Tag: Freedom

Self-Defense Success in the Peace Corps: Kaytea’s Story

To welcome Kaytea Hendricks back to our organization as a self-defense instructor, we wanted to re-publish her self-defense success story from her time serving in the Peace Corps in Morocco. We’re so glad to have Kaytea teaching with us again!

I was on an afternoon walk when I was grabbed from behind. I thought it was a friend messing around. I said, “Come on, let me go.” Then his grip tightened, and I felt his erection. Then it hit me: “I’m being assaulted!”

He grabbed me just like Resolve instructors do during class. I took a deep breath and thought, “Oh no! He has no idea what he just got himself into!” I released a yell that was so powerful I surprised myself! I struck his groin and broke his grip. I turned to see him already sprinting away.

After this event, I felt strong and proud of myself.  Unfortunately, there were other women in my Peace Corps program who were assaulted in a similar fashion, but who had a very different overall experience. They experienced deep, life-altering trauma even though each of them was able to get away and avoid a full-on assault and were not physically hurt. 

One woman had to leave the program and return home; another started seeing a therapist; and a third woman, after therapy, still decided to return home. Although they were successful against their assailants –with no training! – they experienced trauma instead of empowerment.  

I saw how Resolve not only prepared me to defend myself, but prepared me to focus on my success – not my vulnerability. Instead of teaching me how powerful the assailant was, this experience taught me how powerful I am.

Preparing for Safety and Success in School

Families have a long to-do list when preparing for the new school year. We buy growing children new clothes or figure out hand-me-downs, gather pencils and notebooks… And when the first day comes, it can be filled with excitement or dread!

Every child loves learning. You only need to watch an infant learning to crawl or walk to see their pride at mastering a new skill.

So, why is it that getting kids to school can be so difficult at times? For many of us, it was the social arena that proved the most stressful part of school, not the big test coming up.

How many of us would have concentrated better in school or had better attendance if we had the skills to deal with problems that came up with friendships, classmates, and people we interacted with on the way to school?

When youth have a plan for dealing with a stressful social situation, it means they can choose a strategy to deal with the issue as it arises, and then put the thought away. But when a concern arises and they don’t have a strategy, this unsolved issue makes it very difficult to concentrate on what is in front of them.

When youth have the skills to speak up and take action against bias, social cruelty, bullying, harassment and exclusion, as well as answer the “what if it gets worse?” question in their minds, our communities are safer and more supportive for everyone. Individual students can spend more time learning & succeeding and less time worrying about their social interactions.

It can be frightening to address our fears about our children head on, but we do it. We do it so they are prepared for security and success. We do it with fire safety; we do it with car and bicycle safety. We can also do it with personal safety.

Feeling Safe in an Unsafe World

“When we were children, we used to think that when we were grown-up we would no longer be vulnerable. But to grow up is to accept vulnerability… To be alive is to be vulnerable.” -Madeleine L’Engle

Choosing to prepare is a courageous act. It requires that you face that there are no guarantees in life; it requires that you concede that risk and vulnerability are natural parts of life.

This, I believe, is why our classes can seem frightening to some. It is not because of what we do in the classes — in reality, we structure the entire class around supporting students and helping them to feel safe as they address their fears. However, the act of admitting that there is, in fact, a reason why we should learn violence prevention and self-defense strategies, can be daunting.

In our classes, we don’t focus on the bad or scary aspects. We have seen enough assaults on TV, described on the news, and oftentimes, experienced in our own lives, to last a lifetime. So, at IMPACT, we have a chance to focus on what we can do.

When I teach, I tell students to focus on what I am doing, rather than on what the assailant character is doing, for this reason. It takes effort to shift one’s gaze from the actions of the attacker to that of the person defending herself. It is entirely possible that one could become consumed with threat and forget to move on to one’s own agency. Focusing on your agency doesn’t mean ignoring the threat, rather that we have chosen to focus on options we have to increase our safety in an inherently unsafe world.

I think that this — perhaps even more than the verbal strategies and physical techniques taught in class — may be the most beneficial part of the class: guidance about how to approach violence and risk in a healthy and honest way, and in a way that focuses on our own agency as individuals and as families.

Intuition & Trust

This past week I fixed my first flat tire on my own. It felt like a tremendous success story, not just as a woman with a flat tire, but as an IMPACT success. Three men stopped and offered help, and I realized I trusted them, and trusted them for very good reasons!

Ironically, “broken down on the side of the freeway” is the scenario that I use most in teen and adult classes when demonstrating verbal and physical skills in context. When I introduce the scenario, I sometimes hear gasps or murmurs of agreement, especially from women, as that is a situation that truly worries them.

In classes, the Suited Instructors play characters that say all sorts of nasty things as they approach, being suggestive, lewd, and simply not going away when I say I’ve got help on the way.

In real life, that’s not what happened. The first man who stopped asked if I had help on the way, and when I said I was trying to remember how to do it, he gave me some pointers. Then he wished me luck and drove off. The two men who came after also asked if I needed help and each of them also went away once they saw I had it under control.

I thought about how I knew I could trust them: None of them got very close to me. They all were friendly and helpful, commiserating and making jokes, but none of them tried to bond with me through the experience or sought to gain my trust through a quick encounter. There was no presumption of a relationship because I was on the side of the highway with a problem and they were men with knowledge and experience.

Oftentimes when people think about intuition, they think of it as “How do you know when something’s not okay?” For some, though, we know quite well when things are not okay. It’s more of a question of how to know when things are okay and when to relax

I was elated after the experience, not just because I conquered a flat tire independently, but because I got to relate to these men from a place of trust and lightheartedness, instead of feeling suspicious or worried as I might have in the past. When I count the ways IMPACT has freed my life, this is one of the most valuable ways to me: I can truly be present with my entire community.

When Feeling Safe Isn’t Enough

When I took my IMPACT class years ago, I thought my biggest concern was safety. And it was, in many ways. My fear of violence really affected my life in a negative way. However, my biggest concerns could have been better described as:

  • wanting to understand how to trust others in a way that was more nuanced than an all-or-nothing approach
  • wanting to understand how I could speak up for myself without feeling mean
  • wanting to feel –not just know– that my body belonged to me & I could dictate my experiences
  • wanting to understand that previous bad experiences were not my fault & yet that they didn’t have to be repeated

Another IMPACT chapter recently noted that concern about safety was not the top reason why students enrolled in their classes. That initially surprised me, and I wondered if that could possibly be true for our students if we surveyed them.

I read the director’s email, and I noted that the top reasons for registrations in their chapter actually echoed many of my feelings and things I’ve heard in classes.

Listening closer to participants in recent classes, I noticed people talking about wanting:

  • to be able to protect their families
  • to heal from past hurts when they’d hit a wall with their progress
  • to be more assertive in their professional & personal lives
  • to be able to control their anger
  • to not have to ignore homeless people & others on the street
  • to have better relationships
  • to not always be kicking themselves after a difficult conversation with things they wish they had said.

While I believe feeling safe is an underlying aspect of being able to address all of these other issues, I love and feel honored to be a part of a curriculum that people feel they can come to in order to address such diverse needs.

What Do You Do to Prepare?

Traditional safety advice for women says women should:

•Never go out late / after dark.
•Always stay in groups.
•Not go to bad neighborhoods.
•Carry keys between their fingers.
•Carry mace / a gun / a whistle.
•Check under their cars / in their backseats before getting in.
•Not wear short skirts.

Women often prepare themselves by doing any / all of the above, or by worrying; as if worrying every day could protect us from the pain of an assault. We oftentimes apply this same or similar safety advice to our children.

I looked for a personal safety program that went beyond this list because I was outraged by the idea that I should have a curfew imposed on me that did not apply to men. I wanted to be able to do things independently; I didn’t want to always have to be with a friend. I was frustrated by advice that ignored the fact that some of us live in or work in bad neighborhoods. I was incredulous that this advice didn’t acknowledge that though many worry walking on the street alone, that the majority of the hurt we’ve experienced was by someone we knew, not someone lurking in the parking lot. And I resented the implication that I brought any abuse I endured upon myself.

In truth, following the above protocol did not keep me safe, but it did make my life smaller and made me more fearful.

It’s interesting to me that ultimately these are our choices. We can do these actions every day that result in increased fear and suspicion of others, particularly those that may fit a certain stereotype; or we can invest time in learning life skills.

When we learn skills, our lives open up with possibilities.

Twenty hours assured me that I didn’t need to worry about what I was wearing, that, in fact, clothing would neither deter nor attract the typical assailant. A couple weekends in the classroom meant that I opened up to men again, because I understood the difference between a nice guy and someone who was willing to cross my boundaries, regardless of how I felt. After the class, I trusted myself to react to signals I was receiving both from those in my life and strangers, instead of making excuses for them or denying what was clearly happening. After four days, I felt a change in my body, knowing that it was a safe place that I could now protect.

We all prepare for violence and hurtful events in life differently. Preparing should make us feel safer and our lives bigger, not more scared and more retracted. What do you do to prepare?

Boundary-Setting for Better Relationships & Community

A theme often discussed in parenting and social worker circles is that though we may be motivated to always be kind and helpful, at times our children/clients actually may be better helped by hearing a boundary set than by a kind word. For those new to either arena, this can be confusing because the whole reason they decided to have kids/help was to offer more compassion to the world!

Yet setting boundaries is part of creating community. Setting boundaries appropriately is not about punishment – it is about maintaining and improving relationships.

If I say something that strikes a friend a little off, I expect him/her to tell me so I know not to do it again. I would be absolutely mortified if I found out that I’d been doing something for 6 months that significantly bothered a friend. I think most of us would. Yet, we have very little way of knowing what we’re doing without getting some feedback.

In our classes, we teach students how to give effective feedback to others about how we want to be treated. It can range from, “I feel upset when you borrow my car without asking. I need you to ask first” to “I’m really enjoying spending time with you, but I’m not ready for that” to nonverbal cues like putting one’s hands up.

My friend may be simply learning about what works for me; however, it may also be something s/he learns about the world. When I set boundaries, I am not “schooling” my friend about how s/he should treat people – a lecture probably wouldn’t be very well received! However, if s/he hears a boundary from me and from a few other people in a way s/he can hear, s/he might change his/her approach.

The physical skills we teach can be taken in a similar vein. The perpetrator is always responsible for his actions and must be held accountable; change always has to originate with him. IMPACT has programs that also work on primary prevention and changing social norms. However, if an assailant does attack me, he will quickly learn that I am not okay with being treated that way.

For whatever reason, the assailant believes that it’s okay to treat people harmfully; by multiple people clearly communicating that it’s not okay — or by one person demonstrating it forcefully — perhaps that impression may unravel.

It’s up to all of us to set social norms. Ultimately, I cannot control another person’s thoughts or actions. But hopefully setting boundaries for myself, and by each of us setting our boundaries with each other, we can change the accepted status quo. This can be a part of making our community better for everyone.

Sparring & Sports vs. Self-Defense

Many sports, at their root, undoubtedly were created to develop and practice physical skills that can also be used in real-life situations. The interesting piece is when we forget how to separate the game aspect of sports from the physical skills gained.

When I teach, I have the opportunity to work with a lot of young athletes, including martial artists, boxers and wrestlers. Their practice in sports often makes them better prepared to strategize and think about physical technique. What they’ve learned on the mat clearly comes out in IMPACT classes, from their enhanced body awareness to willingness to confront violence. It’s evident that they’ve already given a lot of thought to the topic of aggressors and power and domination.

So it’s interesting when I hear intermediate level women in martial arts say they could never defend themselves in real life and would just have to run from an assailant. I’m fascinated when I hear teen boys talk about drawing out an attacker and fooling them into striking first and howling that it’s a “cheap shot” when they see IMPACT students deliver groin strikes.

The physical skills we practice at IMPACT are remarkably similar to those learned in sports. However, at IMPACT, we always keep our eye on one thing: assailants are not looking for a good fight. They are looking for an easy target. And in that situation, there’s no such thing as fighting “fair.” It’s not about scoring a point. It’s about changing the assailant’s mind by yelling and showing you’re willing to defend yourself.

Why are strikes below the belt illegal moves in all sporting arenas? Because they END the fight! There’s no match after that. He’s not going to get up and rally to score another point. So, when fighting for sport, it makes sense that this is forbidden. However, in real life, if your life and safety or that of someone you love is at stake- go for the groin! It’s not about being fair; it’s not about complex strategy and drawing him out. Thankfully, it’s much simpler than that – at least physically.

This is what makes self-defense for the average person so easily attainable. It’s not complex. You don’t have to be in good shape. Find the courage to register for a class so that you know you could defend yourself without being overcome by socialization or fear. Practice the verbal skills that you’re more likely to need in real life. Then… bask in the knowledge that if necessary, you can defend yourself and your family and friends. 20 hours. It’s that simple.

Why We Set Boundaries

People sometimes tell me that they hate conflict, and so setting boundaries is difficult for them. In reality, learning to set boundaries is perfect for the person who wants to avoid conflict because it prevents conflict from arising or becoming worse.

The true function of boundary-setting is to prevent problems from building up to the point that:

• You eventually explode and jeopardize the relationship;
• You avoid the person and/or have to end the relationship; or,
• It escalates into a more serious issue where physical or sexual assault may occur.

Boundary-setting does not mean asking for everything to go your way. It is not really a “boundary” for me to say, “I feel uncomfortable when you snort when you laugh. I need you to stop.” However, if a behavior is happening that may lead to one of the three points above, it’s my responsibility to bring it up.

Think about how shocking and awful it would feel for you to find out that you’d been doing something for months that significantly bothered someone you care about. Wouldn’t you want a chance to change it before your friend exploded or started avoiding you? Once it gets to that point, changing patterns is far more difficult. There may be serious hurts that have to be navigated and overcome.

Boundary-setting is personal safety.  Setting boundaries can create emotional safety in relationships as well as prevent assault.

It’s incredibly unlikely for the stranger on the street to assault us. Even when a stranger crosses our boundaries verbally, we don’t think nearly as much of it as when a family, friend or co-worker does the same. These are the skills that we need not only to stay safe, but also to create easier, joyful and fulfilling relationships.

Learning to Live Courageously

Life takes courage. It takes courage to talk with that person you have a crush on and takes even more courage to stick with it when things get tough. Raising children and suddenly being responsible for another life takes courage. It takes courage to go after the job or promotion that you want. It takes courage to stand up to a bully, whether at school or at work.

Students in our classes learn to develop their courage. It takes tremendous courage to face your worst fears on the mat. Whether you’re most afraid of rape or murder, setting a limit with a friend or a family member and then being rejected, or afraid of hurting another person emotionally or physically, we address it in our classes.
Yes, it’s scary. But the good news-?

Everything after that gets easier. The practice pays off. You learn how to steady your voice when you’re afraid, and you learn to hold your ground through your fear and anxiety.

The next time that surge of adrenaline and fear hits, it’s not so surprising. In fact, you start to expect it.  You know what it is and how to get through it instead of being overwhelmed and feeling controlled by it.  Maybe you even welcome it when it comes.

Practicing in a supportive environment can change that feeling of terror in the face of a challenge to noticing that that rush means you’re doing something worthwhile. That surge no longer paralyzes but actually provides you with the energy to do what’s necessary and take action.

Living fully requires action and living with conviction. Courage can be learned and practiced.

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