The Three Fights in Self-Defense
Know the difference between a hero and a fool. Daniel Penny was a hero who almost spent decades in prison.
Before you can choose your battles wisely, it's important to understand that there are usually three potential fights to every fight.
Fight 1 – The Verbal Fight
This is the starting point for most violent encounters. This is the "yak before the smack."
If you can end the fight here, you win, regardless of what is said. This is where Verbal Defense is helpful. The skill here is to emotionally detach from the words being hurled at you. If you let the insults get to you, you are elevating a bully to a stature of control over you.
You can't let his or her words control you. Learn to be slow to respond to insults and even slower to become angry.
IF SOMEONE IS INSULTING YOU, THAT'S A
REFLECTION OF THEIR CHARACTER, NOT YOURS.
Those words are their invitation for you to jump into their cesspool. Making that jump might be the worst decision of your life.
To be clear, if you feel your personal safety is in danger, you don't have to wait for a big mouth to strike first. But, you will have to explain your decision regardless of what happened.
This is also where your freeze response may kick in. The key to gaining control of the freeze is, when possible, to take a step back and raise your hands and turn your palms out towards the antagonizer as you begin to speak.
Speaking will help you regain control of your breathing, which reduces the freeze effect. Stepping back also buys you some reaction time.
You always want an arm and a half to two arm’s length between the two of you so that it forces the other person to step towards you to reach you.
That can give you time to evade, escape, block, or fire back.
Fight 2 – The Physical Fight
If you feel threatened for your safety, you may have to strike first, especially if you see a pre-attack indicator (PAI.) That means that the fight has escalated from verbal to physical and the stakes just got much higher.
Even if you were legitimately threatened and felt in danger for your life, the potential for a bad outcome is increased when it escalates to physical.
If you step back and tell him to stay away and he continues to invade your space and even pushes you, that may be justification for you to strike first.
Just understand that you have to be clear that you felt you were in danger. You can't say that you just wanted to shut him up.
If you engage, it has to be decisive. You won't get a second try. Maybe, you lose the fight and get seriously injured or killed, or that happens to the other person. It happens every day.
You better hope you have witnesses and/or video surveillance so you can prosecute and defend your actions.
Once you've stopped the threat, you need to stop fighting. If he or she can't attack you anymore, the fight is over.
If you continue to hit, strike, kick, or choke a person once the threat is over, you've started a second fight against a defenseless person.
That is how you end up in Fight 3, which is the legal battle for your freedom.
Fight 3 – The Legal Fight
The biggest fight of all is often in the courtroom. Quite often, in the heat of the fight, the threat is over, but you go for one more punch or stomp to the head.
In the eyes of the law, that is a new fight that you started against a defenseless victim. Even if he started it all, the threat to you was over, but you didn't stop.
That is a new fight in the eyes of the law. The new fight may well extend past criminal charges and move to personal lawsuits. This varies state by state, but there are thousands of cases of victims suing their attackers in civil court.
New York has a Parental Responsibility Law that states parents are responsible for a child's actions between the ages of 10-18. You may be fighting your legal battle from a jail cell for months, maybe years. You may have to mortgage your home to pay for the legal defense with no refunds.
All because you didn't choose your battle wisely.
