu. We actually learned how to bow properly while wearing armor and practiced sword defenses while kneeling. That training was filtered through brutal reality in a jail… so I’ve been the guy with training and experience teaching in a garage. One of my dearest friends and mentors is a former librarian, graduate of Maharishi University, Vietnam combat veteran, former cop and has almost as many blackbelts as fingers. That’s some pretty unique training.
2) Military or Police training. People who haven’t been involved with either tend to vastly over-rate the UAC (Unarmed Combat) or DT (Defensive Tactics) training that soldiers and officers get. UAC is not a primary tool for anyone in battle. The person who conserves ammo and has a bullet left will win a fist fight. It is still taught, but they get little time for it and the purpose of the training is more to get over the idea of closing and grabbing an enemy than to instill specific skills. Military skills are designed to do as much damage as quickly as possible. The target students are young men in peak condition. An aggressive young man in good condition can make a lot of things work that would fail if attempted by someone else.
Police DT training also has limited time but it is considered a more important skill. It generally emphasizes take-downs, locks and pressure points. It is taught in an intensely political environment. Public agencies are far more concerned about getting sued than losing officers. For that reason, the skills tend to be concentrated on less damaging techniques (regardless of whether they work) and taught by rote (to prevent cadets from claiming the training was in some way unfair.) 40 hours of training in DTs at the academy and eight hours a year of refresher training is about standard, but varies by state. It is not enough to get good and most of the best officers train on their own. Which is hard because of shift work.
3) Experience. Trial and error, by itself, rarely makes a good technical fighter (
I define a good technical fighter as someone who can consistently defeat a bigger, stronger threat). That’s a lot of error to overcome and error has a price. (I’ve been well trained and by most standards enormously successful, but I sometimes have trouble remembering names, my left eye is blurry and the cornea tears if I let it dry out, my fingers go numb every so often from all the shoulder dislocations, I have a slight limp if I get tired or the weather gets cold…) What experience can give you is resourcefulness, toughness and an understanding of other violent people.
4) Combination. Obviously, I find that training under a good instructor coupled with experience makes the best fighter. I will even go so far as to say that a mix of traditional skills (where they can learn very dangerous techniques) combined with hard-contact sport training (where the students get used to impact and pain) is a huge edge.
Second breakdown: What people can do to each other
This is another thing that can be broken down a lot of ways. One way to look at it is Movement-Pain-Damage-Shock.
Movement: In a fight, you can move the threat or part of the threat. You can shove him, throw him, make him lose his balance. You can plant him into a wall or slam him down the stairs or into traffic. You can also move part of him, shifting his arm so that his ribs are exposed or twisting his head up to expose his throat.
Pain: Causing pain is really variable. Most people are not beaten. They give up. If a threat really, really wanted to keep fighting you need to either shutdown the brainstem (people have kept fighting even with extensive damage to the neo-cortex) or break every long bone in the body (and even then, they can still pull a trigger). Pain is to make the threat give up. To decide he doesn’t want to play anymore. Not everyone feels pain and not everyone reacts to it the same (some give up, some get enraged, some panic, some don’t feel it at all). Pain can be caused by light strikes, gouging pressure points, pinching, pulling hair and joint locks… that’s just a few off the top of my head.