Larkin - When violence is the answer: learning how to do what it takes when your life is at stake

Violence is rarely the answer, but when it is, its the only answer.

As a society, we have focused nearly all our energy on the first part of that statement. We dont just want to believe that violence is rarely the answerwe want to believe it is never the answerand so in recent years we have set out to identify every instance where that is true. Admittedly, there are many of them, and we have gotten very good at describing them to anyone who will listen. As good as weve become at advocating nonviolence, we have gotten even better at dismissing those rare instances where violence actually is the only answer. We put asterisks next to those events and pigeonhole them as the exclusive domain of criminals and cops. We have not only convinced ourselves that this vision of the world is real, but we have taught it to our children as gospel by building layers of protection and insulation around them to reinforce the truthfulness of our vision. Unfortunately, we are not seeing straight. We have created a society where the blind are leading the blind.

My goal with this book is to open your eyes.

I am a violence expert. I know what violence is, how it works, how to use it, and how to avoid it. As an expert in the field of life-and-death self-defense for the last twenty-five years, I have counseled, trained, and taught tens of thousands of men and women across the globe. Rich and poor, big and small, frail and strong, military and civilianIve seen them all. Each of my students has a different story, but 70 percent of them have something in common: they only sought out help after surviving an act of violence.

Seventy percent.

Think about that number for a second. In a training class of twenty people, that means fourteen have endured the physical and emotional trauma of violence. Fourteen of them are victims. The other six probably know someone who recently became a victim and it jarred them into action.

Its relatively rare in my business to have a student who doesnt have a story to tell, who is being proactive and wants to be prepared. The rarity of this occurrence is both one of the most frustrating parts of my job and the most understandable. Who really wants to think about this stuff if they dont have to? A bigger, stronger, faster person, intent on doing you grievous bodily harm, is a base fear of every human. Its only natural to try to push those fears out of our minds when we lack the skills and the knowledge to act effectively in defense of ourselves and our loved ones. Instead, we hope our fears are never realized and we try to rationalize them away: I dont need to worry about this. I live in the right neighborhood. I have the right friends. I am a good person. Stuff like this doesnt happen to people like me. Im sorry, but youre wrong.

Aside from how dangerous these cavalier attitudes are (for reasons I will explain in depth later), hoping or rationalizing does little to actually reduce your fear. Wishful thinking only compartmentalizes and suppresses it, and only briefly. If youre a woman, maybe the fear erupts to the surface when an unfamiliar man walks into the parking garage elevator with you. If youre a man, maybe it creeps in when a friend of a friend is particularly aggressive with you in a social situation. The question you need to ask yourself in a situation like that is, What is at the bottom of this fear?

In my experience, the essence of that fear is that if someone becomes a physical threatespecially if they appear to be bigger, stronger, and faster than youyou have nothing in your toolbox to deal with it. You are helpless and vulnerable. You are in trouble.

With this book, I hope to change that sense of helplessness and vulnerability. Thankfully, for most of us, violence is an anomalya black swan event whose likelihood is as predictable as its consequences, which is to say not very. Most people will go their entire lives without experiencing serious violence. But those who do will feel firsthand its power to drastically change, or even end, lives. It only has to happen once.

I know its uncomfortable to think about a moment like this. But you have to come to terms with the fact that someday, somebody might try to physically control or attack you. Its perfectly within the range of possibilities for our lives, as it has been for the entire history of human civilization. Just ask every real victim of violence that I have worked with or trained.

When it comes to other rare events that can have destructive consequences on our lives, we arent shy about preparing for them. We have fire extinguishers, disaster preparedness kits, car insurance, health insurance, flood insurance, and life insurance because we know there are things in this world outside of our control, and being prepared for them gives us confidence that we will be able to get through them if and when they arrive.

So why do so few of us have a plan for unexpected violence? For some reason, we see training for self-defense as a Herculean effort reserved for the physically elite, so we dismiss it. That means there are just two main groups who study and prepare for violence. One group is the predators (well talk more about them later). The other group is the professional protectors, like the police and military. Many people are content to bank on those protectors to be there in times of need. But pinning all your hopes on the possibility that one of those professionals will be on the very spot at the very moment youre in danger is a lot like throwing out your fire extinguisher in the hopes that a fire truck will be turning the corner onto your block the very moment the flames touch the drapes.