mind body mama: Do Something

Recently a woman disclosed to me that her ex harasses her verbally and electronically. Periodically he subjects her to explosive anger and threats.

“Why don’t you DO something?” her friends demand.

As if ten years of de-escalation, boundary setting and safety planning was not “doing something.” As if knowing and avoiding his triggers, staying calm and centered in the face of rage and hate, and organizing their interactions to minimize his access to her wasn’t self protection.

As if this woman does not practice self defense every minute of her life.

In a self defense class a student shared this scenario: She was stopped at a light in a local city when two groups of young men converged in the intersection. They were engaged in a heated verbal altercation. She tried to read their body language: Was a physical fight about to break out? Did anyone have a gun? She looked around the intersection: Could she back up? Could she drive around them on the curb? They dispersed as the light changed and she drove away. But afterwards she asked her self defense teachers, “What should I have done?”

Her self defense teachers said, “Read their body language. Look for a weapon. Examine your options for getting out of there.”

Third scenario, same self defense class as the second. A woman told the story of her friend who had been assaulted while running. A man came up behind her and pushed her forward. As she fell, he jumped on her back.

“What could she have done with someone on top of her?” the student asked.

“What did she do?” asked her teachers.

“She yelled. People noticed. He ran away.”

We dragged the mats in for the next class and taught some moves for getting away on the ground. But not because the woman in question had left anything out of her self defense response.

People want self defense to be about “kicking ass and taking names.” Not because they aspire to violence but because they long for a just and triumphant victory. They want to know they can face danger with decisive action. They want confidence that they’ll come out of an assault unscathed.

And sometimes they want assurance that they won’t be assaulted in the first place. They commit to self defense training as a prophylaxis: if I learn this, I’ll be invincible.

But the complex truth is that there’s only one person who holds the power to absolutely stop an assault, and that’s the attacker. The skills we bring to bear upon an assault in progress mitigate the harm but they can’t erase the intent. And having effectively navigated a dangerous situation does not leave a woman feeling the same as if she had never encountered the danger.

The woman whose ex curses her leaves their interactions feeling as if she’s been yelled at by someone who hates her. The woman who stopped at the red light drove away with adrenalin coursing through her body, heart racing and hands shaking. The woman who was pushed scraped her knees and hands and felt the fall reverberating in her bones for days.

A teenage student once challenged me, “My man says there’s a way that you can make yourself not feel pain. He does karate and his teacher taught him. He says you can punch him and it won’t do anything. Can you do that?”

She was testing me, to see if I was as kick-ass as her man and his compadres. Her magical thinking made me feel soft and sad. It is so terribly easy to hurt a human body—a fact that we rely upon in physical self defense. And humans are so incredibly resilient.

Self defense is about resilience. It’s what we do when faced with danger and fear. It is a triumph, of the “triumph of the human spirit” variety. But it’s not an untarnished joy-filled victory lap. It’s doing what has to be done. It’s getting through something we never should have had to face in the first place.