Overcoming Fear Part II

“He who has overcome his fears will truly be free.”

                                                                         --Aristotle

Sorry for taking so long for following up on Part I.

If you missed the first installment you can access it here: https://protectyourself.mykajabi.com/blog/overcoming-fear-part-1

So, in the first part of this series on “Overcoming Fear” I discussed what I believe to be what are “Rational Fear” and “Irrational Fear”. I also stated that I was going to discuss the Guided Chaos method of how I believe we train people to not only cope with fear but harness it as a weapon.

I’m going to first cover some of this from my own observations as well as some of my earlier understandings in the art of Guided Chaos to set the stage for where your thinking needs to go, and then in the next part get into some of the methodology or ways you can learn to train both body and mind to focus “Rational Fear” or what I call “Panicking the Right Way”.

"Panic" is a very natural human reaction. It is that automatic response to a threat that keeps us safe as I alluded to in the first part of the Blog. But in order to begin that process as with everything we first have to get our minds right how that is done depends, depends, depends that’s because our experiences good or bad can influence how far we have to go to “get there”.

The reason I phrase it in this manner is because this is not something that is set in stone nor is something that’s a standard that is written down.

I have trained people who had extensive experiences because they grew up in a rough part of town. These folks tend to get their minds right a lot sooner than most folks not because they’re tougher mind you but because they grew up in an environment where violence was common in which having the right mind was a matter of survival.

For example, I grew up in public housing in a blue collar working class town where the largest employer was General Motors and like most of the people I grew up around my parents were laborers originally from southeastern part of the country, and came to New York during the height of the Civil Rights Movement. Most of the kids I went to school with were literally second generation Italian, Irish or Hispanic.  

Mind you it wasn’t the roughest town but it was rough enough. Watching people get into fights, getting into fights on your own, or watching bar room brawls spill into the street was just a fact of life. All of the towns for a number of years along the Hudson River were like this all the way up to Schenectady. We use to call ourselves at times “River Rats” and wore it with a badge of honor.

The largest city in southern NY outside of New York City is Yonkers where Grandmaster Perkins cut his teeth as a Police Officer. Yonkers was the last stand holding back the Barbarians like “Hadrian’s Wall” back when New York City “officially” averaged over 2,000 murders per year (a lot of bodies dumped on McClean Ave just across the border). I can remember laughing with Grandmaster Perkins about how the Yonkers Police use to open up skulls at the “Movie Land Complex” by “Nathans Hot Dogs” on Central Avenue. I know because let’s just say some of my relatives were their “clients”.

The year before I went to high school, the school I went to had a major race riot that put a number of kids in the hospital along with landing a lot of folks in jail. To me like my friends this stuff was well, normal.

It wasn’t until I went away to college and got around “normal people” that, when I would return home for the summers I realized how "nuts" the people were that I grew up with. The reason I never noticed it when I was growing up was because when you’re in the bowl with all of the other nuts you don’t think you’re a nut! Like Nirvana says in the song “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, “…I feel stupid and contagious” and when “stupidity” is the norm it not only seems normal it is contagious. (Oh yeah… I can tell you some serious stories of serious stupidity).

Why am I saying all of this? It’s because I’m just trying to paint the picture of the world I and millions of other kids in the New York Metro area grew up in. When you grow up around it and in it getting your mind to the right place is not hard.

But what about folks who didn’t grow up around people who were certifiable nut jobs?

It’s been my experience that even if you didn’t grow up in that sort of environment even if you are not like that you can get there with the right training and motivation.

Courage is a mean with regard to fear and confidence.

                                                   --Aristotle

I’ll never forget I guess it was sometime after I was in the Marine Corps and we were doing Cold Weather training that a good friend of mine 1st Lt Mike McLain, said to me,

“Man Al I’m telling you the average Officer ain’t nothing but a milk fed pup nurtured on lamb’s milk. I’ll bet 90% percent of these guys have never been in a fight before”.

A little background on Mike, Mike was a guy who grew up in Pascagoula, Mississippi where the ship yards are. I never even heard of this place until I met him. It sounds like the kind of place that comes right out of one of those “Deliverance” type of movies, you know what I mean... Mike was one “tough mofo”. I remember he volunteered to go to Survival Escape Recovery and Evasion (SERE) School just because he wanted to prove he couldn’t be broken.

Anyway, they turned him down I think they thought he was a little too eager and thought he might actually “enjoy” it. Yeah, I could see that. Mind you nobody “likes” SERE School it is only to be endured. Anyway, he used to be a “Guardian Angel” in his town before joining the Marine Corps, was highly proficient in the martial arts and loved to put foot to ass. The whole “Officer and a Gentlemen" thing was cramping his style.

But somewhere along the way on the way to actual combat something strange happened to the majority of those “milk fed pups” as he liked to call them. They were not milk fed pups at all but “wolves” and if they weren’t already wolves in hiding, they became wolves, but wolves none the less. Those who we thought to be meek were strong and in some cases those we thought to be strong the opposite was true. The point is no matter where a person comes from, where they’ve been even if they’ve never been in a fight before in their lives doesn’t mean they aren’t that guy or can’t become “that guy”.

The point in me saying all of this is none of us knows what we can do, who we can be or really are, until faced with our own mortality or that of protecting the lives of others. I can tell you as a leader regardless of rank, the greatest fear most of us have is not being killed (although that’s still high on the list) but making a mistake that costs the lives of others. Like I said in Part I, when you stand for something greater than yourself you don’t need to find courage, courage finds you. The closer you are to your men the more devastating it is. It is for many a fear greater than death. War is funny, even with people in your unit that you don’t like you still mourn their loss.

Anyway…

Usually when I teach on fear or helping people as I train them to overcome their fear I try to learn a little about them if possible. So that I can tailor my remarks and not waste time discussing things that are not important or relevant to them.

But before I get into that I want to go over a few things that I think are common to most people because I can tell you that a big part of learning to overcome fear when dealing with a dangerous situation or an attacker is understanding what is real versus what is imagined.

Until there is Movement or Contact there is No Fight

I belong to a number of groups on Facebook so I’m going to give a shout out to my friend Tony Harris who is the administrator and creator of a forum called “Fight Science Clinic”.  This is basically a forum dedicated to people focused on discussing realistic reality based concepts of combat and not mumbo jumbo Voo Doo martial arts.

Sure there are disagreements over various techniques and the like but the intent is not some mutual admiration society but a forum where serious minded martial artist can come together to discuss concepts related to combat even if we agree to disagree.

My favorite is when you’ll have two high level martial artist’s discussing how to deal with a certain situation each from their own perspective. Often, they’ll both come to the same correct conclusion and then still disagree. Too funny.

As far as I’m concerned that’s fine and as I said sort of the point, besides even my own wife doesn’t “always agree with me”, I’ve also been married long enough to know there’s only one right answer to 99% of her comments, “yes dear”.

My point is if my own wife doesn’t always agree with me what makes me think that others are just going to drink in my stuff without question?

Anyway, one of the common threads that I find in Fight Science is that no matter what art a person does or technique that is discussed. It all really comes back to the same thing and that is “nothing happens until somebody moves”.

Meaning until there is movement or even intention nothing really happens. Unless they have some sort of projectile weapon where a person is too far away from you for you to do much about it, until they get close to you they really can’t harm you. Without contact there is no fight!

The understanding that until there is contact there is no fight is critical in my view to a person understanding how to deal with and overcome their fears. I’m not going to get into weapons here that will be the subject of another Blog Post down the road.

One of the things that I think is a big issue for most people is the issue of dealing with size or strength. You can generally see size and can sort of tell if a person is strong by the way they are built but speed is deceptive. Speed is a relative thing and you don’t always know how fast a person can really move.

If a person has an athletic build it’s generally assumed they are fast but it’s still hard to tell. This is important because again one of the major fears a lot of people have and that is dealing with a person who is larger than them or stronger.

I hear it all of the time, how do I deal with someone who has a longer reach than me? How do I deal with a much larger person? Stronger person etc. I can go on but the point is it’s at the forefront of many people’s fears. Understandable, after all this is what we’ve been conditioned to believe from tens of thousands of hours of TV and movies etc.

Stay with me on this because I’m going to circle back on this point in the next installment as it relates to developing the ability to overcome “Irrational Fear” and using your “natural panic reflex” effectively. But the first place I have to start is with your Mindset.

You’re Just Dealing with Motion

 “Even if a man has no natural ability, he can be a warrior.”

                                                  --Miyamoto Musashi

I am so all about this quote. This is truly the essence of what Guided Chaos is all about, “The Study and Practice of Universal Movement with a Martial Application”. Making people warriors even if they have no natural ability. It doesn't get any better than that.

I can still remember some of my earliest days of training Guided Chaos with Grandmaster Tim Carron and standing around with him at times just picking his brain about a variety of things. One thing that I always admired was his frank honesty and candidness whenever I asked him a question. It may not have always been the answer that I wanted but it was always the truth.

Tim, as we use to call him was one brave dude and even to this day I regret never telling him how brave I always thought he was and how his teachings along with Grandmaster Perkins', helped highly sharpen my Mindset especially during my combat deployments. Tim was one of those Vietnam Vets, like many vets from that era, where you intuitively knew if you went there it was the point of no return. There was “no bullshit” in his game!

I remember playing the “what if” game with him just to hear what his response would be if he had to deal with a number of different situations just to gain a better understanding of how he viewed things, and I found his insights fascinating because while simple they were “very profound”. 

I’ve set this up as sort of a Q and A so you can get the full impact of his responses. Below are some of the things he would say to me when I would ask him very specific questions and how he deals with things. These are just rough approximations of the questions I would ask and his responses and not necessarily word-for-word. I’ve liberally added quotes here and there to reinforce what he was saying because he really had a very profound understanding of these matters.

“All men are the same except for their belief in their own selves, regardless of what others may think of them"

                                                                                 --Miyamoto Musashi

Q: What would you do against a larger, stronger or faster person?

A: You’re just dealing with motion. No matter what a person does, no matter how strong or fast they are at the end of the day it’s just motion. As soon as you move I’m already moving I’m not waiting for you to do something. You see I assume everyone is stronger or faster than me anyway. You never know who you’re dealing with and in a real fight you don’t have time to figure that out so when people try to push me I just give it up, I don’t resist them and I just get around them. I just step out of the way and decapitate them. Also, I don’t care how big and strong you are your head is your head.

“To win any battle, you must fight as if you are already dead.”

                                               --Miyamoto Musashi

Q: What would you do if you had to deal with say a boxer or a grappler or someone who was good at kicking, you know what I mean? (By the way I love this answer.)

A: Listen, I don’t know if I can kick anybody’s ass all I know is if you attack me, you better kill me. If you don’t you’re a fool because I have every intention of killing you if you try it. If I think you’re going to hurt me I don’t care what the situation is fuck that, I’m not even going to give you a chance. I’m going to hurt you before you hurt me.

As a follow up to this I asked;

Q: So you’re not even thinking about dealing with some sort of technique or strike?

A: I don’t care what people do, in a real fight because you can do anything I just assume that no matter what you’re doing you’re trying to hurt me. If you step toward me or your arm moves toward me what can it be? We’re already in it so it doesn’t matter to me what you do the fights already on. Like I told you before I’m just dealing with motion so whatever you do I’m going to find a way to deal with your motion. How I do it depends on what I feel I need to do at the time. That’s why when I do Contact Flow I always want to have a little contact. I want to feel everything, if I can feel your motion then I can stop your motion.

“Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”

                                                               --Napoleon Bonaparte

Q: What do you mean by that?

A: I stop a persons motion by stopping them. I don’t try to suppress their movement I feel where they want to go or what they want to do and I stop their motion by hitting them where they can’t afford to get hit before their motion gets started, or I get out of the way and let them run into my strikes. Of course when I’m training you I don’t hit you for real because you’ll get crushed.

Q: So how come when I'm working with you sometimes it feels like you're stopping my arms? 

A: Come here let me show you something (we then start to do Contact Flow). Notice when you move, now feel what I'm doing but watch my body (at this point I noticed how as he moved he's always slightly adjusting his body). Notice I'm not pushing with my arms I'm using my body. I can feel your body through your hands and so I move just enough to cut off your movement or redirect you. Right now we're just training so there's other stuff I would do if it were for real.  

Q: So then why does it feel like there's a lot of force?

A: It's because I'm giving you "equal pressure" against your body through your arms I'm not pushing. When you move your arms I adjust my body and cut off your movement I'm actually redirecting you where I want you to go (at this point he laughs a little). Most of the time I'm not even moving it's that people redirect themselves all I do is just give them the path they want to go. The problem is when working with people they panic so I have to control them a little just for the training. You can feel it more now because we're going slow but if we were going fast I would break your balance instantly or jack your arm out of the socket.

Tim also went on to explain how he does what John calls little micro-drops on peoples arms. He told me the reason he does that is because either their arm was in his way on the way in or because he felt he couldn't negate it in time. So he drops, neutralizes the motion and redirects it all in one movement (this is a skill by the way that is "way cool" and once you've felt it, it clears up a whole lot of things that seem like contradictions to the Principles when in fact it is one of a million little facets of the art). Tim wasn't pushing my arms he was hitting and directing them out of the way. This skill by the way is not the same as people speeding up to clear the arm this is all about timing within the flow itself. Like I said this is way cool. 

He was just doing it slow enough so that I wouldn't get injured. I also want to point something out because it really needs to be said. One thing that Tim would also say to me is, "sometimes for whatever reason I have to stop things or deal with them in that manner because I'm just not fast enough to get out of the way at times".  The point being that while not the preferred method it's better than getting hit. Makes perfect sense to me. The reason this understanding "eludes" many people is because they would never ask him why he would do certain things when he did them. If they had asked him the questions he would have told them.) 

From there I would ask questions like: 

Q: So how do you deal with a person say trying to grab you or hit you in the eye or whatever?

A: Simple, I don’t let it happen in the first place! You reach your hand out whether your striking or trying to grab me whatever you’re going to do I’m not letting it happen in the first place. I don’t even get into it. Too many people wait for the other guy to do something and then they try to stop it. Why wait? What are you waiting for?

“No Fear, No Hesitation, No Surprise, No Doubt!”

                                                --Miyamoto Musashi

Q: Okay, how do I stop people from say hitting me clean, etc?

A: You’re asking the wrong question, like John says all of the time. The question you should be asking is how did they get there in the first place? You’re trying to solve it after the fact, once you're hit you're hit. To me getting hit isn’t always a bad thing it’s how I get hit.

Then he started to laugh a little bit and said,

“Watch how John moves notice he almost gives his body up? Notice he moves in but makes no attempt to try and block anything? He’s just in.”

I said, “Yeah now that you point it out.”

Tim then explained, “That’s because when he moves in he’s already out of the way so even if you hit him you never get a good shot it’s always a grazing shot at best.”

I said, “Yeah”.

Tim then explained,

“Because of John’s ‘Looseness’ he’s not overly worried about getting hit as long as he covers his head on the way in. Notice, when John wants to get in and hit he just sort of dives in on people with total reckless abandon. That’s why I told you when you work with John don’t be an asshole. When you’re working with him he’s allowing you to hit him to some degree so you can learn otherwise you just get beat up and you don’t learn.”

Competence Breeds Confidence

One of the things that I always understood about Tim was that he was “supremely confident” in his ability. The reason is because he knew through his experiences and years of training under Grandmaster Perkins he was “highly competent” as a fighter. As Tim use to say to me, “If you don’t believe in your ability or that you can do it then you can’t”.

I believe this mental understanding along with having a very down to earth approach when dealing with people and distilling it down to dealing with “human motion” and “physics” was a big part of why Tim had such a high degree of confidence in his ability. He could neutralize your movement while appearing not to move at all and like John he had already cut off your motion like “five moves ago”. He was confident in his ability and virtually fearless about it because he was highly competent at what he did. Which makes perfect sense. 

In the military or in law enforcement you can always tell the greenhorns from the salty dogs or street savvy guys. They are the guys in combat wearing every piece of protective gear the Army or Marine Corps every issued them, same with law enforcement.

So regardless of how much of a hindrance the excessive gear may be until they learn the ropes they’re not taking a thing off. At some point they realize that there is an acceptable level of risk and that you cannot protect yourself against everything, what's the old adage, "when you try to be strong every you're strong nowhere". Again understandable. But I’ll tell you once they reach that level of “savvy” where they’re in the zone they become almost “untouchable”.

I can tell you while I know in law enforcement police officers are required to wear certain gear no if, and's or but's. In the military once people figure out what they need to accomplish the mission the extraneous gear comes flying off. It’s just the way it is. It's not bravado it's that you reach a level of savvy that you become so confident in your abilities that the idea of being killed in certain ways becomes just an acceptable level of risk. 

Like any job you’ve ever had once you reach the level of competency where you know what the Hell you’re doing it’s a whole different game. When developing a person’s mindset to overcome fear this is that “zone”, that understanding, that "savvy" I try to bring people too in both mind and spirit. If you can get there I don’t care what your background is, you’re a different person. It's actually a very liberating feeling.  As Shakespeare says in "Julius Caesar"; 

"A coward dies a thousand times before his death, but the valiant taste of death but once. It seems to me most strange that men should fear, seeing that death, a necessary end, will come when it will come."

You ask any soldier who's ever seen battle for an extended period, if you are to survive this is exactly the attitude you have to adopt if for nothing else but for your own sanity.  To live in fear of death is to die over and over again. Trust me, no matter what folks say none of us start off with this mentality, nor are so brave that at times we're too ashamed to cry out to God for strength. We become that thing which at times transcends even what most would believe to be rational thought because it's what protects us. 

“Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees the others.”

                                                            --Aristotle

One of the stories I like to tell about courage is what happened to one of my Marines when we deployed to the Persian Gulf. It’s funny, when I was a 2nd Lt and we were on our way to the Persian Gulf I had this kid whose father was a high ranking Officer who all of a sudden found “Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ” and claimed he was a "conscientious objector". Funny how that happens on the way to combat. Like we were going to all of s sudden just send him home. Yeah right!

This is a kid mind you that my Staff Sargent had to council for “devil worship” and trying to raise “Lucifer” himself in the barracks back in Camp LeJeune. You can’t make this stuff up. (He was actually trying to get thrown out of the Marine Corps by the way, remember this was 1990 and we didn’t have “Satanic Lay Leaders” back then, a common tactic).

Anyway, so my Staff Sargent brings him to me to hear his case and I basically said something like, “Listen Lance Corporal, when we go ashore you’re coming with us even if we have to drag your body through the sand. Got it!” (by this time I’m in his face). So after my Staff Sargent reminded him there was “no crying in the Corps” he went back and joined the rest of the Platoon.

He was scared to death I could see it on his face, Hell we were all scared, but I’ll tell you what, that same kid when we hit the sand in Yemen and Saudi Arabia was walking point on patrols leading the way. He eventually was meritoriously promoted to Corporal and made a Fire Team Leader. You see, when he had to do it, and had no choice he buckled down and became “that guy” and went from scared kid to fierce leader. In other words, he became confident through becoming competent. When he had to stand up for something greater than himself courage found him.

Again, I believe it is this lack of competence, whether in awareness or martial skill, of not knowing how to handle a situation that also contributes to much Irrational Fear.

If they can be Touched they can be Harmed

“Locate, close with and destroy the enemy by fire and maneuver and repel the enemy assault by fire and close combat.”

                                     --Mission of the Marine Corps Rifle Squad

The statement above represents the mission of the Marine Rifle Squad it is the hallmark of the Mindset that makes Marines, “Marines”. It is not that we have fancy weapons or that we do combined arms that separates us on the battle field. It is our ethos, our esprit de corps, and our willingness to get right up in the enemies face and smash him across the mouth with a 2”x 4”!

It isn’t any more complicated than that.

With that said, given my previous experiences you would have thought I would have figured this one out for myself but it goes to show you. That everything has its own dynamic and that even if you are a combat veteran you can overlook the obvious.

One thing that Tim use to admonish me for doing in the beginning and that was creating too much “standoff” or “space” between him. He said one of the problems that people have is they don’t want to get close to other people because it makes them feel uncomfortable and scares them. Their fear causes them to create unnecessary distance and makes it harder to take the fight to the bad guy.

For those who train with us regularly, they’ve heard me refer to this as “uncomfortable man distance”. This is where you’re doing Contact Flow at a distance that is so close your bodies are practically touching each other.

One of the ways he described getting around this aversion to getting close is to think of getting close “differently”. He said when you “hate” people or think of them as your “enemy” you tend to want to keep them at a distance but what you want to do is once engaged, close the distance as fast as possible and not give them space to move. He said you want to sort of think of it like “love”.

Whaaaaaat!?!

Okay, now at this point I’m scratching my head with that look on my face like, “What-chu-talkin-bout Willis?”, because Tim was like one of the most dangerous people I’ve ever met and I’ve met a lot of dangerous people. So hearing him talk about “love” was like hearing a NASCAR car driver give advice on the benefits of driving “really slow” during a race. The two just didn’t add up. But then he explained.

“You see when you love someone you’re willing to get close to them, so you have no problem getting close”, then he made a jester for me to come closer as if to hug and then in a microsecond I felt him jerk me against his body while reaching around grabbing my head, and wrenching my neck to the limit where I knew it was going to go, practically yanking me off my feet.

Then he said to me with a big “Mephistopheles like” grin on his face, “You see, when I think of love, I just think of loving people to death”. I let out an uncomfortable laugh but I got the point of the lesson: 1) don’t fuck with this guy and; 2) if you want to take the bad guy out you have to be “willing” to get close, right in their face, bad breath and all, and have the “moral will” to unscrew their head from their body.

Well that’s it for this installment, I’m going to continue this in Part III and get a little more specific into the Mindset and other stuff we tell people to set their minds on the right path.  Until then I leave you with this great quote.

Let us not pray to be sheltered from dangers but to be fearless when facing them.

                                                                       --Rabindranath Tagore

Thank you.

LtCol Al Ridenhour

Senior Master Instructor

GUIDED CHAOS

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