Dealing With Violence, Creating Structure For Spontaneity And The Perils Of Being A "Jam Idiot"

Some fellow students have reported to me that their combatives training is actually making them feel less confident and more fearful!

Sounds crazy. But is it?

I had the same thing from studying RBSD/ Combatives... I really only got into it about two years after I had stopped being on the doors as a doorman or "bouncer" and getting into regular fights. I found the more I studied and the deeper I got into the subject the more nervous and less confident I felt.

Has your training made you feel more fearful?


You may well want to look at what is going on at your behavioural level and your internal dialogue... now look at your RBSD training... where are you doing it? who with? what do actually spend time focusing on in your sessions? Is there an IMPLIED feeling of incompetence? are you being hypnotised into feeling the world is a threatening place and that its a struggle to deal with? (just rhetorical questions for you to ponder )

This can be the kind of thing that happens in group therapy/ AA groups... the unspoken, implied assumption that are reflected in the language patterns are much more powerful than any specific explicit commands... beliefs like "you ARE an alcoholic" or "once an alcoholic always an alcoholic" etc

In some RBSD/combatives circles I start to get the impression by listening to their discourse that everyone who might want to have a disagreement with you WILL want to beat you up and they WILL be a "STREETFIGHTER" and that means they will be FEROCIOUS and use frighteninig prison biting tactics that you have never heard of... etc

That is just one reason studying this subject can make you more scared where it should be making you more confident.

Another is that intellectualising and frontal lobing the subject invites you to think in terms of consequence and that imagining of what MIGHT happen can drive you crazy. I personally found after 6 months of study of "how to do violence" I was less confident than I had been 3 years previous to the study when I KNEW far less but I was doing violence much more regularly!

Now thats not to say I don't think what Ive learned is useful and that I don't think I'm more skilled now than I was back then... but knowing more and being more skilled does NOT necessarily make you feel more confident.

I started to feel like my ultimate nightmare: "the RBSD nerd".

From Macolm Gladwell's book "Blink", chapter four which is about "creating structure for spontaneity":

"There are I think two important lessons here. The first is that truly successful decision making relies on a balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking... The second lesson is that in good decision making, frugality matters... overloading the decision makers with information, makes (performing a skilled task) harder, not easier. To be a successful decision maker, we have to edit."

Gladwell also references in this section a former Marine called Paul Van Riper who was called out of retirement by the Pentagon in 2000 to play the role of a rogue anti american Commander in a quarter of a billion dollar war game called Millenium Challenge.

"Van Riper didn't believe you could lift the fog of war.... from his own experiences in Vietnam... Van Riper became convinced that war was inherently unpredictable, messy and non linear... It wasn't that Van Riper hated rational analysis. Its that he thought it was inappropriate in the midst of battle, where the uncertainties of war and the pressures of time made it impossible to compare options carefully and calmly... nurses and firefighters would size up a situation immediately and act, drawing on experience and intuition and a rough kind of mental simulation. To Van Riper that seemed to describe much more accurately how people make decisions on the battle field."

Van Riper's Rogue Red Team played the "War by the book" Blue Team who obeyed every established principle of military strategy... and gave them a kicking!

"Had Millenium Challenge been a real war instead of just an exercise, twenty thousand American servicemen and women would have been killed before there own army had even fired a shot."

I say: You cant do violence by numbers, you have to develop an intuitive ability to improvise given the circumstances and then trust it, thats where real confidence comes from.

There is so much good material in Gladwell's book relevant to self protection Im struggling to edit myself ... here is my last point:

Jam Idiocy

In chapter 5 Gladwell describes an experiment performed by Psychologist Jonathan Schooler, who came up with the term Verbal Overshadowing

(... if I ask you to remember someones face, you can do it effectively, but if I ask you to describe that face in words your visual memory actually becomes impaired by that process! thats "verbal overshadowing")

In the experiment a group of food experts were asked to rank the quality of 24 different jams. Schooler took a group of college students and asked them to rank the jams too. How close was the students ranking to the experts?

"Pretty close" says Gladwell "What this says, in other words, is that our jam reactions are quite good: even those of us who aren't jam experts know good jam when we taste it."

BUT

What happened in the experiment when students were given a questionnaire and asked to explain their choices of jam? Total disaster... there was little correlation at all with the experts choice of jam.

"This is reminiscent of Schoolers experiments I described in the Van Riper story (about verbal overshadowing) in which introspection destroyed peoples ability to solve insight problems. By making people think about jam...Schooler turned them into jam idiots."

In your Combatives training, beware the "Jam Idiocy" Effect.

You cant think your way out of a problem that you acted your way into... so if you want more confidence: stop thinking so hard about everything and take action!

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