02.03.2022
Wednesday’s first lesson – an online teacher consultation for Drum Kempo Ju Jitsu in Ireland – brought us up to a list of useful options in a crisis situation. The list wasn’t exhaustive.
We discussed how to teach avoidance. This is wide subject touching upon all the other options that followed. It includes simply avoiding situations that our awareness has alerted us to or avoiding certain places that intelligence has fed back has a bad reputation. However, it also touches upon de-escalation and being switched onto avoiding certain triggers in known people. 
This brought us straight onto our first hard skill: tactical escape. We discussed serpentine running when escaping in a large open space, keeping the back to the wall in more confined areas such as rooms and various agility drills used to promote explosive breaks for escape. In the most general and early sense of the term, we are simply talking about withdrawing tactfully from a potentially dangerous situation. This took us onto some purer soft skills including de-escalating in general, tolerating certain uncomfortable situations rather rising to the bait, distraction or delaying strategies used to exhaust a potential threats aggressive adrenaline spike, which moved us onto establishing rapport and also using tactics for the aggressor to save face. Finally, we reached the last resort of fighting to escape.
As always the case with these consultation lessons, we had a fair number of segways or sidebar subjects that warrant some summing up here:
- Civilian Self-defence when taught as a set of hard skills is the youngest of all combative ideas. It is the hybrid descendant of warfare and sport, contextualised and fashioned into legally justifiable strategies, tactics and techniques. To see it as an immaculately conceived discipline is delusional and unscientific. Combative learning has never existed in a vacuum and all strenuous attempts to keep it there, without acknowledging the way human primal conflict has evolved and continues to evolve, are destined to become abstract solutions to violence supported only by cult-like behaviours. Therefore, although self-defence (the hard skills of self-protection) is best taught separately from other combative disciplines, with the distinction of its particular purpose and goals made clear throughout, and confined to strict minimalistic parameters, its teachers should observe all potential influences.
- When it comes to self-defence, unarmed combat is not an honest representation of what is likely to happen. Walls, the ground and incidental objects quickly become weapons as much as they become hazards in a serious assault or unplanned fight. Furthermore, besides primal grappling, it is very likely that even most primitive of codified combative systems occurred after human ancestors were already wielding weapons. We know we are naturally a tool-using species that evolved from a line of different species that had already begun using tools. Most unarmed combat were developed as supplemental emergency measures should a warrior not be able to immediately access a weapon or as a safer way to assert dominance via a consensual contest.