what makes an expert?

Good question.  Don't really have an answer. This post is about the off-balanced nature of how we play with the word because it doesn't mean now what it used to mean.

I guess we get to acknowledge first, that "expert" means a lot of things. It can mean someone particularly knowledgeable in a particular arena, someone granted personal respect, someone with demonstrated skill sets that seemingly outmatch their peers -

It used to mean just "experienced". But that usage is now deemed obsolete. Too bad. A momma who's raised 9 fabulous kids is a freaking expert by experience in my book, and I know one such momma.

Expert has evolved into one of those words that changes in definition as swiftly as the context changes. Here's what I mean:

I've been designated for "expert testimony" in a couple of court cases over the years. Two criminal, a handful of civil, and one IDEA mediation (that one was a really long time ago)  and my testimony ranged from nodding my head yes to a judge in family court to a 7 hour deposition in a civil suit. Cases addressing a bunch of different situations - mostly human behavior...except the IDEA case - that one was an assessment on accessibility. Long story that,  based on my first career as a Deaf Education teacher.

I earned an Expert I rank from Krav Maga Global following a week-long grueling physical training camp in Israel followed by an equally brutal physical skills test. I survived - earned the patch and hung up my rank-testing goals. When just about everyone testing undercut me by a minimum of ten years, (and months of recovery to their weeks) I turned my physical training goals on to different objectives.

People have called me an expert on any number of occasions mostly around the field of self-defense as it relates to our psychology and human behavior - and self-defense specific to women.

Who's right? The courts? The mediation officer? The judge? My combat art system's rank evaluators? The IDEA attorney? My friends and colleagues?

It's not a title I claim and I have openly shunned it until I'm blue in the face - and it gets used my direction anyway. I'm not a fan of the word - but not because of the word itself. I don't like how easily we fall under the authoritative spell cast by it.

Case in point. Just because some folks label me that way doesn't make it true. There are so many people out in the self-defense world with more experience both as practitioners & as instructors than I will ever have. But the E word is sticky and once someone wipes that sticky goo on you, it's damned hard to get it off.

There's a logic fallacy called Appeal to Authority. It's when we reference Experts to give our words more weight in an argument or, a good natured debate (and that seems to be a dying art -but check out Randy King's new podcast for  dose of fresh air on that one). Humans like to appeal to higher powers for a host of reasons, mostly, I think it's because there's a degree of personal abdication...a little back door that gets creaked open when we say an Expert told us so-and-so. Then if shit goes badly, we have someone else to blame. The Expert told us...therefore...it's the expert's fault...certainly not our own! Back door...

I think we like Experts too because they get to be windmills for the Don Quixote's among us. Something, or someone to rail against when we feel otherwise ineffectual. We can write scathing reviews, blog posts, IG comments - from afar we are the brave warrior for truth and justice and again - back door exits because few people will reach to have open honest dialogue anymore. Particularly around disagreements (or worse, offense). I have an Expert I don't like - at all. But I know a metric ton of people who do like this particular Expert. When I feel like jousting I'll grab my steed and lance and do my thing. But I do it quietly, with friends who are going to laugh at me for it because jousting at windmills is...well jousting at windmills.

So, what IS an expert? My spouse, for starters. In his area of expertise - a sought after guy in his domain. He's an expert. In my world, he's stunning. I know there are people who don't like him and in his domain would not call him an expert. Okay-dokey. I get to see him how I choose.

As much as there are people who slapped the sticky expert goo on my back and use the term with respect, I know there are folks out there who completely disagree. Good. They get to do that too.

The cautionary tale around the word Expert lies in the credence we give it. No one is a true expert. That's because somewhere, someone else taught the Expert who was then just a student. And that teacher was taught by someone before them, etc. And - more importantly, somewhere there is someone who is keener, more skilled, sharper minded than anyone slapped with the Expert label. We may never hear about them - doesn't make it less true.

Whether we seek an authority in curing an illness, healing a broken bone, in deciphering early English Literature, self-defense skills, in torte law...it is essential to remember Expert is a designation, not a fact. The best possible gift you can give yourself when you meet someone who's been tagged with that sticky label is to decide for yourself...then let other folks do the same.

(And I'll be the first to tell you there are other folks out there who far more earn the designation than I ever could.)

If you really like the work of a particular person, you respect their ideas and feel they are a benchmark in their field - okay. You can share this sentiment with your friends and some may buy it while other's do not. Good, accept it and move on.  Not a great platform for proselytizing.

The inverse is also true.  Have a friend or colleague who designates someone as an Expert that you don't much care for? Okay dokey.  Remember, it's an assigned value of esteem, not a universal fact and you both get to believe as you choose. Really. There's enough room.

And if you turn assigned value into a battleground (whether for or against) you are playing deep in the Appeal to Authority fallacy and here's the rub, it is unnecessarily divisive. Unnecessary  because it doesn't matter. It's a label with such a profoundly fluctuating meaning the term itself doesn't carry any authentic value.

I like my Expert and you decidedly do not. You and I kick up a storm over a worn-out, echoic paper doll of a term...to what end? Who is served? Who's life is now the better for it?

Here's an option. We evaluate an Expert's position and message as it relates to our personal experiences in life. If the words and music line up, if the message resonates and it adds value to your life, own it. It's your life (not the Expert's), take the message that moves you and let it become your own. If in this evaluation you do not find value, leave it. Move on. There is something thread-bare and weary to the gestures we make against the messages we reject.

We used to burn people at the stake for this sort of thing. Physically. We're still doing it metaphorically. Think about what amazing creativity could replace obsessive hostility against a meme, message or ideology you reject?

And this goes deep. Let's take an ideology like racial/ethnic supremacy. I personally find it abhorrent. I can march against it, carry signs, shout at rallies, exchange blows with those who support such ideology. Who have I helped? Is my neighbor happier? Are my children healthier? Are the hungry fed? Is the justice system suddenly woke?

We get really spooled up over our Experts and experts. We pit one against the other and hide behind keyboards - which feels a little self-convicting at the moment since I am, in fact, at my keyboard...and we throw poisonous darts because we feel better for it?

I don't think so. I don't think anyone actually experiences resolution in these ideological hunger games.

So no, I'm not an Expert. I have been called one, labeled one, introduced as one at a speaking engagement. I have stopped stomping on the term when thrown my way because I don't get to decide what other folks think. Much as I'd like to - and because my energy is better spent where something may be created v destroyed.

It's a silly word, anyway.

scared rabbit syndrome

Not everyone is a Threat. In fact, most people just want to get through any given day with minimal drama.

I'll use flight travel as an example. When we are crammed together in close quarters by choice, we benefit from remembering most people aren't out there to "get us".  First situation, two separate flights. Once the Offender was a young woman, once the Offender was a young man. Both were sitting on a plane and trying to get the Touch Screen on the seat back in front of them to work. While trying to figure it out, their contact with the seat back (touching different spots on the mini video screen) translated through to the body in the seat.

The young man and the young woman were disturbing the person in the seat. They didn't know they were bothering the person in the seat. The woman in the seat in front of the young man got up, placed her hands on her seat back and leaned over the top of her seat toward the young man.  In no uncertain terms, she told him to stop "hitting her in the back of the head".

The young man appeared rather startled - he had no idea what he was doing to hit this woman in the head. He was traveling with someone who could have been his father. This guy leaned over and said something to him quietly ... I'm assuming it was an explanation of why she made the assault accusation. The young man read a book for most of the flight.

Different flight - roles reversed, the man turned to the girl who was finger stabbing the screen and said something like "if you don't stop banging on my seat, I'm calling the flight attendant."

Not everyone is a Threat. These two air-travel novices were unaware how easy it is to jostle fellow passengers. Like the guy who fell asleep and his head flopped over during turbulence and rested on the shoulder of the stranger next to him. He wasn't trying to look down her shirt or cop a feel.

The woman who dropped her cell phone and reached down to hunt for it and repeatedly touched the men on either side:  her head brushed a thigh, knees, her arm moved across a calf, etc. She wasn't testing them to see if either would be a good target for sexual assault.

The young flyers weren't attempting to escalate conflict and the sleeping frequent flyer wasn't looking for an "accidental" grope.

Is 'manspreading' a thing? Sure. Is consuming more space than your tight quarters socially permits a thing? Yup.

Does it mean the person means you harm? Most of the time...no.

If your self-defense protocols & training are making you more suspicious, more hostile, and less comfortable in social environments - your protocols and training aren't helping make your life better.

If you yell PERVERT, every time someone brushes against you in densely populated situations, your protocols and training are building fear and anger.

The last thing we need right now are more angry, frightened humans. Train (if you do) to be strong. Strength is marked by your ability to know most people don't care to harm you - most people don't even notice you exist, to be honest. They are too wrapped up in their own personal goals & problems to notice you. Rude? Maybe. Self-absorbed? Maybe. Assault precursors? Not typically.

Train so you can discern the difference between self-centered "man spreading" and a predator testing you to see if you are a good target. Train to trust that should the time ever arrive in which the situation warrants defense - you can defend you yourself.

Check the knee brush on the subway, of course. But if you assume every knee brush is the precursor to sexual assault or another form of violence, your life is kinda' terrifying and qualifies for Scared Rabbit Syndrome. I don't wish that on anyone.

on witch-hunts, fear, and terrifying compliments

I've never cared for the label "feminist". Personal glitch. I get that most people would say the shoe fits- I think I don't like it because in my mind it reflects something extreme and extremism rarely comes to a good outcome. With all the Kavanuagh drama right now - I'm noticing something eerily familiar...hang tight...this is a long ass post.

I'm hearing men I consider pretty good humans share that from here forward - they help no woman with whom they are not personally familiar or share DNA strands. It's not worth the risk of having their lives destroyed in the new men-are-pervs witch hunt.

The abused become the abuser. That was also thrown into the conversation and they are not wrong. I won't speak to the ethics of decisions to withdraw support. Such a decision is deeply personal.

Several decades ago, I was a newly minted therapist when laws were passed establishing "mandatory reporters" in child abuse cases and programs were being developed to teach children it was okay to tell someone. I was responsible for educating faculty and administrators on the procedures for reporting and how to know if an incident might be reportable. Part of that inservice was also about how administrators were forbidden from blocking reporting by their staff...because that happened. And even with the training, it still happened.

I remember vividly sitting in a principal's office mediating between a teacher and the principal while the principal dressed-down the teacher for calling in a suspected abuse case after the principal had expressly directed her to keep out of it. There was a conversation about how a school policy couldn't supersede the law ... it didn't go well.

Children who were being neglected or wounded at home were getting the intervention they deserved. It was a good thing with a dark underbelly. Parents who opted for the family bed movement were accused of sexual abuse. Women who believed in nursing their children to the age of 2 ... were reported for sexual abuse. Single parent's with latch-key kids were reported for neglect. Sometimes it was true - sometimes it wasn't. Once accused though, always accused. Parents innocent of the accusations often moved to new towns - new schools. It was the only way they could get away from the glares and whispers.

Savvy tweens learned they could cry "child-abuse" and parents terrified of the public proverbial beheadings would back off of punishments for misbehavior. Female and male teachers alike stopped comforting distraught children, refusing to hold even a 5 year-old's hand while walking to the nurse's office with a playground injury.

Out of fear, we abandoned one another.

Across eras of change, this is what we do.

When it is finally acceptable to speak up to abuses of the past, we also learn we can weaponize the power to accuse. We've been doing this long before the literal witch-hunts of the 15th century. I have no idea what the solution is - and I have no idea whether this is relevant to the Kavanaugh drama.

Humans have been doing this for hundreds of years and I suspect we will continue to swing to extremes and then eventually figure out how to find the midline of our bell curves.

In this moment, in this movement I have an idea or two. My thoughts are generated as the mother of men and as a...feminist. We start by remembering we are fucking in this together. This thing called humanity is tribal by design. Most of humanity would die in total isolation. The majority of the species no longer needs tribe to hunt in bands, nomadically move our villages with the seasons.

We need each other in different ways now that technology satisfies ancestral needs. Some of us will do heinous things to other's in the tribe. We get to acknowledge it. Speak to it. Address it. Punish it. We get to remember too, we are accountable to what we create. Humans who accept responsibility for   only our collective success and deny accountability for our failings meet the clinical benchmarks for narcissism and at minimum, a degree of sociopathology.

When we swing to these extremes we are culturally narcissistic. Have yet to observe that producing valuable outcomes.

If women have been the target for assault, harassment and abuse then we must ALL do something about it.  Women supporting one another involves more than picketing together or marching on Washington. It includes supporting and celebrating success rather than getting vicious with envy. It means mentoring women rising up with new talent, rather than being the matriarchal pillars holding up the glass ceilings.

It also means taking responsibility for our bodies and our rights. Speak up and out? Absolutely. But if this is ALL we do?? Then we stand accused of Frederick Douglass' words from the 1850s. If we want Freedom without taking responsibility for the work and struggle required then we want the harvest without plowing the fields and we want the ocean without it's waves and storms and we want rain but keep the lightening and thunder to yourself, thank-you.

Transforming a culture doesn't work that way. The work that seems to be shunned right now is the work women might be doing for ourselves. This social shift we seek isn't going to happen solely by accusation, trial and punishment. If we don't want to be targeted for sexual violence - in addition to better punishment and more cultural support for our accusations - we need to become hard targets. We need to be generally considered a bad choice for sexual violence but not out of fear of witch-hunts...out of an expectation that I am equipped to stop you before you ever get started.

Everything in the media right now is about the consequence of sexual violence. The focus on the university campuses is to teach what giving and getting consent looks like. This isn't bad or wrong. It's just incomplete.

Recently, I met a man in his early twenties who is an accomplished martial artist and a generally lovely human being. In conversation on a break from training he remarked "you're terrifying". He meant that as a compliment and I took it as one. His remark came from respect, not fear.

If could gift one thing to our society right now, it would for women to be respected in this manner. I can't wave a wand and unilaterally make that happen (which is probably a really good thing...no one needs to give me a working wand).  I will; however, be at stake for what I can influence, what I can support, what I can mentor. I will be wrong many times along the way; of that I am certain.

And may the gods be so willing - I will not let fear choose for me.

old stories and easy habits collide

"you certainly seem like someone with many possible outcomes" 

a quote from the Netflix series version of Anne of Green Gables. Yes, I am unashamed and watching it. I'd forgotten how much I loved the story and how, in it's own interesting way it tells the tale of resilience.

The quote is from an elderly woman spoken to Anne (if you don't know the story do a quick google search) who is roughly 13 and decidedly uncooperative where the social mores are concerned.

The point to the conversation was basically: you go, girl!

Hardships and judgment for this encouragement fully recognized, the stately elder-woman offers the pronouncement anyway. Particularly true for a young Victorian era woman like our protagonist, but also deeply accurate for all of us.

Our lives are moment-by-moment propositions. Each new moment a humanist version of Schrodinger's Cat hanging on a razor's edge of .... will I be this? or will I be that? We take all our little breaths of air as an unconscious promise of another moment, another hour, another day, another month...

Reality is though - we are promised nothing. The universe will do it's "thing" and we get to determine  ...from an array of possible outcomes... how we will influence the subsequent moments.

Not too long ago it struck me that it had become an effort to be deliberately kind. I had to think about it and choose it. When we stop being kind, we walk around life like a house-cat who's claws are never sheathed, always at the ready inadvertently fucking shit up just by moving. I realized this little slip down an unpleasant facet of my personality was a byproduct. The consequence of something I prefer to believe and is categorically untrue: I am bullet proof.

The Kevlar reinforced fantasy allows me to ignore moments in which I feel loss, betrayal, and other subtle woundings. Ignoring them doesn't mean they don't happen (and if you're all like "whoa...therapist heal thyself"...you are not wrong) although it is a stellar defense mechanism.  It's effective in the moments when it is required; however, I'm not proud of how it highlights my natural inclination to be a bit of an asshole. The kevlar defense makes it easy for me to ignore the actions of others altogether only there's an additional heinous downside -

I can't speak to that which I choose to ignore. It is one/another way a potentially necessary statement, question or dialogue silences itself. Speaking up or out or however you want to say it, can come at a cost. A cost that can be consciously chosen or denied if the cost is known to us. If the cost is hidden behind door numbers One and Two - the risk feels exponentially greater.

We are all someones with many possible outcomes. Those possibilities are reduced to contextual social norms when we forget even the outcomes we find heinous are actually still an option should we so choose. Shaking off the weight of the Kevlar Defense requires me to consciously choose what my outcome will be when I choose to keep my mouth shut (sometimes wisdom, without a doubt) and when I choose to open it.

Reinstating a little more kindness started a couple of weeks ago. Hopefully I'm the better for it but more importantly, hopefully my little piece of the universe will be at least less worse - nudging along the outcome to a "the cat is alive" byproduct of intention.

responsibility v. unforgivable asshole

Been thinking about privilege a lot. It's a hot topic in the social warrior world and has become the scarlet letter tattooed to the foreheads of folks who fall into the current accepted class.

On a comparative scale, I've always lived with a degree of privilege:

1. I am caucasian
2. I grew up in a two-parent household
3. My parents were employed
4. I have always had a roof over my head.

That finger-pointing, shun-worthy scarlet P follows me like a junior-high "kick me" sign taped to my back.

Comparatives go both ways. I could write this the other direction. Could write about years of money being tight, of how we lived in a crap neighborhood when I was little, etc. I prefer to talk about how privileged as in grateful I feel that my parents busted their asses. My dad grew up on a working farm. Money was a rare blessing. He was born with a pretty huge birth defect and was Irish-Catholic. Catholic charities hospital did corrective surgery when he was a toddler ... at almost no cost.   That's huge. Without that charity I wouldn't be here. He'd have never made it off the farm.

He was the first/only one from his family who went to college. Same is true for my mom, born to an immigrant dad who literally built the house she grew up in. Himself.

My mom worked - doesn't sound all that earth-shattering. But in the blue-collar neighborhood that was the step up from where we lived before, it wasn't common. She went to work because it was the only way they could maybe send us kids to college.

There are loads of people who had it worse and loads more who had more privilege. I am grateful for how hard my grandparents worked. Literally, physically worked. They survived the Great Depression. Most of their kids survived too. Because two generations busted their asses, I did so less.

Dial forward. In high school, if I wanted what my friends had, I had to work too. Fine. In high school I got a job. I had a history of bone-tired hard working family behind me. I never questioned work was mandatory for survival.

Dial forward several decades. I have a nice roof over my head. My kids are going/have gone to university and we are only student-loaning a portion of it. I have a car I like driving, food isn't a question and there's "extra". Not tons by comparison to my environment given where I live...but extra nonetheless.

And I am unashamed. I know this privilege wasn't a random windfall from the gods. My parents and my grandparents worked their assess off so the subsequent generations would have a leg up. I don't worry about racial profiling and I don't face the scrutiny and judgment that still confronts the LGBQT community.

In the maelstrom and firestorm of "privilege = unforgiven asshole" I'm happy to be who and where I am. Like my parents I worked my ass off, because they required it of me. And now, I get to do something with all that privilege. I could be an asshole. I could lord it over people and tsk-tsk suffering and I could say "well why don't you just get a job".

Here's the thing. There's nothing shameful about being able to pay the bills or going on a vacation. You know the whole power = responsibility? It applies. To any one of us who stand on the shoulders of people who scraped out survival in generations prior. Privilege gets a bad rap when we behave like spoiled little monsters instead of adults with a degree of leverage. There's no shortage of spoiled monsters, but privilege = unforgivable asshole isn't a physical state of being, it's a mental one.

Leverage is power gained from the use of a tool. Privilege is a lever. How I choose to use that lever determines whether or not I function as an unforgivable asshole or I function as productive. I'm sure sometimes I am an asshole because most humans are assholes periodically. Being ashamed is a force amplifier too...but I'm not a fan of the results of that. If you have a roof over your head, food is available and you can pay your bills, you too have a degree of privilege.

Being ashamed of it does no one any good. Your privilege is a lever. Use it well and use it wisely. Make the little world around you a better place. Yeah, it sounds trite but no kidding, you have the power to do so .... pretending you don't makes you the unforgivable asshole, not your privilege.

this rose has thorns - #500

Protocol and Punishment. If you do something bad and wrong, your tribe will punish you. If the tribe wants to limit how much punishment it must meet out the tribe will create protocols to prevent the behavior altogether ...and up the punishment for maximum deterrent currency.

In the tribes I know of, it's a two-fer. A little prevention and a decent amount of punishment. Punishment itself is used as a two-fer...punish often enough and with a enough force and the punishments become prevention. Our current social structures expect this to be in total sufficient - we know it isn't. It's also where I struggle to believe the #MeToo and #Timesup campaigns will be deep game-changers. Maybe I'm wrong, and that would be cool.

And I'm sure Oprah and her colleagues didn't read my Dear Oprah post. For my little corner of the universe though, it was widely read (and widely read is absolutely a comparative to my other stuff and the idea of "widely" to me mostly means "read at all"). Confirmation that I'm on to something is that it was both agreed with and strongly disagreed with--

There's another award ceremony coming up - and a continuation of the efforts to support the #metoo and the  #timesup campaign, the artists are going to be wearing white roses. Kinda' cool in a fashion because the white rose was a symbol of women's suffrage and those women paid heavy prices for their commitment. They were jailed, starved, tortured in various was including being beaten and served food crawling with maggots.

Now the fight is about sexual harrassment and sexual violence with a strong focus on the arts and entertainment industry. #Timesup is a statement that people don't "get to do that anymore".

I'm poking around at a couple of questions - why is the time up? Why now? Why not 10 years ago? Why not 100 years ago...or a thousand years ago? Sexual violence has been protocol-ed and punished for millennia. 

Momentum probably gets a good deal of the credit. We've had more change in the 50+ years I've been alive than the last 300 years combined where women are concerned. #Metoo and #Timesup have created some momentum in the arts & entertainment industry and some momentum among the common folk as well.  It looks like a degree of this momentum is anchored in Protocol and Punishment. As in, let's do more of that. I don't know if that's good or bad - above my pay-grade, really. I am cautious about it remaining anchored in that particular trajectory.

It has the potential to invite an externalized attitude about personal authority and I've seen the damage that causes. Protocols are set by the tribe to keep us in-check and punishment is force-applied action when the protocols are violated. Protocols -rules- work for the people who agree with them. What if you don't agree with them? How many times have you driven over the speed limit? Anyone text and drive for even a second since the laws forbidding it were ratified?

Risk v. Reward drives those choices. In that moment of going over the speed limit, the reward felt worth the risk. There is no difference between rape and speeding when it comes to protocol effectiveness and behavior management. If you agree, you'll comply. If you don't, you won't.

Taking it deeper - systemic (tribal) punishment is only a factor if I get caught. And even then, I may judge the Risk:Reward ratio as worth it. Serving time is not always considered a horrible outcome. What then?

#500. I threw that out there in my letter to Oprah because I like the notion of women being able to decide for themselves. To have the skills, knowledge and ability to set their own protocols and their own ability to support the protocols with enforcement if necessary. Can that go awry? Will some women use physical force when it's not called for? Sure. But that's already happening across all gender lines for pretty much everything. That's why we still have child abuse. Yes, oversimplified comparison perhaps - but nonetheless that's the bottom line.

And at the end of it, women trained in self-defense .... includes a frontloading effort in prevention skills. Yeah, of course that includes don't all go out together and all get really shit-faced with no one to serve as the sober decision-maker.  Prevention is sooooo much more. People reading, understanding how and where and why violence happens, how to identify the difference between threat displays and pre-attack indicators, how to....

They physical stuff is the everything-else-failed option. It needs to BE an option, it also needs to be one of many options. And those of us in the industry need to be teaching All the things. All of them.


--and to prevent someone getting twitter-pated because that sounds like teaching all the prevention stuff is only a girl's game - don't hear that I mean it as such - it isn't.

Speaking of the proverbial Someone - someone...well several someone's actually - called me on my words. Give me 500 women? Pony up, sister. 

I'm in a massive project that is like a giant pacman eating all my time. It's over mid-March. But I'm moving on the #500 and I have an amazing tribe in the VioDy team who are standing with me and thinking with me and when March is past - there will be more. Boots-on-the-ground more.

....because - if we hit a tipping point of a high percentage of women who are trained in at least rudimentary self-defense the cultural expectation will shift from an assumption that women are easy targets to maybe only some women are .... but which ones? The Risk:Reward ratio will be harder to discern and I'd like to see what that looks like.

Circling back around to the white roses. Cool symbology. Let's remember too that this symbol far outreaches virtue signaling and reflects frontlines-level risk unprotected by the beauty and glamour of Hollywood Royalty. A white rose for this purpose also signals a level of anarchy required to create substantive change and a willingness to be at stake for a level of risk that carries an equal opportunity of reward and punishment. There will be both and the cost can be high.

nesting dolls

I'm in Santa Rosa, CA this week. It is like being in a nesting doll - a living breathing nesting doll.

I don't even know how to articulate it.

In October the area was hit with the "Tubbs" Fires. It's January and the impact of the devastation is still palpable. Not where I'm staying and working - it looks untouched. It isn't singed or scorched. But it's a pocket. It's a spot of normal in a reeling abnormality of destruction. Everyone I know here has talked about the new layer of impact - community wide PTSD. If your house didn't burn, maybe where you worked did - maybe you escaped both but XX number of your good friends are homeless.

I can't really find the language to express the ripple effects -

So nesting doll. I'm here in this city that is normal and abnormal paradoxically simultaneously.  And I'm teaching physical self-defense, a little ConCom, a little Violence Dynamics, a little Krav, in this mismash that shouldn't work...but does. Teaching a group of people who "have to" come to the training and the research on mandatory programming in any kind of rehabbing (including the whole idea that prison should be rehab of a sort) consistently reports mandatory stuff doesn't work. But this seems to.

And the people in my classes are in the bigger long term program that is voluntarily mandatory because being IN the program is voluntary but participating in the different aspects of the program once you are IN...is mandatory.  And so the people who show up to work with me for two days didn't have a say in it.

And they all have a metric ton of life they are working through, including addiction.  Violence is an up-close and personal experience for the majority - both on the giving and receiving end of the violence spectrum. So there's a lot of conversation and experience of PTSD in the program tucked inside a city that kind of has PTSD.

Nesting dolls.  Nothing profound to say about any of this. Just noticing and wondering about it. And fascinated once again by the crazy capacity humans have to adapt and adapt and adapt again. There's a continuum or a scale in how humans measure adaptability ...healthy to unhealthy to not-at-all.

But being here in the midst of a great deal of adaptation in action, all I can think of is --

no wonder we made it to the top of the food chain - we just don't know how to die, do we?

It's a figurative statement, haven't met an immortal human yet and we all eventually die and sometimes we die in tragedy -

at the collective though? we don't die easily. We should - but we don't.

Enemy Mine

the enemy narrative seems to be a deeply embedded human narrative. It's may even be tied in to our genetic drive for tribe. Kind of hard to have a solid sense of tribal identity if everyone in the tribe can change tribal affiliations at will - revolving door tribal identities aren't an acceptable thing.

I'd venture that in our current era, most of our tribal affiliations are imaginary. Doesn't make them wrong or bad or any less potent, the affiliations are just not tied to raw survival. Example. I am "a lot" Swedish. Still have family in Sweden. But if Sweden goes to war, I am not going to feel personally threatened. I'll worry about family - but my sense of physical safety and security won't be under attack. I am also "a lot" Irish. Same thing goes.

Tribal affiliations to our chosen organizations and even cultural heritage are rarely tied to our original drives for maintaining tribe. Sort of. Working this out...

Let's say I'm part of a Facebook group and over time, everyone in the group - leaves. The group page may still hold a spot in the interwebs, but the tribe has disbanded. Poof. Extinct. A year from now very few people, if any, will remember the group ever existed. Woe is me, such a loss!

But...if I founded this group and it's purpose is SUPER important to me and everyone is like 'meh' and moves on, I am likely to feel at the minimum, a tad irritated and on the opposite extreme - deeply betrayed.

And. If you leave my FB group for another group of a similar focus - now you are an enemy. You are my competition. You, are a traitor. You are loyal to me, or you are my enemy.

Are we so fiercely protective of our imaginary tribes because the evolution of humans' higher level skills (prefrontal cortex stuff) has outpaced the evolution of our tribal functions/drives? There is an internal disparity in these two evolutionary tracks and I wonder if that's why we engage in such dysfunctional behavior.  Think about this. If I belong to one martial arts group and then get involved in a second - there is a powerful martial mores that says my behavior is bad and wrong.

About a year ago I was looking into Libre - nosing around more than anything. A martial colleague reached out and said "hey, I'm a Libre guy and we could work together and make your school a location" (paraphrased). This could be fun, I'm thinking. But......I was also connected to someone else, a different martial colleague who had a few connections to Libre and taught knife stuff....and there was a subtle resistance to this from the first person. The connection never happened - for a variety of reasons btw - I'm just using this as an example to highlight the point.

The Gracie BJJ organization had a video circulating in which one of the Gracies made an overt statement that if you trained with him and then you also decided to train with someone else you were really fucking up and he would take it personally- a betrayal and a violation of ethics.

Another example - I'm connected pretty deeply with a couple of Martial 'tribes'. A representative of one of the tribes and I had a conversation ....can't remember when...a year? two years ago? The conversation included a questioned posed to me...why would you risk the approval and support of our organization to be connected to another one?

Somewhat paraphrased because naming the tribes is irrelevant here. It highlights though, the strong drift humans have toward the enemy narrative.

You are either with us, or against us.

Historical references go back at least as far as the Judeo-Christian Old Testament Book of Joshua - this is super important to us.

I am chasing about 5 different rabbit trails in this context right now - maybe there will be a few more posts on it as I play around with it. At this moment, I am landing on a couple of things:

1. if the purpose of a tribe is to make people better, stronger, more resilient expressions of themselves then this tribe would be violating it's own purpose for existence to say "you can only be stronger and more resilient in MY way..." because-
2. If as a tribe, I restrict your ability to become stronger and more resilient to the greatest degree possible then I make you vulnerable to the types of strength other tribes are developing...i.e. you can only be strong the way MY tribe is strong.
3. This creates an obvious weakness easily exploited by the enemies my tribe has created by drawing this line.

Rory once posed the question...is it possible to shift tribes without creating an enemy narrative? It should be possible because the tribal identities are a) chosen and b) irrelevant to daily survival. However, the disparity in evolution of our monkey and human brains may create such an intense dystonic state that we may find the paradox too intense and capitulate to the stronger monkey drives no matter what we do. And yes - I am using the WE on purpose. The WE applies to both the tribe and the Benedict Arnold's.

Sooo many thoughts - but given I'm at the end of cogent thoughts at the moment - I'll put a pin in it for now.

where danger lives

Thoughts stirring from a couple of different statements and a conversation from BC Vancouver VioDy –EDITED...

Humans aren’t a fan of acknowledging violence as an element of our biological nature and yet we have always used it to establish territories, to affirm hierarchies, to punish and to set tribal membership boundaries.

We have grown into a colonized species and like ants, have figured out how to live in large numbers without eating each other or ripping each other’s heads off (literally). Most of us like the results of the skill set.

And even with this evolutionary trend toward civil colonization, we struggle to keep ourselves in check.

In the past week I’ve heard two law enforcement professionals create a distinction between violence and use of force.  One made the distinction overtly and argued for it openly. The other one made the distinction in a conversation; not quite as consciously, but no doubt was still anchoring into violence and use of force are different.

post published edit to the above paragraph: flushing this out a bit - I know plenty of LEO's who do not separate use-of-force & violence contextually. I think the need to differentiate among force professionals is anchored in the idea that violence is bad and therefore if a force pro is one of the good guys, what s/he does in the line of duty can't be called violence.

There’s no difference. Use of Force is violent action. Sanctioned violence, maybe – but still violence.

Is it better to categorize violence with language to create the behavioral leashes that allow for this colonized living (and all its benefits)?

Or is it better to acknowledge – violence is violence – and set different parameters? I’m going to be super biased because this second option is my paradigm so obviously, I like it.

Being unleashed removes any socially programmed rules for when violent action is acceptable. Unleashed, I can hit you over the head with a shovel because you took my chair. When my kids were toddlers they hit each other over the head with tiny plastic beach shovels because someone had their bucket. Humans in their natural state do this.

So, I have parameters. A protocol in place that guides my choices based on how I want to live in this colony of humans. I have a failsafe if I lose my shit and slip the leash. I have friends who have similar protocols. Hence the bias.

I can’t help but wonder if the “let’s use words to say certain kinds of violence aren’t actually violence” is a risky way of establishing protocols. In psychology, there is a school of thought that identifies the more dangerous human is the one who refuses to acknowledge what s/he is capable of…

You know, the person who says – and adamantly believes – s/he could NEVER do THAT – EVER.

This is a dangerous human. If she ever slips the proverbial leash it will be so completely alien an action she’ll have no capacity for self-regulation. And this makes me wonder if the increase in episodes of mass shootings, etc.  is tied to our over-domestication and refusal to acknowledge…yup – I could totally do that.

We can’t explore and regulate those behaviors of which we refuse to become self-aware (sorry for the psychobabble).

I know what I’m capable of. I know where I glitch and I know why. I know there are blindspots still in which this awareness is completely absent.

Can you answer these same things for yourself? Are there things you think you absolutely can NOT do? Are you sure?

Violence isn’t binary. Shooting you is violent. It doesn’t matter if I do it because I don’t like your face, or I do it because I have sworn duty to protect and you have a gun shoved in the mouth of a baby. Either way, if I pull the trigger I am – in that moment – violent.

The more domesticated our colonization becomes, the more we eschew words reflecting our primal nature. I don’t think this is something we should be particularly proud of -

What! Really? Say it isn't so-

ooookaaaayyyy. The woodwork is crawling with everyone who's coming out of it from Hollywood to The Hill. Sexual violations from lewd comments, groping, assault and under-age targeting.

And we are all appalled. Along side is the social media awareness campaign #MeToo.  That's a different but parallel universe so for now, I'll stick with the crawling woodwork.

I have two questions.

Why are we surprised?

Why are we suddenly outraged?

Question One. Why are we surprised...
Sex and sexuality have been a confused and distorted facet of human behavior for.............. well kind of for a few millennia.  Humans have been using rape as an action of war or territorial marking for deep back into recorded history. As a personal action, I think it's a safe assumption to say sexual violence has been a factor in our behavior at least as long as it has been part of our behavior at the tribal level. Sexual violence and appropriation is about power, dominance, control, territorial marking, and occasionally about lust and desire. This.Is.Not.News.

What's more, I'm pretty sure most adults are not actually authentically surprised by the recently disclosed licentious behavior. Our need to be surprised by a decently documented historically time-lined behavior serves a purpose. Are we collectively surprised because it gives us the right to plausible deniability? Letting ourselves off the proverbial hook of social responsibility?

Question Two. Why are we suddenly outraged...
Perhaps our collective gasp is an acceptable expression of virtue signaling. Generally, no one I know or have ever come into contact with supports sexual violence as a socially acceptable human behavior.  There is a dark and twisty debate about what actually constitutes sexual violence - but there doesn't seem to be debate about whether or not it's something we should all gather around to say "yay US! Let's legalize rape!"

Let's get honest. In industries and social systems like Hollywood and politics, the fight for and ownership of power is a primary objective. And if there is a human behavior through which power is frequently expressed then there should be a pretty high correlation between the power-hungry industries and this behavior.

We should not be surprised. You should not be surprised. By any of this. Drop the drama.

It's common. If we have decided that common no longer equals acceptable, okay - good on you. Fix it. Get off the drama and get to work.

hmmmm - considering an uncomfortable probability

"Women have a tendency to look more to an authority/leadership for confirmation on decisions than men." By experience in training environments - a discovery made in specifically a force professional environment during training phases by a colleague. Is this statistically accurate? Does it apply in other professions? Don't know. Someday I may research all that but for now, don't need to because I can confirm - as uncomfortable as this may be to acknowledge - that in force-related industries I know this to be personally true.

Is this because it is a traditionally male paradigm? Do women, unconsciously perhaps, notice and wonder:

because there are so few women, and the majority of the leadership are men - maybe as a female - I better check with a guy to see if I'm thinking about XX in the right way. Maybe, the lack of women indicates the guys get this more than women do and so I shouldn't rely as much on my own judgment or intuition here...maybe...

I don't know. I haven't had those thoughts at a conscious level. When I worked in violence-prone environments I didn't look to the men for direction when someone was escalating because - in those environments -

a) I trusted my skill set
b) the roles in the environment had me in more of an "authority" position then most of the men I worked with. In other words, it was my job to make the call, not theirs.

But...personally on the mat - I know there were plenty of times I would question my ability to figure out what I was doing wrong when something wasn't working. I asked more questions than the guys.

The questions themselves aren't a solid metric of this though because as a whole, women are more discovery oriented and because of how our brains are wired, we see more connections between the points and we have a stronger drive to understand the "why".  What the questions were about though, that's where the comment that kicked off this post is something I can relate to (ick, so much don't like the reality there).

For a long time, I didn't trust my ability to figure out a solution on my own. I know of at least one situation where I followed a male training partner over the cliff in a martial-art mistake because we were the same rank and he was certain...and I wasn't.

I don't know how universally true the "Women have a tendency to look more to an authority/leadership for confirmation on decisions than men" reality is. It does seem to show up in force/violence related paradigms. And from a teaching/coaching in self-defense mindset it makes a particularly coaching approach even more relevant:

Good coaching often involves responding to a student's question "how do I fix this?" with "What do YOU think?" or some other form of encouragement that is basically designed to say hey...you can probably figure out a solution on your own. If there IS a gender metric and it does circle more around the force/violence industry and we want women to believe they can be their own bodyguards (to paraphrase a common marketing ploy) - then we need to coach the mindset early...and often.

As instructors we need to support her to look to herself to solve the problem. If we are preparing someone for a martial arts testing - all students need the coaching that will help them pass their test. This is different coaching. This is about performance and about looking "uniform" in how they move. Everyone's foot needs to HERE and everyone needs to move diagonally at a 45 degree angle. Everyone needs to.... because in a Martial Art we are training to the measure of the Art. In Self-Defense? Not so much. She needs to know she has -or can develop - the ability to think on the fly. She needs to trust she is as capable as the guys. Maybe even, that when it comes to high-speed problem solving, she might be naturally better at it because she adrenalizes more slowly.

hmmm.

sneaky is as sneaky does

Haven't written here in a while. Partly because I've been wicked busy but mostly because my thoughts have been swirly misty things too hard to pin down into a cogent set of words. I'm not sure that's changed but here we go anyway.  I am back from my second teaching gig with the VioDy crew. This time at VioDy Prime. The original location and with mostly retreads (people who've done it before). Significant to me because I was teaching stuff they'd all seen before and seen before by the person who created the stuff. Yeah - no pressure there, nope....none at all.

Like, teaching structure in front of a couple of Judo/Jiu Jitsu instructors who's art forms are anchored in structure. I seriously considered throwing Rory Miller out of the room for that one because my monkey brain was all "oh hey, let me teach that one thing that you taught me...and yeah - the drop step oh yeah, teaching that one too and it took me forever to get THAT one down and now you're going to sit over there and watch me teach it...fuck that".  Didn't kick him out but I thought about it.

One of the get-to's about VioDy is I get to teach Conflict Communication. I think the material is transformational and I really like teaching it - for a lot of reasons - but mostly because each time I teach it the insights that pop up in the room change how I see the material and inform more deeply into how humans work and seeing as how I'm a shrink, that makes my day.

We talk a lot about the monkey brain (your limbic system etc.) and how much it resists change. The resistance goes waaaayyyy up when that change impacts any tribal affiliation or your place in that tribe. The monkey brain is also wicked smart. Not intelligent necessarily, but smart - clever - underhanded and devious even. It's always cool to find the evidence of this, particularly in your own self.

Working with Rory, Kasey, Randy and Terry is a gift all the way around and I am privileged to say Rory is one of my closest friends. My closest friends are the people who are comfortable saying the hard things. Spent several days with this bunch and discovered something. I know that he smart little monkey brain will use our own biases and glitches against us. What didn't occur to me was how this smart little aspect of the socialized self will use our personal ethics in an inverse strategy to undermine change.

If I work to minimize behaviors I identify as personal character flaws - like weakness - my monkey brain can and will use that against me if it means maintaining stasis.

Me: where I find weakness in myself, I will work to change that - do the hard things, etc.
Monkey Me: if you do XXX that will be weakness
Me: Oh! Damn. Okay, got it. Won't do XXX.
Monkey Me: good job! (claps me on the back) atta' girl. (and smiles a little just at the corners to avoid being obvious because not doing XXX does not benefit me or the goal but homeostasis in the tribe).
Me: Wait. What?

Homeostasis of the tribe isn't bad or wrong. Usually. But sometimes it works at cross purposes to strength and growth. Growth and strength - and transformation - they upset the balanced systems of the tribe so the monkey is going to prevent it and if it has to, the monkey brain will use your own personal rules for living to the tribe's advantage perhaps at the cost of your own well-being.

Sneaky little bastard.

recognize the bait - recognize the hook

A friend in the martial arts/self-defense world posted something recently from an online group. She copied a post from another female practitioner and then made a sympathetically face-palm sort of rant  about the post.

I read the repost. At the moment I am all out of rants and something needs to be said - again.

"You probably aren't going to hurt/injure a family member or colleague. So, be careful about biting on the show me what you learned hook." This is a common cautionary statement delivered mostly (in my experience) from female instructors to female students.

Here's why we say it:

Jane starts training in martial arts or self-defense. Jane's brother, husband, boyfriend, male colleague (fill in the blank) will eventually make this request show me what you learned. This is a hook. The majority of the time, this request is an invitation to a monkey display of strength, dominance and ultimately - putting her back in her place in the tribal hierarchy. What happens next is predictable.

Jane: we learned how to defend a headlock (or whatever you want to put in there...)
Him: show me -
        He puts her in said headlock or choke or grab or whatever and sinks in like he's fighting for his life. Jayne begins to demonstrate the defense....and it fails. She can't get out or get away because she is being respectful of the relationship. She isn't running at full speed or full power. She isn't causing pain or injury. If the defense is technically valid, it will work in most situations but she will need to execute with the full force of my life depends on it level of energy and commitment. If Jane does this, her boyfriend, husband, son, brother, etc. is getting hurt. So she doesn't.

Him: see? you can't fight someone like me, it won't ever work against someone like me
        his point? I dominate you. I always have and I always will. You are defenseless against me.

If this is a family member who actually gives two-cents worth about Jane's safety and security, why would he want her to feel helpless? He will argue that he's just trying to make it realistic for her, only he isn't. He is counting on her unwillingness to cause him pain and injury.

If Jane says fuck it to the social boundaries and executes an effective response to his attack there is retribution. Punishment. Sometimes it's physical - he hurts her back. If the relationship is personal or familial, the punishment may not be physical, it may be more like withdrawing affection or help around the house or cutting remarks.

Sometimes, sometimes this happens on the mat. A male training colleague will feel it's his duty to make sure his attacks are realistic so the girl gets a real experience .... or that's the story he tells himself to justify an opportunity for physical expressions of power and control over women. If Jane is effective here, the punishment is usually physical and is occasionally backed-up with cutting remarks to her and fellow to students about her. This is what happened to the woman in the forum. She posted her experience to the other women in the group and I don't like my reaction.

I just nodded and moved on. Kind of like I nod and move on when someone tells me we are out of milk at home because, well, so what else is new?  Happens all the time.

A couple of key points:

• yes, this happens once in a while between men
• it may happen between women, I don't have any accounts of it
• no, this is not a Down with Patriarchy flag flying moment - because -
• it's not about patriarchy
• it's about a distorted and toxic relationship with power

The guy on this script doubts. He doubts his own capacity for power so he adds to his power-bank account by dominating other people. He does this by playing on the specific social scripts of expected behavior among martial artists and/or connected relationship (the script being don't hurt or injure family/friends/colleagues in a polite demonstration) and leverages the script to gain power and control. The social script is the bait. It's a fantastic piece of bait because it blends right in to the environment. Like the fisherman's perfect lure or the hunter's deftly disguised trap, the bait distracts the prey from the hook hiding behind the natural environmental cues (social scripts).

This behavior matches two specific profiles. The process predator and the resource predator. Both use the standard social scripts in any given culture or tribe to their advantage for the purposes of power and control.

It doesn't meant that the boyfriend, brother, husband, colleague is categorically a process predator. We are all capable of this orientation. It means that in our current sociocultural milieu, there is still a hard glitch in a significant number of men when women express physical fierceness. Their human brain says of course I think women should be able to defend themselves their monkey brain snarls against everyone except me.

I don't know the woman who posted her experience in my friend's Facebook group. Don't have to. I have had any number of female students come to me and tell identical stories. So much so, that now when I teach women's only classes there is a specific script I use during the wrap-up. I explain that this hook will most likely get thrown at their feet by someone they know. And then we talk about how to handle it.

I won't wrap this up by saying it's sad we have to do this because saying it's sad decries the common nature of the experience and denies reality. This happens all the time. Women who train need to know  it for what it is - it's a hook. Bite down on the hook and he has permission now to justify his display of physical power and efforts at domination.

Don't bite.

caveat: there are plenty of situations where this does NOT happen. When the male person asks to be shown what she's learning and he doesn't try to prove anything to her. Writing about how frequently the request is used as a hook is about like anything we write about; highlighting things that need to be highlighted so we can become part of the solution v. perpetuating the problem.

training for tragedy

#training for tragedy #cross breeding books  #can't help myself. 

If I wrote in hashtags that's how this would start.

Book number one; Rory's book, Training for Sudden Violence, is aptly titled seeing as it is a series of drills and skill development options for the potential of a violent encounter. 

Book number two; Gilligan's book, Violence: Reflections on a national epidemic, I haven't finished yet but I can't help myself. 

Gilligan is a psychiatrist who spent the bulk of his career working with incarcerated violent offenders. Gilligan has a personal touchstone with violence as well, grew up with a raging father.  Rory and Gilligan share the background of working in the prison system and although I haven't finished Gilligan's book yet (and it published about 20 years ago) I am curious to see if there are similarities between the two authors' perspectives. 

It's not a fair comparison because I know Rory. I am only now meeting Gilligan and only via his professional presentation on paper. 

...but I can't help myself. Gilligan starts by trying to create a language base that makes sense for the conversation. He goes through categories of constructs and explains why he chooses Tragedy as the only one that works for violence. 

Tragedy's etymology is odd, but I see how Gilligan came to his conclusion. Historically, the word describes an unhappy event, or a disaster. Gilligan takes it further and explains why it isn't "pathos" a natural disaster outside of human control - being goal driven and interactive and a variety of other things. 

Gilligan's title uses the word Epidemic too. I don't know if I agree with him yet - need to read the rest of the book. Playing with this though, it works (thus far).

As a student in combat arts, I seek out the most efficiently brutal approaches possible. So I can teach those efficiently brutal actions to people who might get caught in Gilligan's tragedy. I am then, training for tragedy. 

If violence is tragedy and this tragedy is epidemic then violence is a virus because a virus can be epidemic in nature. Bacterial infections can go epidemic as well, so I guess violence could be either and with both a viral and a bacterial epidemic, inoculations can be created to keep the uninfected safe. Gilligan has yet to mention how violence is fundamental to natural survival. Munching on a carrot or chewing on a steak - the methods getting both items to my plate involved violent action. The interchange between man and carrot or man and cow was unhappy for the cow/carrot- in Gilligan's interpretation then, a tragic moment went down.

I can't teach a carrot threat assessment skills or how to convince a Threat he's picked the wrong carrot to mess with. I can teach that to a human. Training for tragedy.

Playing around inside the etymology of the titles - Training for sudden violence is a gradual inoculation against tragedy. Sort of. If it goes physical, it's still doesn't really have a happy ending. If you defend yourself successfully there will still be an aftermath - you know, the whole catastrophic win thing? Yeah, it applies. 

But...in a violent interchange with a Target who believes he is incapable of defensive action, the tragedy may be far more epic. And the socialized condition rendering one human helpless against another, more comfortably violent human - this is also viral.

Okay. Let me see if I can tie this together. Training for violence is training for "tragedy", something disastrous. Like most things, disaster is scalable. The scale is impacted by the magnitude of the aftermath AND how the people involved interpret where the event falls on the scale.  Force is scalable. Force on force events end when one person uses just the right amount of force to overwhelm the ability of the other person to continue. Disaster management. Epidemic management. Inoculation. 

Inoculated against polio, I can be exposed to polio with a remarkably reduced risk of contracting polio. It isn't risk-free, but I'm down there on the low end of the scale. I got there because I have a little bit of the polio virus running through my veins. My immune system is 'trained' in polio. It knows how to defend itself. 

When I teach women's self-defense courses I tell them that the statistics will change when women are no longer a consistently easy target. When the exposure risk is consistently high -when women are inoculated carriers of Gilligan's Tragedy, many would-be Threats will think twice (you know, the whole goal of limiting the amount of damage s/he takes).  Not all; but many. This gets me in trouble with the current movement in feminism decrying women's self-defense training as part of the problem "Teach men not to rape!". 

Way to give the game away, girls. Let's go back to being helpless waifs with the vapors; yup that'll work. I mean it worked well in the past, right? 

If you don't want to catch polio you have two options during a polio outbreak. Option A: go live in the woods far away from all humans (like my grandparents did with my mother before there was a vaccine).  Option B: get inoculated. 

I love the isolation of the woods but I don't want to be forced to live there. And at the end of it, living in the woods only protects me, what about all the other people I care about? 

Option B, it is. Inoculation. I didn't need to have it injected because it is part of my nature as a human. I did need to have it brought to life. And although exposure to violence while under the influence of the other socialized infection (i.e. - experiencing helplessness in the presence of said violence) may play a part, Training for this Tragedy gave my instinctive nature a few tools to play with. 

Violence is integral to the fabric of the natural universe. Only humans engage in violent acts against other humans for the fun of it. Maybe this is Gilligan's tragedy - I'll know better when I finish his book.  Whether his logic plays out or not, he's given me metaphor that I can use, like the inert carrier agents of the virus/bacteria formulated for the inoculation, the metaphor may help get the point across.

tacit conspiracies

I recently stood in a line-up. The socially dictated lineup of a receiving line. I don’t like them. I don’t really know anyone who enjoys standing in a tidy row as everyone else walks by to a) make some level of physical contact and b) mumble scripted praises or condolences. And as much as the banal socially scripted interchanges are irritating and boring, the opposite can be worse in the receiving line ritual. That one person who stops in front a specific person in the lineup and dives into a heartfelt conversation. This isn’t the ritual and everyone is left uncomfortably flat footed while traffic progressively backs up on down the line.

This is an odd ritual when you think about it. Most people don’t enjoy the process whether in the giving or in the receiving of the scripted touch/remarks. But it happens anyway. Most often in funerals and weddings. Two of our biggest rites of passage are marked by receiving lines.

The people in the lineup are on display and the people who come to have a look carry their own expectations of what they want/need to see. These expectations are distinctly driven by culture and tribal protocols and it took me a few minutes to realize I was breaking one. My own discomfort with being on the display line blurred over into small gestures of discomfort on the other end so I didn’t catch it right away. It was a well-attended funeral, I had a lot of time to figure it out. In polite society the cues signaling awkward discomfort are less blatant. People smiling or tilting their heads in gestures of familiarity with fleeting bracing at the jaw. One shoulder tipping away, or making eye contact but breaking it and looking quickly down or off to the side to the next person in the line. To name a few.

The offending gesture was me extending my hand out for the expectant physical contact. I did not know 98% of these people and the obligatory hugs are generally held for people who can at least demonstrate a degree of facial recognition. Some of the elderly women reached for the pat-pat hug anyway. They skipped right over my extended hand. Okay. No problem. But the other two responses were most dominant and followed the rules of polite, Southern, conservatively religious society. Don’t touch the strange woman.

Particularly the men. My extended hand was usually ignored by the men. When it was received there was no handshake. Take just the fingers, hold them for just a moment, release them. It took a particularly awkward guy for me to realize I was the source of the discomfort specifically – beyond the general no one wants to be here business.

Oh. I get it. I’m doing this wrong. That was the revelation – I can be a bit dense sometimes.

The rest of receiving line wasn’t any more comfortable but at least now I had something to do. Try and read the body language ahead of time. Who is going to shake my hand, who isn’t? This is not a place to trot out personal expectations.

On the long ass drive home the next day, I had a lot of time to think. A question materialized.

When is tacit consent [to a tribal protocol] and act of kindness and when is it conspiracy?

The receiving line at a memorial service is a no-brainer. This isn’t about me. It’s not about acknowledging women as equal partners in a productive, advancing society. Forcing the men to shake my hand just makes me an asshole.

What about in other environments? Just taking the handshake rule, male uncomfortable touching female = no handshake. Reading the body language that says “this is wrong” gives me, us, a choice. I can extend my hand and leave it out there and the person who doesn’t take it is the asshole. It’s obvious if not to anyone else but the two of us. How do you choose? Who’s the asshole? I have answers and places I use the handshake rules as a litmus test. It is an instantaneous data dump about the other person. Will they shake my hand? At what level of grip? What level of contact? For how long? What’s the eye contact? Posture? Structural positioning? So much information.

There is a new series coming out – don’t remember which network is producing it. The title is The Handmaid’s Tale. Based on a book* I read well over a decade ago. Disturbing book. Disturbing because it takes this gray zone decision making and demonstrates what happens when tacit consent to a protocol/rule/expectation slowly becomes conspiratorial agreement to participate. It’s not unconscious. The monkey self-justifies the agreement. Go along to get along. Don’t make waves. It won’t be that bad. This isn’t a hill to die on.

And then we wake up one morning and discover the entire social structure has shifted and to go back on that conspiratorial agreement will cost you everything. The book is disturbing because it is entirely possible.

Which hill you die on, is your decision. Key word here – decision. It’s a choice. Your choice. If you, me, if we don’t take the time when time offers itself up for a good think – if we don’t take the time to consider the hills, and upon which ones we want to battle to the death, gray zone ambivalence wins. And like it or not, whatever shackles you find about your ankles, you agreed to it.

*The Handmaid's Tale was published in 1985. Author: Margaret Atwood.

victimizing assumption

 

 

Humans love us some assumption – at an intellectual level we understand how dangerous assumptions can be – but our monkey brains just love the stuff. Like a Claymore, assumptions guarantee collateral damage. This is not a lightbulb moment. The scatter blast damage zone of an assumption is a foregone conclusion. Hence the “you know what you do when you assume, you make and ASS out of U and ME”.

 

Here’s one that gets me curious and when my monkey gets all excited, frustrated and annoyed. And pissed, if I'm being honest.

“All women who train in self-defense have been attacked and have issues.”

 

Both pieces of this assumption are a trap. They trap the assum-er and they trap the target of the assumption. The assumption traps these women into a specific reality and by nature of the assumption, victimizes.

 

If I am a woman who enjoys rehabbing my natural predatory instincts and have never experienced an assault (of any kind) and you assume I have been the target of violence, your assumptions shuts down an entire aspect of my liberty. I am not free, not really. By your assumption, I am not free to take possession of my future, I am not free to choose how and where I play. There must be a dark and scary driver, or I wouldn’t be here. My past is in control of my choices…not me.

 

Fact 1: women have the capacity to be damned effective tactical agents. Studies show women can be better equipped for combat than men due to a myriad of brain wiring natural to most females.

 

Fact 2: playing the way tiger cubs play – practicing the hunt, pounce and kill sequence is fun. Baby predators play the way predators function. We are predators and because we are humans, we learn to play throughout our lives.

 

If you assume I have been attacked = I have issues to work out you are going to expect me to quit my training at some point (because I'm all better now). I don't get to be good because I just want to be. Thanks for that.

 

Moving on. Let’s say I am a woman who does have a history of violence and I train in self-defense seminars, classes, programs. This does not automatically preclude I am doing this for fun. The history does not naturally prohibit me from choosing it because I enjoy it. At some point along the way there may be a process of testing social conditioning and programming from a violent encounter, conditioning equating to a belief of “victim”. Cool. Very cool, in fact.

 

To presume women with a history train only to work through issues is remarkably delimiting. The assumption means once the issues are resolved – training is done. She moves on. Okay, maybe that happens and it’s perfectly fine. But if she continues to train, indefinitely, the assumption is going to drive the you have issues label deeper and deeper. Making her more and more pathological. This is a good idea…how?

 

It’s not binary, folks. If Susie trains to overcome feelings of victimization and helplessness and then moves on to other things once that is accomplished, good on her. If Sally trains to overcome same victimization/helplessness and then discovers this is just a metric ton of fun, she gets to do that. But if we make it binary – then Sally’s issues just get bigger, worse, more pathetic the longer she trains. She is more victimized instead of less...

 

Really. Think about it. Do you really want to cast that on her?

 

The redundant habit of assumption is a monkey brain function and has the capacity to create tribal rules/protocols. Those protocols become beliefs and those beliefs become fact.

 

And all along that unfortunate timeline, the women who train become sentenced to deeper levels of presumed victimization.

 

So much for empowerment (which sucks as a word anyway as it is so overused).

 

Next time you have a thought about women on the mat – check it – teach your monkey a little humility and remind it assumptions are a sign of weakness. Strong people get curiosity is a higher order. Only strong people test their beliefs against assumption and trade tribal bias for curiosity.

 

Be a strong person. Let women who choose to train define their own reasons and prescribe their own futures.