Pine Tar Thoughts

Pine sap. East Texas folks in the Pineywoods call it Pine Tar. The interminably sticky sap oozing off pine trees is like perpetual double-sided tape. You can't seem to get it off of you (skin, clothes, whatever) and everything you come in contact with sticks back.

Every once in a while I get Pine Tar thoughts. An idea or a gut feeling refusing to let go of me. No matter how I try to ignore it away or wash it out of my thoughts, it's just too damned sticky and won't go away.

Several weeks ago I received an openly hostile email spewing hate-filled comments about something I was quoted as saying in an article. I looked back at the article and even reached out to the author about the how it was perceived. Then I wrote about the email (in part) in Scared Rabbit Syndrome.  I wondered if I was being over-sensitive and realized being attacked by some unknown person from somewhere out there in the inter webs is just an odd experience because it's an intangible confrontation. The best response may in fact be no response at all.

Then the sticky thought came back. More of a little niggling wormy thing in the back of my head. So I looked at it again - is my perception wrong? Is there an actual error in using a Predator Test to suss out whether or not a casual touch or brush of contact is truly accidental v. the beginning of Target Assessment?

Don't think so. I still believe if one's radar goes off and there isn't anything openly threatening happening yet, you can test the situation out before activating a personal version of community Tornado Sirens. Conversely, I also believe you have the right to just get up and walk away if that feels like the best option; however, the circumstances discussed in the article and subsequent vitriol attack reference confined space in an airplane. Only so much getting up and walking away available.

The sticky thought eventually pointed out a blind spot. I firmly believe everything can be weaponized. Including words. Including words typically employed for social pleasantries. Words like Please. Two-by-four upside the head moment for me: that's not a common mindset among women. Duh. Not the sharpest crayon in the box sometimes.

Pine Tar thought should be done now. Moving on. .... Nope.... it's back again. Sticky damn thing.

Last night I ran into the tree. The source of the Pine Tar worm in the back of my brain.

NOW I GET IT! Now I understand why this woman exploded in an email about the predator test process discussed in the article. I understand why her solution - the only solution that should ever be taught, standing up and screaming get your fucking hands off me you XYZ, when you get brushed by a passenger seated next to you - now I understand what that means.

Before I ran into the Tree, I kept thinking - why does someone want to live that way? How is teaching women to assume every accidental point of contact is a sexual assault a good idea? Or at least, why is it becoming a popular idea? Yeah, I get the influence of the #MeToo movement and I appreciate the depth of awareness-shift happening...but still...it bugged me.

Now I get it.

What image sparks in your mind when you  see "Women's Self-Defense Seminar"?

Pictures of women learning to hit? Women learning groin kicks? Learning to defend chokes on the ground? Women at a shooting range learning to use a firearm?

Me too (see what I did there?). This is how I was raised as a self-defense instructor. This is how I was trained as a Women's Krav Maga instructor - a specialty certification. Don't get me wrong, I think physical self-defense should be part of gym class in all middle and high school curriculum.

But this is also where we get it wrong.

I have a daughter-in-law. I have nieces. I have a handful of adopted daughters, girls I have known well through the years. The last thing I want ANY of them to EVER experience is the need for those physical skills I love teaching. There are no physical encounters without scars. Emotional or physical.   And yet those images are the expression of women's self-defense - of self-defense regardless of gender.

Prevention. This is what we should visualize when we hear Women's Self-Defense. Threat Assessment, people reading, environment management, victim assessment/grooming (as in - you're being evaluated as a potential target), escape/evasion...the short list of skills we should picture when we think of self-defense training. The fun physical stuff - and I mean that literally - should absolutely live in the curriculum. The industry standard is the mistake.  We teach the last line of defense as the primary skill set instead of as the last line of defense.

Ta-Da. This is the sticky-pine-tar brain worm. Women's Self-Defense is synonymous with physical self-defense. Now the verbally violent email makes sense. The self-defense world has held a singular focus and has effectively created one acceptable solution to assault: wait until you are attacked to respond. This is the standard.

This logic is akin to teaching architects to look for structural problems after the bridge collapses.

With the pine tar washing off, I have more thoughts.  This post; however, is already WAY too long. Putting a pin in it and maybe there will be a part 2.

#500 thoughts - goals forward

found an incongruence in my mental framework. Fixing it-

Goals Forward + Resources Backward is not a super common cognitive paradigm. This may be an evolutionary thing. How much food does our little band of homo sapiens have? Hmmm, doesn’t look good – time to hunt. The resource assessment determines today’s agenda, the goals. How we shift to goals-forward is something to noodle around on and I’m super tempted to follow that rabbit trail but it’s not why I sat down at the keyboard this morning.

I tend to be fairly goals-forward when attacking a problem. Or a person. Or I was when I first started training. It may be why TKD was frustrating because the goals were about tournaments and belt progressions and after a while, it just wasn’t a meaningful enough goal to hold me. Krav Maga was a little easier to sink my teeth into, the goals worked for me -move in, cause damage, prevail, get out. Those goals made it easier to get connected to the idea of rank testing and other achievement-based benchmarks within the progressive system of a combat art.

During the early days of becoming an instructor, 99% of my instructors were men. Big surprise. Periodically, I needed reminding that I wasn’t 6 feet tall, 250 pounds and I wasn’t bullet proof. They weren’t wrong. My instructors were pointing out that my attitude was fine but my tactics sucked. You can’t be 6 feet tall when you are – ummm – NOT, no matter how much attitude you bring to the event.

Size matters (I know…I know…jokes abound). While I stubbornly, slowly began to acknowledge this reality another affordance snuck in and tainted the way I thought, assessed and taught. The impact of mass differentials in the physics of a violent encounter is a thing. What creates the potential for a distortion in thinking, is how we relate to the terms “advantages” and “disadvantages”. This is a resources-forward way of thinking. What do I have? What am I lacking? How do I work with that?

A question crept in a while back, it didn’t have words to it so I couldn’t articulate it but now there are both words and what feels like an answer. Resources-forward  as a useful paradigm in self-defense has a limited shelf-life. Limited like buying milk the day before it goes bad, limited.

I am guilty of teaching this way. The size comparative of person A and person B may be immutable.  The goal is dynamic and it is the goal that dictates the strategy and the ensuing tactics. This is a painfully obvious statement.

It’s a useful statement though, perhaps. As I dig deeper into developing #500, my first steps are in researching mindsets, instructional approaches, the good/bad/ugly of women’s self-defense and in this research am finding an unfortunate little fallacy that crept in to my own affordances over the years. Size is a disadvantage from which to compensate.

Or not.

Size is a factor. But if it’s one piece of a larger equation, whether it’s an X or an A in: a+b=x doesn’t, by its nature, determine whether or not it is advantageous or deleterious to the equation.

What happens if we drop this paradigm. If we stop telling women (specifically but not exclusively) that they are at a disadvantage and need to compensate. Size advantages/disadvantages is a resources-forward paradigm. Goals-forward is…well…about the goal. Damaging a human body just isn’t that hard.

And resources-forward may also be one of the culprits behind why most programs are solely focused on the worst possible situation – the physical encounter because that is about fear. When we are counting resources in light of potential problems, this is fear running our thinking instead of something more useful.