Tag: Fear

The Effects of Fear & Violence: Mourning Trayvon

Trayvon Martin’s death, as well as the lack of charges brought against his killer, was horrific for many, but was not surprising.

Women often tell me of their rape aversion plans. They usually include: carrying their keys between their fingers, never going anywhere alone, watching their drinks, not wearing revealing clothes, not going out at night, etc. “Sometimes,” they wearily declare, “I just wish I were a man.” What we don’t usually talk about is the dangers men face, especially men of color.

Men typically are not told to restrict their behavior in these limiting and largely unproductive ways. They are not warned that they’re being reckless, or worse – provoking any violence they might encounter – if they don’t adhere to these rules.

Still, the concept of men as free from the effects of violence in our society is a deeply flawed one. When I teach about violence prevention in schools, teen boys often are resistant until they realize that I’m not just there to teach the girls. Then they express confusion and resentment as they describe learning to evade physical assault by aggressive men and boys, while simultaneously having to demonstrate they are not a threat to others.

A recent story with Donna Britt, mother and author of brothers (& me), on NPR discussed how she raised her boys. She and others are doing a great job of making public what they call “the talk” that African American parents give their boys when they make that transition from cute child to possible threat in the public eye.

This is an everyday reality for boys and men of color, and I’m glad that this is getting some media attention and acknowledgment. Yet, in a culture where we say there’s no way to predict violence, profiling is inevitable.

Soon the evening news will interview another neighbor who testifies the murderer next door “seemed so normal” and everyone will nod that there was no way anyone could have known. Then, everyone, including the police, will grasp at whatever they can– the latest mug shots, the characters from the last movie – to be able to predict the next act of violence. Because we don’t want to be caught off guard.

Safety is not worth this cost to our communities. There are ways of predicting violence – which means there are ways of preventing violence – that don’t include profiling random men of color and blaming victims. Why are we not exploring these?

In an entertainment culture, it is not popular to explore predictability. When there is a mystery, you can be sure that everyone will stay glued to his/her screens, anxious to keep track of the newest development. Meanwhile, this also ensures that sponsors’ advertisements will be watched while viewers eagerly await the next installment of the story.

Despite Gavin de Becker’s book, The Gift of Fear, being on the bestseller list when it first came out over a decade ago, reporters still choose to interview the clueless rather than interview his team that studies how intuition works and the precursors to violence. As a culture, we treat those who know ahead of time as mystical outliers, never pausing to study how it is that the average person could foresee such a thing.

Those who accurately predict violence use behavior as their indicators, not hoodies or race. Concepts like forced teaming (pretending there is an alliance between you that doesn’t exist), using charm and niceness, giving too many details, typecasting, loan sharking, giving an unsolicited promise and ignoring the word “no” are all accurate ways of predicting when someone is acting manipulatively and possibly dangerous. Of course, in order to give credence to these ways of predicting violence and danger, we would have to admit that most violence happens by people we know and/or includes an “interview” process, rather than being a random shooting or a man behind the bushes who says nothing before grabbing his victim.

To say that violence is predictable is not equal to blaming those of us who have experienced it in the past. It is empowering everyone to have more tools for the future so that we may live fuller lives and feel less fear. It is challenging our society to distinguish between paranoia, prejudice and real intuition.

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.

My Friend, Adrenaline

My relationship to adrenaline – that hormone that gets the heart pumping and gives one the shakes – changed because of IMPACT.  IMPACT’s adrenaline-based classes teach students (including me, years ago) how to function when their nerves are jangled and they’re having trouble thinking clearly.  This comes from the behavior modification that instructors do in the moment of adrenaline that trains students in behaviors that lead to successful outcomes.  Through this training, our brains learn that we can function in spite of this hormone flowing through our bodies.

Since my first class, my relationship to adrenaline has become more conscious.  I’ve noticed adrenaline when I: had a grant deadline to meet and experienced technical difficulties minutes before the cut-off, drove a stick shift in traffic for the first time, talked in front of important groups, had difficult conversations, had a near-miss while driving… and probably lots more.

Each time, I noticed my response was to grumble amusedly, “My friend, adrenaline” in recognition of its sudden presence.  I may have not been altogether pleased to see my friend, but I understood what I was feeling.  In the past before my first class, I might have labeled it “panic”, “anxiety”, or “irritation” and gotten more “stressed out.”  After the class, I was able to identify it as a natural, physical reaction to what was going on and have a different, more productive relationship to it.

While these more everyday adrenaline experiences do not have a direct relationship to staying safe, I realize that this changed relationship to adrenaline is one of the ways IMPACT can improve one’s quality of life.  Adrenaline (and conflict) are natural parts of life; we will never change that, but we can change our responses to them.

Feeling Safe & Being Safe

Personal safety and self-defense classes should make a person actually safer, feel safer, and feel less fearful.

Fear can make a person more closed off from the world- loathe to trust others, averse to talking with strangers, and hesitant to try new things, be in new situations, or visit new places.  Living in fear of violence is one of the more oppressive consequences of violence in our society.

I firmly believe that self-defense and personal safety classes should address that fear.  It should alleviate those symptoms.  If a safety program makes a person go out less, be more mistrustful, be less open to new people or new experiences, it has perhaps succeeded in mking him/her safer.  But it has not succeeded in making that person feel less fear.  It has not made his/her life more full or more joyful – and it is not the only means to safety!

To feel and be safer does not require us to feel afraid.  We are often told that to be safe, we must feel afraid.  However, it is possible to feel safe and be safe.

If a violence prevention or personal safety class doesn’t make you feel safer and less ferful, if it tells you to close off your life even more than you already have in order to be safe, take another one.  Closing off is not the only way to get security in this world.  It may seem counterintuitive, but we can actually feel more safe and more secure when we open up, once we have some criteria for judging and some skills for defending.

Without the Myth of Random Violence

Violence is seldom random.  Like all behaviors, violent behavior follows patterns that can be observed.  Once understood, these patterns can be prepared for.  I highly recommend the book, The Gift of Fear, in which the author Gavin de Becker breaks down the behaviors that manipulative or dangerous people use.  He goes into depth about how intuition functions to keep us safe.  At IMPACT, we teach an Intuition Development class on this topic.

If everyone understood that violence follows a pattern, it would have a profound impact on communities:

1.     Individuals would only be appropriately alarmed when a set of behaviors happen, and would feel at peace when they don’t.

2.     People could grow closer, not feeling suspicious of one another because of stereotypes or profiling or past experiences.

3.     It would make a lot more sense to learn a systematic approach to preventing, defending against, and mitigating the impact of violence.

4.     Victims/survivors and others affected by the threat of violence in our society could learn practical skills to avoid, prevent, and diminish violence in their lives and feel safer.  By gaining knowledge and skills, survivors can change the idea that it was something intrinsic in them, or that they are victims.

5.    Good people regularly profiled as potentially dangerous (men, people of color, those wearing baggy pants or piercings, etc.) could walk down the street and get into elevators without having to worry and put effort into not scaring others.

6.     Perpetrators of violence would be seen as using a set of behaviors to hurt and scare (have power over) others, and the behaviors would be addressed more, rather than demonizing the person.

7.     We could address the roots of violence and prevent it on that level, instead of continually having to provide victim services and lock up perpetrators.

Violence will always be shocking and upsetting.  By focusing on patterns, we discover the tools necessary to change how violence affects our communities.

Revealing Vulnerabilities

“It was so great to have men in this class – here I am, a 68-year-old woman, thinking I’m the one who’s got stuff to be worried about, but they are struggling with this stuff too.”

– 4-Hour Workshop Participant

Just as the student above describes, I love teaching mixed-gender and mixed-age classes because through seeing the different situations role-played in class, students learn just that:  we all have our challenges.

 

From a young age, many girls are still taught that they are more fragile or less able to do things than their male counterparts.  They eventually learn that they must watch their drinks, cannot go on walks alone, or that the road trip that their brother goes on is forbidden for them when they reach the same age.

 

For women growing up in this context, discovering that men are not impervious to threat and not invulnerable can be a revelation.  This discovery can have profound implications for our beliefs about our own vulnerability and ability to defend ourselves.

 

It’s the reason I believe our mixed gender classes are becoming more popular for men and for women.  Women, while learning to protect themselves, learn about the situations that men face.  Men, while learning to protect themselves, learn more about the depth to which violence affects most women’s lives.

 

If you’re a woman, consider taking a moment to talk with your friends, father/brothers, or boyfriend/husband.  Ask them if anyone has become fearful of them or aggressive with them – without any intentional provocation on their part – simply because they were men and viewed as potentially violent.  See if you can get them to honestly tell you about situations they’ve faced and the fear they felt.

 

If you’re a man, consider sharing these little-revealed vulnerabilities for the benefit of the women in your life.  Also, consider sharing with other men and younger generations that though you may deal with a situation quite capably that you still do feel fear and adrenaline, that you still experience that vulnerability.  Lifting the veil and acknowledging this helps everyone by normalizing the experience and letting others know that though it never goes away, there are ways to prepare.

Letting Go of Anger

Just as we don’t want to live in fear, looking over our shoulder constantly, most of us don’t want to live a life of anger.
For years, I hung onto my anger as if it could protect me. I felt angry at people who might hurt me or others.  It seemed natural that I could let that anger fuel the strikes I learned at IMPACT.  It seemed effective – and it was, for a while.
I recently realized that I don’t really feel angry anymore.  I continue to feel every right to defend myself.  I see that being angry at would-be-assailants was a good vehicle for learning to care about and value myself again.  But I realized that defending myself with my words or physical strikes can happen still without carrying around anger.
Whether fear or anger, emotions often happen reflexively as an attempt at self-protection.  People often believe that by reading about the rape in the news, or telling a friend about the horrible story they heard, that they can prevent violence in their own lives.  This may be true.
People also believe that by being outraged at events on the evening news or by that “rude, inconsiderate” person, that they can keep violence at bay.  This strategy may also work.  Yet while strategies like these may help us avoid bad situations or “bad people,” they may also keep us from good experiences.
When we keep fear with us, we often do not notice – and keep ourselves from the opportunities to notice – that we are powerful.  We may not realize or discover that we are capable of effectively handling difficult situations.  And when we keep anger with us, we too often miss out on the joy that can come from people getting close.  We miss out on the opportunity to notice the real healing we’ve done and the innate tenderness and compassion we have for other human beings or someone special.
We sometimes need to let go of these emotions in order to live the lives we were born to live – and deserve to live.  Fear and anger will, ultimately, only hold us back.

Sharing Our Stories

Storytelling is an important part of how we all learn.  So, we would do well to think about what the moral of the story is before we tell it.  When it comes to personal safety, the moral is all too frequently:

a) be scared!
b) don’t do that!
c) it could happen to you
d) there’s no way of foreseeing it/preventing it
e) you have to watch out for those people (promoting prejudice)
or f) all of the above.

One of our instructors had a couple free minutes with a class of 6th graders where the students wanted to tell stories about frightening situations they had experienced.  Since we know kids easily latch onto sensationalized tales of danger and we prefer our kids classes to be non-scary, she coached them: “And what did you do?  Did that keep you safe?  Sounds like a scary situation that you handled really well – and you stayed safe.  Good for you!”

She told the students that when they tell each other stories, they must include the parts where they were successful.  They must include what someone did to get out of the situation, how they acted to keep it from getting worse, and where they turned to for help.  People listen to your stories, she explained, and you can be their teacher instead of just scaring them.

We as adults would be smart to follow the same advice our instructor gave those students.

When I think of an interesting story I saw on the news or something someone told me, and I want to tell someone else about it, I consider,

a) does it avoid the scare-tactic points above?
b) is it actually for this person’s benefit, and if so – what’s the lesson?
c) does it provide useful information that someone can use practically?

By following these guidelines, we can be sure that when we share safety information with others – children and adults – we are helping to prepare them, not scare them.

“Forward These Safety Tips!”

“Forward this email to every woman you know!…”

As a woman and as someone who teaches violence prevention and self-defense, I get a lot of emails about staying safe.  The sentiment of wanting to keep people you love safe is a great one.  However, too often these emails spread disinformation and fear, rather than anything that would realistically help keep someone safe.  So here is a little guide to help people evaluate the emails before they take them to heart and send them on.

• Have you checked Snopes.com? If you are not familiar with it, Snopes is a great website that researches stories that circulate and dispels them if they find them to be urban legends.  Almost all of the emails I’ve gotten (assailants now using older women as lures outside of WalMart, gangs choose their next victims by the good Samaritans that flash their lights at them, etc.) are proven on Snopes to be untruths being spread rampantly on the internet.

• How likely is this to be common? Consider any statistics that you know ab out violence or go read some, and then consider, for instance: if statistically, most women are assaulted by someone that they know, how likely is it that there is someone hiding, plotting to get in my car unbeknownst to me while I fill up my tank at the gas station?

• What, exactly, is it telling you to prepare for? Does it conflate assault with robbery? A robber is someone who wants things, while an assailant is someone who wants to hurt someone else.  Remember that a suggestion like not carrying a purse, not keeping your wallet in your back pocket, never wearing noticeable jewelry, etc. is about robbery, not assault.  Being specific about what you are preparing for can make you feel less scared and more prepared.

• Does it tell you to “never” do something? I’ve read emails that tell women (typically) to never wear overalls or have long hair or to balance their checkbooks in their cars.  They promise dire consequences to those who ignore these warnings, because *that* is what assailants look for.  Well, no.  Assailants, statistically, look for people who are unaware, people they consider easy to overpower and dominate, or easy to provoke.  Hairstyle has nothing to do with it.  Of course lists are tempting, but lists can encourage you to concentrate on things that may obscure the truer power of what your intuition and own understanding would otherwise guide you to do.  Real life doesn’t happen in absolutes.

• Does it ask you to limit your behavior in a way that seems difficult or unrealistic? Many of these emails and, unfortunately, many safety programs promote changing one’s habits in a way that limits living life.  Certainly I’m not going to walk down a dark alley for the heck of it, but a certain degree of risk (balancing your checkbook for a moment in your car after shopping, going out after 7pm, or hiking alone) is not foolish, foolhardy, or irresponsible – it is, in fact, healthy.

• How does it make you feel? This, perhaps, is the most important point to me.  Does it actually share things that make you feel safe, feel more powerful in your own skin, feel more able to deal with situations that come up in life?  Or does it tell you that there is danger lurking around every corner in your everyday life that you must try to avoid?  Good safety information should make you feel safer, not more afraid.

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