The Importance of Context in self defense training

Imagine this scenario, you find yourself in a frontal choke situation, you know from your training that it takes approximately 11 pounds of pressure to collapse the trachea and the arteries behind it and only 8 seconds for strangulation to cause a loss in consciousness. You know the situation could become fatal fast and time is running out.

What do you believe is the best possible action to take to resolve this encounter?

Think about what the next 30 seconds might look like, how will you react? Imagine the next few steps and visualize the outcome, now consider what you came up with and read on.

So what is context? The dictionary defines context as “the set of circumstances or facts that surround a particular event or situation”

So why is context important to us in self defense training? Context provides us with the full picture of where our defense strategies and tactics are useful and allows us to create a more accurate mental blueprint. Take the frontal choke situation we outlined earlier, you visualized the outcome of that situation (if you didn’t, do so now).

Did you picture yourself as the individual being choked or the individual doing the choking? If you were the victim being choked then your entire response to this situation would be wrong because what you didn’t know is you were the one doing the choking. In my original scenario I never stated who was the victim or if there was a victim. What if you were the one being choked, would your response to this situation be appropriate if the person choking you was a petite 17 year old waitress at local restaurant who thought you just slapped her butt? Or maybe you are at a mall and a cop has mistaken you for a shop lifter would your response to this situation be appropriate?

Now imagine you’re in a situation where someone is pointing a gun at your face. This is pretty straight forward, there is a frustrated individual aiming a real hand gun at your face and the attacker wants your money and will not take no for an answer. How would you response to this situation? I’m sure by now you are wondering what trick is involved in this question. But take a moment to think about what your response might be and what you have to consider in order to answer this, remember there is no correct answer only an ideal response. So what would you do if you had a gun pointed at your head and the attacker would not back down?

Keep in mind your response as you read on. So how do we integrate context into our training. First we must understand what makes up our experience. We never see the world as it is, we see the world as we are, for each second of a person’s life they take in 2 million bytes of information. Humans (theoretically) can only process 134 bits or 7 plus or minus 2 chunks of information. In order to create our experience of the world and maintain awareness we Delete, Distort and Generalization 99.99 percent of all the information available to us per second, according to Biologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi the author of the book “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience”. Similarly a Psychologist named Ulric Neisser said “Our mental machinery knows everything that is going on around us but discards most as unimportant before consciousness is reached”.

We create our experience moment by moment through our interpretation of our senses which creates our experience which are made up of Visual (what we see), Auditory (what we hear), Kinesthetic (What we physically feel), Auditory digital (what we think, feel emotionally, our state of mind) and finally smell and taste. This is what we call our internal representations or modalities. The interesting thing about our internal representations is that they are not actually how the world is only how we perceive it.

So in order to create effective training we must include all the things we see, hear, feel, touch, think, ect.. we should be considering the time of day, our physical limitations such as having a pneumonia, asthma or a broken limb, our clothing and our environment.

Then we have to consider what is going on in the mind of the person attacking us, what do they want and how do they plan to get it. Then we need to learn to evaluate how we can use it against them to ensure our safety.

Now that you have a taste of what a scenario looks like let’s review the gun situation, consider for a moment what you thought your response would have been in the hand gun in your face scenario. Now hold on to that thought and see if your response fits in the actual context of the situation.

You are in the subway in NYC and it is 11:30pm.

You just exited an unexpected award event where you were named person of the year by a prestigious organization that promises you will continue to experience increased success day by day.

You just sprinted to the subway station and have just missed the “1 and 9” train going downtown towards Penn station.

You are standing on the subway platform and you are significantly out of breath.

You are hoping the subway car comes soon because you are about to miss your train home.

You are feeling out of breath but you’re in a great mood because everything seems to be going right.

Just then you are confronted with an attacker pointing a handgun at your face yelling demands that you find hard to understand.

Your attacker has persuaded you to move backwards towards the edge of the platform, by waving a handgun in your face, you have moved as far backwards as you can and now you are standing with your heals at the gap which holds a 6 foot drop into the railroad tracks.

Your wearing your nicest suit, tie, jacket and dress shoes.

Your significant other is to your left and a child who is very important to you is on your right, they too are dress very nicely.

Your partner is wearing a family heirloom which while it looks expensive its value is all sentimental.

It is raining and the platform is wet and slick.

Earlier today you hit your right elbow on your car door and it has been significantly weakened all day it is difficult to straighten, however if you move slowly you do have some limited use.

You can see down the barrel of the attacker’s gun.

In the background you hear the sound of the subway train approaching, your instincts tell you it is 30 to 45 seconds away. At first you are relieved, you believe that help is on the way then you notice the attacker getting anxious, you sense the attacker wants to resolve the conflict before the train reaches the station. You hear the click of what you believe is the hammer of the gun being cocked back. You see a bead of sweat drip from the attacker’s brow as the attacks turns silent and his face goes from bright red to a pale white.

In a split second millions of thought point your mind as you begin to feel the adrenaline course through your body. You have tunnel vision and every sound is significantly muffled, your knees are shaking and you can’t seem to speak. Suddenly a single thought occupies your mind, “What am I going to do?”… Then you notice the gun is fake, the barrel is plugged, and you begin to wonder how could this 7 year old boy be crazy enough to attack me and the people so important to me with a fake weapon?

Now what is your response, would your prior response have been effective or even appropriate?

We also must also consider the legal ramifications of our actions as well as the social ramifications. In our training we can not just haphazardly and viciously attack and maim every potential assailant. We have to consider that this person may retaliate in the future, they may come looking for us for revenge or they may start a legal suit costing us money and potential jail time. We also have to take into account biological issues, what if the attacker has Aid’s or Hepatitis? If we add these complexities into our training we can more accurately replicate what we may find in our everyday lives.