Worst Case Scenarios

There are many people who don’t believe that self-defense training is effective, worthwhile or productive. I am sometimes asked when I demonstrate/teach techniques, if they would really work e.g. “I know it would work against my training partner, but what if I’m facing a 320 pound, psychopath, who’s impervious to pain?” It’s a good point; in that scenario there are more things that won’t work than will – it also stresses the importance of threat identification, prediction and avoidance, so you never find yourself in such a situation. The problem with this worst case scenario thinking is that it leads us to be fatalistic in our approach to self-defense and personal safety, as well as disempowering us rather than empowering us to believe we are able to control the outcome of the various scenarios we may have to face. When somebody makes the point about the 320 pound behemoth and whether a particular technique will work or not, I usually ask them to look around the training area and pick out which individuals in the class match their imagined foe in regards to stature and size – a class of 20 practitioners will largely represent the cross-section of physical attributes, such as height, weight and size, that exist in the real world. Yes, there are individuals in the world who are abnormally large and strong, yet the criminally violent community is not made up of a larger than average share of these individuals (what distinguishes them from the rest of society is not their size but their propensity for violence). Believing that we will always be facing large and pain resistant individuals is a false proposition – we still need to know how to deal with them but they are not our most likely assailant.

We can easily talk ourselves out of the need to learn weapon disarms, because who could successfully disarm a gang of assailants who are pointing multiple firearms at us. I agree. It is hard enough to disarm one person, let alone two or three. Yet what is the likelihood that you will ever find yourself in such a situation, and does this invalidate learning to deal with the more likely scenario of facing a lone mugger/abductor/criminal with a firearm? It is all too easy to create scenarios in which it is impossible to succeed, and thereby conclude that learning to deal with any situation is a waste of time. Unfortunately we have a tendency to fixate on the dramatic, however unlikely, and come to the conclusion that there is nothing we could do when forced to deal with it – it is then an easy step to take to convince ourselves that all training is pointless . If an organized gang on trained criminals were to break into my house, getting past every security piece I have, and were then able to tie and handcuff me to a chair and give me a prolonged beating, you’d have every right to ask me, “so what would you do now?” you’d also have every right to question my solution, as being potentially unrealistic and ineffective – and in such a scenario you’d probably be right. But how likely is it that such a gang would target me, how likely is it that every security process, procedure and device I had in place was so easily bypassed, and why do I have to end up tied to a chair? Yes it’s a worst case scenario, but if I fixate on it, I will either conclude that all security is a waste of time, or waste a lot of effort and time designing preventative measures to a situation that is unlikely to happen – as well as wasting resources (time, effort and potentially money) that could have been applied to those situations that are much more likely and common.

It is all too easy to say a technique won’t work because of this and that and a whole line of “what ifs”. All techniques can be made to fail e.g. a punch won’t work if a person is too far away etc. We need to stop imagining the worst and looking at the most likely and probable, and then discerning if those are situations that we believe are possible to deal with. We can worry about facing the giant, who is impervious to pain, and physical punishment, or we can accept that most people will react to an eye being poked, a finger being bent etc. You have the choice to fixate on the worst case, or the opportunity to accept the most likely case etc. If you don’t believe you can have a physical solution to your worst case, then you should look at putting preventative measures in place to ensure you avoid facing it in the first place - this is why self-protection and personal safety training should not be ignored. At the very least understand you have the ability to control the situations you face and the various potential outcomes available e.g. there are few defenses that work better than not being there in the first place.

One of the strange/weird psychological tricks we play on ourselves is to imagine a worst case scenario, realize/understand that we have no solution to it (or that any solution we may have is far-fetched or unrealistic), and then at the same time rationalize that it is unlikely to happen to us i.e. we combine our worst case scenario with the denial of it. This is a crippling combination, which causes us to respond to the “feeling” of a worst case scenario, by denying its likelihood and probability. This is one of the most common ways in which we talk ourselves out of taking self-defense training e.g. to believe we could do nothing if someone assaults us (a worst case scenario), yet at the same time making the assumption that no one will assault us (denial) is the quickest way to adopt a victim’s mentality. Comprehensive self-defense training should include making risk assessments of our lives and life styles and understanding where we are at risk, and what we can do to mitigate these risks, whilst preparing ourselves for the most likely scenarios we will face e.g. it might be fun and informative to train gun disarms whilst on our knees as we are about to be executed however if you are a middle class, suburban housewife is this where a large part of your training and effort should go? Bringing worst case scenarios into our training, and practicing techniques that are relatively difficult to accomplish, will cause more people to question the point of their training than empower them in it