Rory Miller's Blog, page 32
March 12, 2012
Rarefied Reality Checks
That's catch-up. Here's what I want to write about: I had a long and wonderful conversation with a local (to the Bay Area) self-defense instructor a few days ago. She was intelligent and insightful and the conversation was wide-ranging and fun. I would link if A) she had a website and I knew what it was and B) I had her permission...
But I don't have her permission, because I didn't ask... and I didn't ask because this has taken a couple of days to percolate. Didn't think of it at the time.
I have no way to measure my own experience.
In Rory's world, groin strikes and nose strikes have negligible reliability. Of the dozens of times that I have taken full-on, well targeted groin strikes, they have only stopped me from fighting twice. One time that didn't stop me I remember quite clearly that I felt it about three minutes later, and it was the 'let me crawl into a corner and cry and puke a little' type of pain... but for three minutes, nothing. Using it on other people, not so sure. Simple fact was that under our policies, I didn't want to write a report about a groin strike. So I used it way more in training than in real life. That said, I found the flinch you draw when you fake a groin strike more reliable than one that made contact.
Nose strikes? Zero percent reliability. Even with a broken nose, I've never been stopped by a nose hit and I've never seen anyone else (outside of training) stopped, either.
But... this person is a good SD instructor with a long slate of students. In her world (and, granted, it is only about a half dozen of each) groin strikes and nose strikes are 100% reliable. She has had about six of her hundreds of students attacked by men and when they delivered a groin strike it was over. Done. She has not heard from a single student that the technique has failed.
Another group have used nose strikes. Again, no failures.
This is important. No one is wrong. I have my experience, and the experience of my officers and students. So does she. And we saw different things. No one is wrong.
So, questions.
I was dealing with hardened criminals willing to attack an officer. As a women's self defense (WSD) instructor, she was dealing with criminals who targeted women. Does the target selection (officer versus woman) indicate enough about the perpetrator to explain this discrepancy? Were the ones attacking me what some people would call 'highly motivated'?
Like a lot of people I am self-referencing and between fights and intense training I have taken a lot of damage. At a very deep level, I believe if something doesn't work on me it doesn't work at all. Is this valid? Is there any way to know how and why I've kept fighting and whether that is something to be expected or something unusual?
Should one always train for the worst case scenario? I was able, at different times, to test things against PCP freaks or experienced ring fighters or giving up 200 or more pounds. That became my criteria for reliability. I love that. I have very, very deep reasons to trust my stuff... but does the bar have to be set that high? If I had told those dozen women, "Don't bother with groin strikes or nose punches, they don't work" would they have been victims?
March 6, 2012
Teaching, Training and Conditioning
I see distinct differences between teaching, training and conditioning, with different uses and pitfalls for each.
Teaching is passing information from brain to brain. I can tell you that 'colors are how our eyes perceive different wavelengths of light,' or I can teach you the formula to convert celsius to fahrenheit. Teaching can be entirely cerebral.
It can go wrong in a lot of ways. There isn't always an automatic reality check, for one thing. I can give you the formula to convert to celsius, but if you calculate incorrectly it doesn't mean anything. A wrong number at the pure teaching level is just a squiggle on a piece of paper that doesn't look like the squiggle the instructor wanted. I can tell you that the earth is round or the earth is flat, and outside of a handful of professions, whichever you believe will not affect your life or anyone else's in any way.
Because there is no reality check, there is no inherent difference between good and bad information when it is taught. As long as it stays at this level, you can get a child to believe almost anything. Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy are teachings. Most of what we think we know, most of what we have been taught, may be no more true. Because most of the things taught are not tested.
And this becomes dangerously bad, because we then believe these things we were taught are important. Sometimes worth killing over. You can be taught, as an obvious example, that your religion is objective truth, all other religions are lies created by an evil Adversary and killing over this is a duty...
You can feel very sure about your beliefs at this level, but you cannot be sure...any more than a child's insistence in the Easter Bunny makes him hop.
Teaching, though, allows us to transmit a huge amount of information, and to think through connections that would take lifetimes to try out in the real world. It allows us to imagine possibilities and juggle symbols. And teaching compounds over time. The questions that inspired Aristotle's "Metaphysics" have been outgrown.
Validity does not imply truth, however, only internal consistency. And bullshit can compound like any other information.
Training is guided practice in how to do stuff. I can tell you the celsius formula, but you have to put pen to paper for a while to become proficient at it. I can tell you what to do if you are ever attacked by a right over hand punch from a taller person... but if it is only taught, not trained, you will think and not act and you will eat that slow, clumsy punch.
Sometimes training has a touchstone to reality and sometimes it doesn't. This is crucial to understand. Training always has a touchstone (unless you are really doing it wrong) to something. You train to move a body by moving a body. You train to swing a stick by swinging a stick. If the touchstone is or simulates reality closely, no problem. You hit a guy hard enough, he goes down...
It goes to shit when the touchstone doesn't mirror reality. You hit a guy lightly or miss him entirely and he goes down because he is 'supposed' to... Or you spend your hours training against the way the instructor imagines bad guys attack instead of the way that they do attack.
It can also go bad when the metrics are wrong. When you measure success (one form of touchstone) by a poor standard. How a technique looks is not a tenth as relevant as how it feels on the receiving end, but if 'proper form' is measured against a picture you will get, and I have seen, instructors who pick themselves up and say, "You didn't do that right." Or, to dust off an old memory, I once choked a wrestling champion unconscious. When he came to, he explained to me that he had "won on points" before he lost consciousness.
Training is critical, though, in teaching us how and when to move. And when done right, it gets us used to the conditions we will face.
Conditioning affects a deeper part of the brain. It is how animals learn. In many ways, it is how we truly learn. We are creatures of sense and motion, constantly watching the world, constantly affecting the world. A part of our brain, the one that learned stove-hot, is always watching what we do and the effects it has.
Do this and things get better, do that and things get worse. X hurts, Y feels good? Do Y. A flatworm, with a single neuron works this way. Under immense stress, we might freeze, thinking about what has been taught. We probably, for the first several incidents won't remember our training. We will respond with our conditioning.
"You will fight the way you train" is a lie, and I am just as guilty of mouthing it as any other instructor. You will respond to any high-stress, low-time stimulus the way you have been conditioned.
Conditioning is natural and has an automatic correlation to reality. Your form is good and you see the center of the target disappear in a ragged hole. Your form is poor and your shots don't connect, dissatisfying and embarrassing.
But conditioning can go wrong even under good intentions. If you yell at the poor shot, increasing the embarrassment, do you empower the conditioning? Or do you instead condition the student to avoid the situation altogether, to avoid you? Conversely, if the students always win in scenarios have you 'programmed for success'? Or conditioned the hindbrain to know that results are always good and effort and judgment are wasted resources?
Under bad intentions...We have all seen the instructor who makes an example of any student who does well. Training to win but conditioning to lose. The hindbrain remembers, and learns/knows that losing is a safer strategy than winning. That's screwed up, and the ultimate example of training to fail.
Conditioning can be complicated as well. Even simple organisms will move towards pleasure and away from pain, but a child can be conditioned to some mighty strange definitions of pleasure and pain. Confuse the two in just the right way and a child can be groomed into an eager and permanent victim. In individual cases it is not automatic that rewards are as we expect.
Three avenues to make your students better- teaching, training and conditioning. All have uses, all have potential pitfalls. The most important thing, IMO, is that the approaches be congruent. That what you teach and train and condition all work via the same tactics to the same goals.
March 3, 2012
Pleasantly Tired
Also jumped into a new project. I thought it would be huge, but so far it has been relatively painless. It also will result, almost for sure, in a new e-book in a month. Maybe less at this rate.
There's a unique group of people that I sometimes hang with. A very wide, very diverse range of interests, histories, skills and insights. A bunch are contributing stories. I volunteered to edit. Might have a few stories in as well.
So far: Unintended consequences of a fight; a brawl in a GI bar in Korea; the value of getting your ass kicked...even how to survive as a psych patient in a secure facility. That article is unique and powerful.
I think this anthology is going to be killer, and it will benefit some people I care about.
I'll keep you posted.
February 23, 2012
Orders of Abstraction
It has been two years, give or take a month, since anyone tried to kill me. And that wasn't much of an effort, really, nor was it personal. But it felt real, infinitely more real than tax season at a small business.
In the 'ohno' moment, everything is what it is. Exactly what it is, no more and no less and no other. You see and you act, and every interpretation or memory or 'woulda coulda shoulda' thought is a distraction that can get you killed.
You see. You act.
Nothing more. If you do it right, you walk away. If you don't, you just become a piece of someone else's story.
When you think about it afterwards or debrief it, no matter how practiced you are in the AAR, you are removed from the event by a whole order of magnitude. It is a thing of memory now, something that happened. No longer a thing of fear and immediacy.
When you try to extrapolate the lessons (which is the sacred duty of all operators) you are yet another order of magnitude removed. Ten times as abstract. Trying to put or derive intellectual lessons from an event of meat and adrenaline.
Teaching is yet another order of magnitude removed.
February 16, 2012
Guest Post: Ty Johnston
But some writer I don't know from Adam is doing a blog tour. He wrote a nice letter and I thought, "Hey, if the post is half as good as the letter, the kid's a damn good writer." also, the request came at the perfect time, since I was so deep in editing three manuscripts and finishing a fourth that the blog was languishing.
So, without further ado, welcome Ty Johnston:--------------------------
When I was twelve, I stood between my mother and a man who was trying to kill her. I remember no emotions at the time other than a sense that "this has to end." For five years my mother had lived with violence, beatings and worse that came at least once a month, almost on schedule. More than once she had to go to the hospital, twice for extended stays because she had cracked discs in her neck.
It might seem to some I exaggerate by stating this man, my mother's second husband, was attempting to "kill" her. Perhaps so, but it did not feel that way to my twelve-year-old self at the time. I merely knew he had threatened to kill her on more than one occasion and had seemingly attempted to numerous times.
He never laid a hand on me during his violent episodes. There had been times when we had rough-housed out in the yard, and a couple of times he had left me with bruises and the wind knocked from my chest, but that had been play, though today it might be considered crossing the line. It didn't seem so back then.
Though he was not my father, this was a man who I respected, as difficult as that might sound. He was a Vietnam veteran, earning my regard for his service and a bit of youthful awe at the tales of war he and his buddies would pass along. He was also educated and intellectual, and built by hand rows upon rows of shelves in our basement before covering those shelves with thousands of books he had acquired over the years. If not for this man, my interests in literature might never have blossomed.
Yet he was also the man who regularly attacked my mother, leaving her beaten and in tears.
Why she tolerated this for so long, I do not know, even to this day. She and I have talked about it over the years, and she does not have a good answer, not one she herself can come to grips with.
As I mentioned, I felt no emotion at the time of standing between this man and my mother. I do remember beforehand a general feeling that I knew this was coming, my facing down against this man. I was waiting, waiting for myself to grow older and bigger and stronger. I realized he would probably mop the floor with me, perhaps harming me worse than he had my mother all those years simply because I was standing up to him.
But none of that was in my mind the night I was in bed and heard the first of the screams. It was a familiar pattern, one I knew well, and I realized I would be awake all night, helpless to do anything but listen to the cursing and crying. That night was different, however. I can not say what was different, but I remember that "this has to end."
I jumped up out of bed, wearing only pajamas, and rushed through the house and down the stairs to the basement where those lines of books encompassed the room. He had shoved my mother over the couch. She was climbing to her feet and he was approaching as I rushed between them and stood there and stared at him. I did not even raise my arms.
He did not look at me, but tried to rush past, to reach my mother. Without thinking, I shoved out, sending him sprawling across the couch. At that point my mother ran up the stairs. He jumped to his feet and lurched after her. I followed as fast as I could.
In the kitchen upstairs, my mother was at the phone, attempting to call the police. Somehow I managed to place myself between her and my step-father once more. I was in a doorway, and there was no room for him to get by me. The only way he could get to her would be to physically remove me.
I remember expecting to be slaughtered at that moment. But it never came. I continued to stare in silence into his face, and then I realized he would not look at me. His eyes were down, and he only stood there several feet away. His fists were at his side, and soon opened, hanging limp.
To this day, more than thirty years later, I'm still not sure what happened that night. Armchair psychologists and the like might say he was too much of a coward to face someone who was willing to confront him directly, and perhaps that is true. I don't know. I do know that for only being twelve, I was pretty big for a boy at 180 pounds and nearly six-feet tall. However, my step-father was no small man, standing at about six feet himself and weighing slightly more than two hundred pounds. Plus, he was an adult, with at least some military training, whereas I was a kid who hadn't even played football yet. Maybe harming a kid was a line he would not cross.
That memory is the most vivid one I retain of the few instances of violence that have intruded upon my life. Obviously I had witnessed many sessions of my mother being beaten, but after all these years they all seem to tumble together in my mind.
Of the other times violence has entered my life, there have been few, but I remember them with a little less recall. There was then time when I was ten and my grandfather, my mother's father, pistol whipped my step-father, for reasons one can guess. There was the time I went camping with friends at 16 and ended up staring down the barrel of a revolver, to this day my mind's eye telling me that was the biggest firearm I have ever seen in my life, even though cooler heads eventually prevailed that night and no one was hurt. There were a few fist fights in high school. There was the time I went hiking with my dad, I think I was 18, and someone fired several shots over our heads, for what reason I do not know, perhaps just to get their kicks scaring some yokels.
That is the extent that violence has directly affected my life, at least that I can remember.
Odd, then, at least to me, that fictional violence has become such a part of my everyday life. I'm fortunate in that I get to write fiction for a living, and my preferred genres are the fantasy and horror fields. Why is this? Why do I utilize so much violence in my work?
I can't give a good answer. I could go on about the freedom I find in exploring the human condition when I write fantasy, or I could talk about the sheer fun I have at writing horror, because being scared can be fun, at least when the frights aren't real.
I could also chat about other writers, how Hemingway used violence to subtly explore the minds of his protagonists, or how Tolstoy despised violence but still found a use for it to guide his characters in their search for God. I could turn to pulp writers and focus on Robert E. Howard's use of violence as a way to highlight the eternal struggle between civilization and barbarism, or Ed McBain's dichotomy of violence that on one side was often little more than a day-at-the-office for the police officers he wrote about, but could become quite personal and breathtaking in the blink of an eye.
I could go on and on about all of that, but none of it would be real, none of it would truly focus upon violence.
Before I was seven, before my mother remarried, the world I lived within found violence to be exciting. Back then I got my violence from comic books and television, and that stuff was tame by any comparison of what we have today. Spider-man pounced on crooks to set the world right again, and Roy Rogers blasted a six-gun out of a black-hats hand to save the day and win the girl.
Again, though, none of that is violence, real violence.
None of those memories answer the question of why I write using violence so often.
Or do they?
When I really sit and think about it, when I force my mind to go back, it occurs to me that I am not writing about violence, no matter how many villains my protagonists slay nor how many innocents fall prey to my monsters. What I am writing about is adventure, about a seven-year-old boy's version of violence.
I have seen real violence, if only a little as compared to others, and I do not write about that. It is too painful to write about, but I can write about fake violence, which isn't even violence in the first place. I can write the thrilling dreams of a little boy who has yet to taste real violence, because that is who I once was, and perhaps who I want to be again.
High Percentage Shots and Experiments
One example- a strike to the temple. I have read and heard from uncounted instructors how devastating a strike to the temple can be. Some talk about the skull being thin there, some about the geometry of a flat place on a generally curved skull, some about the trigeminal nerve...
But you know what? I've been hit there. A fair amount. And hit people there. And seen people hit there. And not once did it have any effect whatsoever. Maybe once, but that was with a tool. And sometimes the little blood vessel under the skin bursts and you get a nice, dark, bulging hematoma...
My sources say it is a high-percentage target. My personal experience has it as a near zero.
I only know one striking target that hasn't failed in my experience; and asking around, with the usual caveats (not missing, proper hitting) no one else has seen a failure either, despite size, strength, drugs or altered states of consciousness. One technique... and it's not something you can really play with because relatively severe injuries are common. (And, no, I'm not going to describe it here. Most likely you already know it, anyway.)
I have another small batch that I consider high percentage. But there's stuff I don't know. Got to play with an excellent BJJ instructor over the weekend who commented that a rabbit punch in a certain position wouldn't have an effect. Not that either of us were eager to risk a brainstem/cervical shot to be sure...
Hmmm. There's a target band that I really like. Essentially a reset button for the human brain. It has been incredibly reliable for me. It's also considered deadly force in most jurisdictions. But the mechanism of injury may not be what I think it is. If it is percussion to the brainstem, then the position we were discussing wouldn't matter. If it relies on creating even a minor and temporary separation of the upper cervical vertebra or C1 and the skull, then simply splinting the head against the opponent's shoulder would provide more than enough protection, at least at the only reachable angle.
And the only way to be sure would be to get a bunch of stup... I mean young, healthy martial artists and try it out. Full intention of finding the point (angle, force, position, freedom of action vs. splinting) that transmits the maximum shock to the brainstem.
It's a good core technique. I've given (and received) extremely severe concussions from relatively light force at the right angle. But waiting for the happenstance of combat (especially without access to an institutional memory in the form of thousands of force reports) gets small amounts of random data, often not clearly remembered.
Maybe we need a secret society of lab rats willing to put their brains on the line.
For science.------------------------------------------Guest blog post tomorrow. Some author is doing a blog tour.
Port Townsend this weekend, two day seminar + Conflict Communications.
All of March in California, with seminars in Granada Hills, Oakland, Santa Cruz and San Diego.
"Talking Them Through: Crisis Communication with the Emotionally Disturbed and Mentally Ill" is up on SmashWords and Kindle
February 14, 2012
Student Profiles
Rookie officers, for instance, need a solid base. Sometimes that even involves detailed explanation of the problem, e.g. the different kind of force incidents, force policy and basic priority setting and effective motion. Experienced officers, on the other hand, may need a refresher on policy and most could use some practice at articulation, but the physical part has to center around taking what they are going to do (you will not, in eight hours, entirely replace something that has worked well for twelve years of a career) and making it better.
People with a duty to act have entirely different needs than people who have a preclusion requirement in their self defense law. Someone who has trained for a decade in a hard contact style will have different holes and advantages than someone who has only trained in air. Men are rarely exposed to the types of violence women are. Someone who expects to be traveling on the Mexican side of the border or working in Pakistan or taking pictures in Somalia has very, very different needs than someone doing the same job in St. Paul.
Some general categories of information for developing a student profile:
Safety Information:Ranging ability (People who practice mixed-weapon sparring, for instance have skills at ranging that people who work at one range won't be able to see)Know the rules for stopping action (tapping, safety words)Too arrogant to surrender?Breakfall abilitiesPrevious injuriesPrevious traumatic experiencesRelevant psychological issuesRelevant medical/medication issuesPhysical Ability:Largely strength, skill, endurance and pain tolerance. Mostly how physical they want; how physical they can handle; and how physical they need. Those are three separate things.
ExperienceTraining experience-- because that will drive expectations, blindspots and habits. A lot of SD training with experienced martial artists is showing the disconnects between what they have learned about opponents and what they need to learn about criminals.Life experience-- This is huge. Someone who has been victimized in the past will have different needs and triggers than someone who has never experienced serious trauma and very different reactions than someone who deals with violence professionally. One of the instructor's roles is to turn all experience into an advantage. Because it is, but not always in the same way.There is a third aspect that can come from either training or experience. Call it 'heart' or whatever. But sometimes, especially in long-term training you have to (forgive the melodrama) forge spirit. Toughen them up and get them used to decisiveness. And there are other groups where this problem (which can be difficult and is usually time-consuming) is handed to you.Possibly the most important: Understand why the student is there. And this can be huge, because frequently what the student wants, what the student thinks he or she wants and what they need are three very different things.To be safer or to feel safer?To polish or improve a skill?Inspiration (a lot of experienced people start looking for new things when they hit a plateau. It's a good tactic.)To learn a skill? Or understand where a skill they already have fits? Or find the pressure point where skills break down?To stress themselves?To test themselves?Because all of their friends are doing it? And so on. There are a lot of potential reasons and many of them are subconscious. The people who show up to SD classes but don't want to sweat usually want to feel safer, not be safer. And the ones who squirm and go into denial when they get some hard truths want an amulet, a magic cross to keep the vampires away. Some try to find arguments... they are the ones who wanted a previous world-view confirmed, not get new knowledge.
The goal is to get the maximum relevant information safely into the student.MaximumRelevantSafe
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February 13, 2012
What I Want
I want to look at a menu and see things that a working man would eat for breakfast. Sausage and gravy instead of cream brie or 'market berries.' A menu designed for fuel where the average job involves burning calories instead of the menu for a place where the average job is looking as young and thin as possible.
Young women have been checking me out. It made no sense. I'm dressed a little different than the average, but between the tourists, the different classes and the different ideas of style there really isn't a standard here. You can't (correction, I can't in only two days) reliably pick out the locals by dress. So why the checkout? I'm not pretty. Not distinctive. And the attention is coming from a very definite demographic. (If everyone was checking me out, I'd take a hard look at my dress and mannerisms and local standards and adjust.)
Then it hit me. Age, demeanor, gender... I'm edging into the 'potential sugar-daddy demographic.' The other, other, other career path for a young lady down here.
Everyplace is different, and this place is beautiful. The ocean is warm enough to swim in, by Oregon standards. A little rain, a lot of sun. One spectacular sunset. And the people I've met have been wonderful. Even the traffic (granted I'm here on a weekend and in a nice area) looks smooth, uncluttered and even polite.
But I think I'm missing the Pacific NorthWest just a little bit.And I hope all the grumpy waitresses of the world have someone at home to give them a foot massage.
February 11, 2012
Five Days
Instinctive answer was five days. Want to try to be a little more specific here.
Day One: The Theoretical Day-Intros, goals, safety briefing, teaching philosophy, what I don't know-Fear versus danger; fear management versus danger management- Violence Motivations, Maslow model and Triune Brain from ConCom- Violence Dynamics including Social, Asocial, Asocial Masquerading as Social, Deviant Social and cyclical violence- Avoidance and evasion- Context: Ethics and Law; breaking the freeze; aftermath- SD Law- Gender Differences in Violence- Logic of Violence Method- Individual Victim Profiles- Violence for communication versus violence for effect- Three natural strategies- Mindsets
Day 2: Physical Day - Not fighting. Close range assassinations.- 'A' Targets. Easy, Reliable, Incapacitating- 'B' Targets. Require strength and or practice. Incapacitating.- 'C' Targets. Require skill and/or luck. Incapacitating.- Power generation- Other options: Movement and unbalancing- Principles: balance; exploiting momentum; exploiting gravity; structure- Immediate Action- Fight to the Goal- Counter-assault
Day 2 Evening: Field Exercise 1: Reading Terrain - Cruise local area for ambush zones; E&E protocols and principles; Tags; Target-rich environments.
Day 3: Physical Day - Safety Briefing- Counter-assault Practice- Takeouts- One Step. Special emphasis on what it is and what we are NOT doing, e.g. practicing fighting.- Targets and Targeting Drills- Close range strikes- Close range Kicks- Take downs- Leverage points- Blindfolded work- Counter assault practice
Day 4: Physical Day - Safety Briefing- Counter Assault Practice- Moving a body- Wall work- Environmental fighting- Weapons and Improvised weapons- Ground movement- Striking from the Ground- Application and limitations of pain; tactical use of pain- Weapon access under assault- Mass brawl- Counter assault practice- Messy drill- Individual fears and concerns brief and brainstorm.
Day 4 Evening: Field Exercise 2: Reading People - Urban anthropology and victim/threat assessment practice
Day 5: Scenario Day - 2 targeted scenarios for each participant. Each scenario debriefed to a peer jury regarding both tactics and legal justification.- Articulation wars- Tactical considerations to include the presence of children and babies
I think that would cover things. It's a lot of information, but not overwhelming if it is taught correctly. Everything interconnects and almost everything can be connected to common experiences, so it becomes a way to think and a way to move instead of stuff to remember. Might also add a daily debriefing that would include learning how to conduct and after-action debrief.
February 9, 2012
Love and Infatuation
If she (or he, or it... we'll get to that) is the prettiest and the funniest and the smartest; if everything she (or he or it) does, no matter how stupid, is actually very clever on a deeper level... that's infatuation.
When you can see the flaws and still think, "This is right" it's probably love.
It applies to martial arts, too. People fall in love with an art or an instructor and sometimes the critical faculties disappear. Back in the '70's (that's 1970s to you whippersnappers) I read an article in a martial arts magazine trying to explain why the new contact kickboxing circuit was a bad idea and completely unnecessary. The author explained that a good point-sparrer because of his years of training in control and precision, could 'toy' with a street thug.
Control and precision at missing, basically.
You'll get it from almost every rookie in almost every system. And you'll hear it from the groupies and fanboys. And you'll hear it from the people who have found something damn close to a religion. Sometimes it's honest, though dumb or misguided. The guy who said that 'because MMA is the closest thing to real fighting, anything against the rules must be against the rules because it doesn't work' probably really believed it. He had accepted his religion as the highest possible standard of 'proof of effectiveness.' Therefore anything not within his religion must not rise to even a low level of effectiveness.
Same/same with RBSD instructors who insist that knowing self-defense law will somehow confuse and freeze their students. For what ever reason they didn't learn it coming up and, when you are infatuated, every blemish is a beauty mark.
Love is different. I love K, but she is not and can never be all things. If I have to go through a door I want Mike. For talking about stuff like this, it used to be Sean and Mac, but that list is growing. If I need a doctor, K can't step into that role. But I will happily spend the rest of my life with her. Somehow, in that process, I won't depend on her to be everything.
With combatives or martial arts, it's the same. Your art isn't complete. Get over it. Unless it covers everything from talking down emotional people up to small unit tactics and firearms, (and adjusts for you whether you are in the best shape of your life or old and injured) it is not complete. That's okay. You aren't complete either. Part of being human.
But some of them are damn good, and some of the ones you find damn good might not be a good fit for me and vice-versa. I loved judo and classical jujutsu. They made me better (and that's one of the things with my personal version of love-- it makes me want to continuously improve, to become worthy). But they had holes. Judo had few fast finishes; it concentrated on a level of chess-match that I rarely had time for and it trained against itself instead of the attacks I routinely got. JJ was beautiful for ambush survival, integrating a fighter, and paid proper respect to weapons... but it had almost nothing for the lower end of the force continuum.
But both of them were sweaty, physical and hands-on, something else I tend to like in love. And infatuation, actually. Hmmmm. Strike that whole sentence. I just like sweaty action.
Is infatuation bad? I'm not sure. Because I've experienced love and found it to be deeper and stronger, I tend to focus on the delusional aspects of infatuation and worry about the almost inevitable crash. But whether it is a first crush (except for the angsty stuff, let's amend that to the first mutual crush) or a rocking new ultimate unbeatable martial art, you don't often see people happier than infatuated kids. So maybe it's not so bad.
But I still encourage all of you, if you haven't already, to find something that fits. Something that you will be happy with and love, eyes wide open to what it truly is and what it isn't.
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