Tag: Intuition

Empowerment Self-Defense & Healing: Reconnecting to Intuition After Trauma

A tricky thing about trauma is that it messes with our intuition. We’ve all heard people say it’s important  to “trust your gut” about who is safe and who isn’t; but for those of us who have experienced trauma, our trauma response/PTS (Post-Traumatic Stress) can masquerade as intuition in the form of hypervigilance. This trauma response tells us things like, “No men are safe;” “I’d rather be safe than sorry,” rather than looking for signs that distinguish the behavior of people who may do harm from those who will not. It looks for commonalities (men, people who fit a certain profile) vs. distinguishing features (men who ignore boundaries, men who are overly eager to be helpful with a child in a way that places them alone with that child, etc.).

It can feel easier to follow broad “rules” when we haven’t been taught how to trust ourselves and our bodies.

When I took my first empowerment self-defense class with Resolve, instructors played the role of those who might do harm, allowing me to learn more about what to look for, and practice what to do in those scenarios. This helped me tremendously. By identifying red flags and how I could respond, I learned (and my nervous system learned) to relax when those red flags were not present. It helped me identify not just what danger looked like, but also what safety looks like. It helped me learn to trust myself and others.

So many students I’ve spoken with over the years have reflected about how they have structured their lives – oftentimes unknowingly – around vague and restrictive “safety tips.” Some don’t even identify as having trauma histories, and yet they learned these same messages that are very much rooted in trauma responses. These trauma responses can help protect us in the moment, but do not usually serve us long-term. In fact, disconnecting ourselves from our own ways of knowing and isolating ourselves from being with others for fear of being hurt is a trauma response – it is not how we heal. We heal in community, by connecting with others.

Profound change happens in our bodies when we practice tapping back into our intuition. Having a toolbox – a set of skills – to both understand and assess risk more accurately can translate to suddenly feeling freer to do more. The tools learned in class can create a feeling of self-efficacy – not responsibility – so more of us feel prepared to take things on should something arise. This is not a guarantee of safety, but rather, a completely fresh perspective of what freedom and living one’s life might feel like when we learn to trust ourselves.

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.

Protecting Our Communities After Tragedy

Imagine, for a moment, hearing about a tragic car accident. Imagine overhearing bits and pieces about a driver swerving out of control and hitting oncoming traffic at a speed of over 75 mph. You see clips of family members of those who died sobbing on the news. People talk about it for over a week.

How would you perceive that story? How long would it take for you to recover?

Now, imagine that same story but that you had never heard about seat belts, never learned the rules of the road, how to maintain safe distance, and how to look around your car and rearview mirror for irregularities. In fact, imagine you were told that you would be cared for in that sort of situation by people who said they could handle it, but still look fearful.

How would you perceive that story and how would you feel about getting into a car again? How long would it take you to recover?

Now, imagine you are seven years old.

Having tools makes all the difference. It doesn’t mean car accidents never happen, but it means that you have an understanding of how to deal with the risk and that the story plays in your head differently.

Just as you wouldn’t teach a new driver about car accidents and drunken drivers first thing, school shootings are not the place to start a discussion about child or school safety. Even trained officers and military struggle with how to deal with shooters — this is not the topic to begin with for teachers, families and children!

Just as car safety begins with learning about adjusting mirrors and looking both ways before pulling out of the driveway, personal safety for children has the same basic steps.

Teach them to trust their intuition. Teach them how to get help and what to say. Help them practice setting a boundary and saying no. Help them learn simple physical strategies to stop an assault.

By teaching them to deal with scenarios like bullying and unwanted touch, you prepare them for situations that are statistically far more likely and that they can do something about, and you empower them to deal with the terrifying stories that, unfortunately, they will continue to hear as they grow older.

I highly recommend the following articles from Kidpower for caregivers and others:

Helping Children Regain Their Emotional Safety After a Tragedy

How to Empower Kids in the Face of Armed School Violence

Tragic Shootings: Kidpower Answers to Common Questions About How To Be Safe

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.

Saying Goodbye to “Stranger Danger”

We pride ourselves at IMPACT for basing our programs on solid research and responding to dangers in the community. Occasionally the research or the danger changes, which means our program changes.
A Washington Post article from 2010 summarized data from the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children showing how rare stranger abductions are in the United States. IMPACT’s children’s class has always emphasized boundary-setting with people you know more than safety with strangers. We do this because data shows the majority of assaults and abuse of children are perpetrated by people they know.
IMPACT is shifting its children’s classes to incorporate this research, and because we have found a few issues with strict rules with strangers. The first issue is that following these rules often becomes more important than listening to one’s intuition, which is an important skill for a child to cultivate. Children are also likely to break the “stranger rules” if they need help, which can be confusing (a policeman is also a stranger). Teaching them to avoid strangers may create xenophobia and decrease an impetus to intervene as bystanders that witness violence. We believe this later works against the safe communities we all try to create. Most skills we teach with strangers in our adult and teen classes are transferable skills (i.e. skills that might be easier to role-play while imagining a stranger, though they can also be useful later with someone we know). IMPACT teaches awareness, yelling and physical techniques that are still appropriate and useful responses in stranger scenarios.
I am proud to announce that our children’s classes will continue focusing on teaching transferable skills, teaching awareness and boundary-setting with people that the children know (both adults and bullies) as well as physical self-defense skills with a non-specific “bad guy.” We will also incorporate role-plays with strangers where the children have to rely on their intuition (with coaching and feedback from staff and other students) to judge how to best interact and when they need to find a trusted adult.
Please join me in congratulating our staff in making this bold move to take a further step away from “stranger danger” in order to better prepare our children for life without scaring them. And if you have little ones, we’d love to see them in our class at the end of the month!

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.

Why Do We Watch Real-Life Violence?

Just before the Penn State scandal broke out and garnered so much attention because a popular man did nothing, there was a video of a Texas judge whipping his daughter that was making its way around the television news and the Internet. I was at the gym when I saw it on the news.

I was on my way out, so I googled it later. Unfortunately, I consider it a part of my job to know about the horrible incidences of violence being discussed in pop culture.

According to the article I read on the LA Times website, 695,000 people watched it on YouTube in the week it had been up. That same morning, I got an email from Change.org asking me to sign a petition in response to a video recorded in a classroom of one student beating another student because he was gay. There was a link to watch the video.

We used to ask ourselves why we watched so much violence in the media—in movies, television shows, etc. Now the question I ask is: why are we watching these videos of actual, real violence? Before, unless it was my family or I lived next door perhaps, I wouldn’t see real-life family violence. I wouldn’t see the physical assault of a gay teenager unless I went to that school. These are the sorts of things that turn our stomachs. They should. That feeling in the pit of your stomach is your body’s signal to you that something is wrong. If you witness or experience violence or the signals of impending violence, that signal is there to tell you to get away, defend yourself, or do something to minimize the violence as much as possible.

Why are we watching these videos?

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I think—perhaps generously—many watch them as a way of thinking that they are helping. People think that by watching the video and talking about it that they will change the culture somehow. I don’t want to be crude here, but no—that’s gossip. Just talking about what happened next door or across the country is just another way of doing nothing.

The Change.org email was at least asking readers to sign a petition. You see, the student who physically assaulted the other student was suspended from school for only three days. Can you imagine how terrified the other student must have been to return to school and see his assailant again so soon after the assault? We may have differing ideas about what an effective solution might be (personally I would go for educating the aggressor about issues of violence rather than relying on suspension time alone), but that email at least was attempting to do something.

Watching videos of real-life assaults doesn’t just do nothing, it undoes something. It undoes your natural response to that feeling in your stomach. It normalizes the behavior that you are seeing. If you were appalled by violence in the media before, this is something that should make you scream. Seeing violence should make us act. Simple. It should make us all call the police. It should make us make a scene or defend ourselves or others in some way. It should make us call our local crisis center or mentoring agency and ask how we can get involved. It should make us do something. Talking and “awareness” alone doesn’t cut it.

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