Rory Miller's Blog, page 48

Nostalgia

I'm going to write the post now and set it to show up tomorrow. I do have a lot to write about the East Coast, but the blog is for me and there is other stuff echoing in my head right now.
Lunch today with an old friend and a new friend. I spent most of it catching up with Sean, listening to the changes at the old agency; the mistakes and politics and much of it, it seemed, was about broken people. Some good news, as always. Good people shine in shitty situations... but others seem to enjoy making shitty situations worse and murkier.
Then I stopped by the range to see another old friend. I should have expected it, but there were many old friends there. I caught them on a break so we were able to talk for a few minutes. The nostalgia hit hard driving home. These are extraordinary men* doing a dangerous, difficult and thankless job. They are the best of everything it is to be a man: intelligent, dedicated, trustworthy, courageous. MR will have his doctorate soon, may have it already, and teaches at a local college... at the same time he has been a father figure to new officers, a tactical operator and a fighter. Each of them is a story like that.
I know these men as efficient fighters; cold, level-headed planners; and good, friendly people. Dedicated family men. Those who have been thrust into the position are leaders. Not managers, but true leaders. Every last one of them has risked serious injury again and again to help others, and often the people they were helping are the kind of people that most civilians pretend not to see when they ask for lose change, or get outraged when they hear of their crimes.
I miss it. I miss the job and most of all I miss these people. If brother was a matter of choice, MP and SC would be my brothers. I hope my son grows up to be the kind of man that BW projects so effortlessly. If I were to be stuck in a room for years with one voice to talk to, it would be MR.


*Just so happened everyone there was male... trust me, the ladies who do this job can more than hold their own in every way.

Synthesis

Pieces of what follows will be from memory, so please forgive if the quotes are not exact.
RJ Nash, in "Condition Black" notes that the most common attack (male on female) is for the man to merely display a weapon, make a threat, and put his hand on the victim's upper arm and lead her away. It sounds so docile, so unlikely. Who would go along with a mere threat? Why wouldn't she simply...
Teja Van Wicklen, of Devi Protective Offense consistently finds the words to make things real: "It's not like screaming and bullying. Guys don't get that. He can hurt her and she knows it, but he says, 'I know you're afraid. Don't worry. Just don't fight me and I won't hurt you. I promise.' And she chooses to believe him even though she knows it's a lie-- an unsolicited promise is always a lie-- but she doesn't see another way."
Teja makes it personal, makes it real. I teach it dry, academic: Predators want you in your social brain. As long as you are being social, thinking you can control or at least influence the outcome by social skills (talking, bargaining, appeasement, flattery...) the predator knows you are both safe and completely predictable. If you are in your thinking, human brain, you might be smarter than the threat. If you are in your reptilian survival brain, there is no limit to the harm you might do. If your attacker can keep you in your social/monkey brain he knows that he is safe.
When I teach that the first hit after you break out of a freeze is done at half power, it is an observation. No one hits hard in their first strike of their first fight, not when they are surprised. For some unknown reason, it is almost always a tentative, half-power, powder puff. Almost more a signal of intent than a strike. I tell students that and caution them against it.
Teja talks of the consequences: "She tries to fight, but that first hit is half power, like you say, more struggling than fighting and he hits her back, hard. She's never felt pain like that and she is afraid to try again... and he says, again, 'Just don't fight me and I won't hurt you.' She has to believe it because it seems like the only chance she has is to believe he is telling the truth."
There are aspects of problems that I can never fully understand. We are all wired differently, all have different experiences. Teja is fast becoming my Subject Matter Expert for women's self-defense issues. Partially because she sees it so clearly but even more because she can explain it in a way that gets through.

A Few Tired Notes

I'm tired. My voice is shot. It's been a long not-quite-three weeks.Basil Kemble came through with the venue like a champ and turned out to be a very cool young man. A lot of history and insight in a relatively low number of years. He'll be one to watch in the future.
This trip has been a journey on a lot of levels. New friends. New places. Finding commonalities with instructors who I really admire. Finding some new ways to put things into words, thought and action. This-- learning and exploring-- is what life should be, at least for me.
Some of it is a blur. In a sleep deprived haze on a train I wrote almost three pages of notes on the first two weeks. I could write as much on the last two days as well. Almost as much, anyway. Far too much for a single post..and as usual, I forgot to even take my camera out of the bag for the seminar today.
As always, so much we didn't get to...but so much that we did. I think a lot of people got a taste of the things I rate as important: how violence breaks down; that efficiency is the point of training; that they can measure their own efficiency; a little bit of what is in this world...
But no one got more than a taste. The big question, the one I will never have an answer to, is what will they do with the taste? I saw a few learn something, be impressed by the increase (in power or efficiency or tactical use) of a thing, and then go right back to moving just as they had done before. Most adapted, but some didn't and that always comes down to the teacher. How do I reach him? How do I explain to her?
I can argue that the student has responsibility for what they learn, I tell them to take that responsibility and own it... but when I am the teacher the responsibility is on me. Not because this is true, but because it is the only part of the equation I can control...
But what will they do with their taste? Hopefully research and learn more. Question. Healthy doubt. Move for effect instead of approval. Never separate judgment from application: "Just because this will work, does that mean it is the smart thing to do?" Will they keep the precious distinction between knowing how to fight and knowing when to fight?
Jack Hoban was a treat. It was a privilege to join his class in New Jersey. I loved what he said about filling space and seeing space; that technique was the absolute least important aspect of fighting-- many things.
But he taught something that blew me away. Ethics is integral to combat. It's a big section of the next book since if you train without regard for your personal internal beliefs, you will freeze. Force law and policy is the study of the ethics of violence.A few times in my life in a major fight, I've focused energy as a care taker, tried not to hurt the threat, tried to talk him down in the midst of a struggle. Give him a face saving way to end things without injury. In the middle of a fight it has always felt extremely high-risk. I don't like the bad guy to have time to think. But it has worked very well. For me.
It never occurred to me to try to teach it. Too high-risk, and when it worked I was never really sure why. Jack Hoban teaches it. That in the midst of a fight, you can do what is best for both of you. I thought, for a jail-guard thug, I was relatively compassionate. I'm not even in the ballpark of what Jack is doing.
Cool. New levels. New paths. New mountains.

The Better Half

Once upon a time something very bad was (possibly) going to happen. I called home and asked for my gear bag. Ten minutes later, K dropped the bag off at a potentially unsafe place. She didn't ask questions. Didn't ask for reassurance. She never tried to make anything about her. "Call me when it's over," she said. Nothing else.

The perfect operator's wife.

I realized today… during all the cool stuff: the hours, days, weeks and months of training; the fights and tactical ops; the time spent in Iraq and Ecuador… K made it all possible.

Somehow, the house keeps going. The first week I was enroute to Baghdad, the truck broke down, the pump went out that supplies water from the well, the dryer died. All handled. Kids and animals, acreage and small farm, livestock, the rambling house with all the books. K keeps it going. The kids are strong and smart and beautiful. Not my doing, I wasn't here enough.

It suddenly hit me today that I only know half of the story of my own life. For every thing that I have done or experienced, someone was always taking care of the other half.

Rarefied Air

One of the most disturbing moments in the martial arts is when you suddenly realize that your instructors may not know what they are talking about. It's not just in the martial arts, I see it other places too… and it's also not just in my specialized field of real violence.

Probably the first suspicion, years ago, was in my first dabble with karate. It was a very strict traditional system taught by a junior shodan and an extremely cute brown belt at my University. At one point I asked about stances. The instructor said that they clearly weren't for fighting, they were strengthening and conditioning exercises for your legs.

That made no sense whatsoever. Static conditioning is NOT good training for dynamic action. I didn't have the words at the time, but I had this horrible feeling that he was just guessing.

The second instant was when I asked why we spent time on kihon and kata when sparring looked nothing like either. I've written about that before.

In other fields… recently, looking at marketing for Conflict Communications we've had some offers of help. Marc and I are both painfully aware that we aren't salesmen and have no inkling of the process (there is a definite protocol to approaching certain groups.) It became painfully apparent that many of the 'experts' offering help had no more knowledge than we did. Often, all it takes to be a consultant is enough knowledge to make the clients feel inadequate, not necessarily enough knowledge to do the job. Lesson learned.

Then there are many things where the learning curve is extremely finite. You can stare at you navel for eternity, but skill acquisition and knowledge acquisition is time limited.

Do you stop learning then? Of course not. Maybe a better way to say it is that there is a limit to how much you can be spoon-fed. Taking in received wisdom, even from a reliable source (and those are rare in many subjects) becomes mutual navel-gazing quickly. Worse, it can become addictive.

Another conversation with Toby: "I took my first survival class when I was twelve and my last at fourteen. I already knew what I could be taught in a class. I had to go out and test it and think through it on my own."

Toby also shared his system: go out and test. Try it out. Think it through, brainstorm. If you don't have enough of a foundation, you pull back and research. If you can't find an answer by research, then you look for a mentor.

Try-research-mentor.

Subtle difference between a teacher and a mentor, and I appreciate that Toby used that word.

People who have gone to the deep water or climbed the 'path to the mountain' have always been rare. Few communicate well. We make up our own individual languages for what we have seen and felt. It's not a community with a common language that you can be raised in. And even the wisest don't really know all that much.

It's a big world, people. If I knew a thousand times more than all of you put together I would still be ignorant of almost everything in the entire universe… and each of you would know about things I don't know.

Deep water or shallow, no one gets wet exactly the same.

Many paths up the mountain? There are many paths up many mountains. And someone else's knowledge is at best hearsay to you. Learn for awhile, then play.

Non-Prescriptive

The survival class with Toby was, as usual, pretty damn cool. Good people, a nice place, self-selected new challenges...
At one point, while listening in on the introductory fire-starting class, one of the relative beginners started asking "What if?" questions.
Toby replied, "I don't want to be prescriptive." Given the vagaries of humidity and wind and available fuel, there are no primitive fire starting techniques that always work. Anything he told the student and the student memorized would be wrong in certain conditions. His goal and teaching method is to explain the principles that underlie fire: Fuel, air and heat; Heat moves upward; greater surface area for weight is easier to ignite, all else equal; small lights large; fuel and especially tinder quality...
Sound familiar?
There are limits, but survival is survival. Whether under sudden assault or soaked by a sneaker wave in a cool climate miles from help or warmth, survival only comes up where the normal expectations have already failed. If this situation was a normal social conflict where normal social tactics worked, it wouldn't be a rape or murder attempt. The fact that you are in an extreme situation pretty much dictates that the rules of the non-extreme world have failed or, at least, are in abeyance.
Techniques are prescriptive, and so they often fail. Sometimes they work spectacularly, but whether they work or fail is usually a matter of luck. Your prescripted technique works when it happens to hit the right problem. But we don't get to choose what kind of bad things will happen to us.
If you understand the principles, you can adapt. And the principles for much of violence, from how and why it happens to the physics of knocking someone down, are things we have dealt with on some level all of our lives. Sometimes it seems that training deliberately divorces what we do every day, our natural movement, from what we do in training. It implies that movement in a fight must in some way be 'special' and that almost always reads as 'unnatural' and often in practice is stilted, stiff, weak and jerky.
Even when prescriptions work, like in medicine (arguably...sometimes) they are based on diagnostics. If you can't understand the problem, you are unlikely to make the right choices. Survival, again- hypothermia is loss of heat. Fire, food and warm liquids generate heat. Conduction, convection, radiation, evaporation, respiration and elimination lose heat. When you know the problem and recognize you are in the situation, you can derive what to do.Assault survival- if you recognize the situation, especially early, you have options... but if you misjudge the type of assault, especially the social/asocial distinction, your choices will backfire. And if you don't know the principles of assault dynamics, you put a 50% element of luck on top of whatever built-in possibilities of failure your solution has.
Non-prescriptive. Thanks, Toby. It's a nice way to think about it. Every so often things get clearer for what I am teaching. Diagnostics and principles are the core.

24 and Counting

In the last twenty-four hours, I've:
Gone for a long walk in a strange city.Driven one of the ugliest cars ever (Scion).Practiced wakizashi versus katana--live steel-- while completely hammered. And explained practical maai better than usual.Rolled with an Israeli bodyguard.Got exposed to a new fitness system that seems made for grappling and shooting. Compared entry tactics with a former AT specialist.
All in all, the way a day should go...

Student, Teacher, Explorer

"I don't know why he's taken me under his wing. He has lots of senior students, but for some reason he's really connected with me. I'm getting things they aren't."
Bear with me here. Said in different tones by and about different people, this could be a big red flag... but this was a special case and it got me thinking. Just speculation coming up, a possible way of looking at the world and training.
There are students and teachers. That can be a job description or a personality type. Either can be limitless horizons or can lock you in a box. In martial arts, it is far more likely to lock you in a box.
It doesn't have to be this way. I'm pretty sure it's not supposed to be this way, but it seems to wind up here far more often.
In martial arts, the student personality is weirdly passive. They train, which is good. Some follow fads and some latch onto instructors and follow them, but in either case following is the operant word. They collect techniques, they worry about moving right and when they get under pressure or get tested, they try to do what sensei would approve, not necessarily what would work.
If your hackles go up and you say, "Not me" or think that I am painting with too broad a brush, think about this: I've spent more study hours in martial arts than I would need for an MD. Far more than I would need for a business degree. The people who get MDs and business degrees spend countless hours studying real disease and real business. Outside of cops, in all the seminars this year when I asked if anyone had spent a single day in their years of martial arts training studying how real criminals really attack, one hand went up. One.
Memorizing assault statistics (the percentage of rapes conducted by strangers; robberies in daylight versus dark) is not research. It is trivia. They call it trivia for a reason, it is trivial. How an attacker holds a knife, range and terrain considerations, developing distance with or prior to assault...
So students follow a lead and in too many the parts of the brain that should be going, "This doesn't make sense, if I was a bad guy I would never attack this way," somehow turns off, and martial training in its way becomes as mentally passive as watching television.
And there are teachers. Some people start martial arts from their first day in teacher mode. They want to understand and explain. That's good. It's very good, usually. (Some do it for ego. They want to be in a place where people call them 'master' or some other silly title.) But most do it for love...and like many people that love a thing, they don't want it banged up. In a physical object that makes sense, sometimes. You don't want to break a Faberge egg. On the other hand, martial arts should be about as far as you can get from a Faberge egg and you can't really understand something without taking it apart. Much less something physical and visceral and about conflict and contention... you can't understand it to any depth without road-testing.
But to this particular teacher personality, being sure is the hallmark of a good teacher and any test risks doubt seeping in...
That creates a need for a critical third type in martial arts. The explorer. This is what the instructor mentioned above sees in my friend. Toby will listen, he will learn and absorb...and then he will test it. Sometimes at great personal risk, sometimes just with common sense and doubt. The skills he picks up will not just be learned-- they will be put in situations where they will succeed or fail or expand. (That is a huge problem with preserving arts: sometimes in the road test you find out not that they were less than you feared but they were bigger than you imagined, and that means that you never understood them at all. Humbling.)
Toby's teacher, like many extraordinary (as opposed to merely good) teachers, spent most of his training life as an explorer. Not just learning everything he could, but risking and testing and sometimes failing. What comes out of failure is often more compact, useful and truer than what went in.
So he sees Toby and he shares more, because the student and teacher personalities don't get it. They don't understand the awesome power and freedom of doubt. They think that training is about answers and proficiency and safety, and the explorers see it as about clarity. Answers are dependent on questions. Proficiency can (read "Deep Survival") hamper adaptability. In a world with a 100% death rate safety is and always has been a complete illusion.
The explorers get a lot of shit, but they are the ones who will carry a living thing into the next generation.

The Big Scenario Training Post

This should probably be a book, honestly. Maybe an e-book. I'll keep you posted.
Scenarios are an attempt at what Tony Blauer calls the constant search for the best fake stuff out there. All training is fake. If you are learning to send people to the hospital and people don't GO to the hospital, every rep of skill is combined with a rep of a bad safety habit. That's just the way it is.
At the most primitive level, scenario training involves bad guys in armor and a cluttered/realistic environment. The armor lets the student unload. The environment either lets the student be creative or points out that they aren't creative and their brain is stuck. But that's primitive, because it still deals with the problem as if it were one of physical skills.
So here are some points:
1) Scenario training always has a purpose. This is an explicit purpose, and one chosen in advance. To face a common or deep fear. To force a student to keep fighting. To help them see a developing situation. To test their legal judgment or tactical awareness. To find the little part that still thinks this fighting like a comic book-- that little part will get them killed.
2) The best purposes are tailored to the student. If I know you can fight, I will test whether you can tell when to fight. Whether you have the capacity to run when it is prudent. Whether you realize that crashing out of a ring of threats to escape is a qualitatively different skill than defeating a threat. If you have given me a clue that you have doubts about your ability to injure, I will put you in a scenario where you have to unload...and I will describe, probably graphically, what you strikes would have done had I not been wearing armor.
3) It takes good role-players. Through a mask, the role-players must be able to show the difference between an inexperienced and hyper-adrenalized mugger and an old con who has done a hundred robberies. The students should be able to glance at you (in full armor) and get a vibe that you are young or old, male or female or whatever you need to project.
4) The role-players have to be sensitive as well. Not in the "I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings" sense. Screw that. Part of being a bad guy is taking delight in hurting people at their most emotionally vulnerable points. By sensitivity I mean something that's a little hard to explain without an example. Sunday, one of the students, Robert, just kept moving while I was trying to incite a riot. I could tell by my own feelings that there wasn't enough of a hook there for a bad guy to work himself into the right kind of frenzy. If I had been insensitive I might have escalated it where a real threat wouldn't, and inadvertently punished Robert for a good tactic. That's bad training. Good tactics should be rewarded.
5) You have to guard against 'weirdness creep'. There are a handful of things that are likely to happen. I keep a list of 25 good scenarios with me. For the students, these are cool and new. I've done each of them dozens of times. Role players get bored. So what do role players do? They have to fight the tendency to make the situations more 'interesting' read: weird. If I didn't guard against this, we'd have scenarios with trained ocelots and laser-guided sharks.
6) The debriefing after each scenario is a special skill. The student should do most of the talking, not the instructor (DO NOT use a group of students to show off your own tactical intelligence. Primarily, because it is useless for the student. Secondarily, because no matter how many times you have trained the scenario, when the shit hits the fan for real, you might do no better than anyone else. Accept it. Grow up.) Thanks to Peter Breton, who sent an awesome e-mail about his own scenario, I'll be looking at these from both a tactical (including legal) and a strategic level, something I've usually glossed over in the past.
7) Don't do too many scenarios. Like the first black belt test, only the first scenario really shows you what the adrenaline will do. If you put someone through four or five, the last few are run like a game. The novelty wears off. A peer jury helps a lot. Having friends who you have to convince that you did the right thing puts some social pressure (and the attendant neurohormone cascade) on the student. But it still turns into a game. My ideal rhythm is one scenario in the morning probing for weaknesses and a scenario targeted at those weaknesses in the afternoon.
8) Knowing it is a scenario makes people do unnatural things. Confronted by a Monkey Dancer in a bar, leaving is sensible. People leave in a scenario who don't leave in real life (and people step in who wouldn't in real life). That is stuff for the debrief.
Above all, be safe and learn stuff.

Damn

Boston is special.The second day of the seminar went really well, and each time I learn more about how to present scenarios. That would be a whole huge post, maybe a book. Lots of scenario trainers work a scenario to test or draw out martial skills. That's a very different, limited animal than scenarios that test judgment and global awareness.
Anyway, the scenarios were a blast in a nightclub with a full bar and pool tables and restrooms with diamond plate on the walls (that can leave a mark). We had the privilege of Jamie, an experienced bar manager, explaining how he read the line when checking IDs at the door, mirroring timing and the flow of adrenaline... good stuff. Excellent fighters from Chris Dammann and David Weiss' crew, who took the drills and ran with them, increasing intensity and making stuff their own. Exactly the way it should be.
Bill Giovannucci's hero genes came out. That man needs to be a bodyguard when he grows up.
It's been a great weekend-- nargilah and cannolli and brawling and talk; philosophy and tactics and teaching. Pushed some buttons, which is important in scenario training, and found a few more of my own.
Then, to top it off, randomly ran into Dave Castoldi while looking to get some equipment. Wound up practicing knife defenses with one of the Grand Old Men of Small Circle Jujitsu in a store... that was pretty damn cool.----------------------------------------Added Kasey's blog to the bar on the side. He's the complete package, with dan ranks in traditional, classical and sport arts as well as street experience (enforcement and SWAT). Plus, he's a blast to have a cigar with.