So, it's been over 6 months since my last post. As some of my last posts indicated, it was a terrible year for me in a mental health way (even more frustrating in that most of my troubles were medication-driven). I might talk about that more in a future post, I'm not sure, but I'm not going to talk about it today. I've spent the last couple of months trying to figure out how to get back into writing and posting here, and not being able to think of what to write about, since most of what I've been doing has still been oriented around recovering from stuff over the summer, and I'm not ready to talk about that here yet. But finally, I have something I want to talk about. It started as a Facebook status thing, until I realised it was going to go rather long and I remembered that I have this blog thing that I've been meaning to get back to. So, here it is.
I just participated in one of Valkyrie's on-going self-defense classes. I was asked to attend in my position of official Valkyrie role-player to ensure that there was an even number of students, so that Kaja, as instructor, was not also being practice partner/opponent. Since this was a stress-testing day, that was very important - it is a very bad idea to go from playing the bad guy to offering critiques/comforting the person you just upset. However, while it was about stress-testing, it wasn't doing full-on scenarios, where I would play the bad guy the whole time. Instead, we were working somewhere in between drills and scenarios, with Kaja increasing the intensity with each iteration. She did this by playing with 3 dichotomies that describe different kind of violence: playful vs earnest violence, symmetrical vs asymmetrical violence, and social vs asocial violence. In playful violence the goal to learn or score points or demonstrate skill, whereas in earnest violence the goal is to cause pain or injury. With symmetrical violence both/all participants are working with the same tools and rule-set, whereas with asymmetrical violence someone has a distinct advantage (initial positioning, weapons, different/disregard for rules, etc). Social violence is about status and proving dominance (most bar fights), whereas asocial violence is about either getting a thing (a mugging) or enjoying harming someone. There's a whole lot that can be said about these dichotomies and categories, but that will have to wait for another post. For now, suffice to say that Kaja used these principles to construct set-ups and participant goals that lead us from relatively comfortable to highly stressed.
To begin with, we were given the choice of starting on from standing (working with strikes, standing grapples, and likely involve take-downs) or from the ground (more wrestling-style grappling and pins, with striking added later). My partner and I worked from the ground, while the other pair worked from standing. It started as basically sparring, with given starting positions and goals (playful, symmetrical, social violence). Then we were keeping score ( still playful, symmetrical, social violence, but a bit more stressful with the added pressure to win). Then one person was told to cheat, and the other person had to decide how to deal with that (still playful social violence, but now asymmetrical). Each person took a turn as the cheater. The next set-up was a definite escalation, with a defined "bad guy" proving their dominance with the other person pinned against the wall or on the floor and hitting them (yelling at them was also encouraged) while the "good guy" just wanted to make it stop/get away (earnest, asymmetrical, social violence - the aggressor's goal still being about status and dominance). Again, each person did one run through as the good guy and one as the bad guy. Finally, the last construct (mini scenario?) had the bad guy in an extremely advantageous starting position and doing things that would likely cause severe, permanent damage or death because the other person was their toy and they like to break their toys, while again the good guy just wanted to make it stop/get to a safe place (earnest, asymmetrical, asocial). I'm not sure what the set-up was exactly for the pair starting from standing, but for my partner and me, the good guy started lying on their stomach with the bad guy straddling their back and hitting their head or slamming their head into the ground. Again, verbals/shouting was encouraged, and each person had a turn as both the good guy and the bad guy. For the record, this was all done in ways designed to trigger high-stress response while being as safe as possible, with emphasis on keeping your partner safe, guidelines around the force of blows, indicating dangerous techniques instead of completing them (eg, eye gauges, throat strikes) and a safe word to make everything stop immediately (which could be used at any time by any person in the room).
That was a whole lot of description before getting to the point I wanted to make (hence why this became a blog post rather than a Facebook status update). What I found really interesting about the whole thing was how my mindset going into the class influenced how I acted in each of these fights. Even though I did all the same things that the other participants did, I entered the class thinking of myself as being there as a role-player rather than student. I was there to facilitate other people's learning, rather than as a student myself. Even while changing mindsets throughout the exercises (now I'm a sneaky cheater, now I'm psychopathic bastard, etc), I was still in role-player mode. This was most obvious when I was the good guy in the last set-up, even though I tried to move away from it. Essentially, I was still being (relatively) very nice to the person trying to murder me (though I still escaped to safety). I did not get the degree of emotional buy-in and adrenaline dump that often comes with stress-testing. With buy-in, my responses become instinctive and reactionary (at least in the past). Today I was still thinking and actively deciding what to do next, often going with a lower level of force than could be justified by the situation. At this point, I don't know if going into this kind of stress-testing or scenario work with a participant mindset would put me into the reactionary, adrenalized emotional space that I have experienced in the past, or if the role-player mindset has become my standard response to this sort of training - this is the first time I've done this kind of stress-testing as a (sort of) participant since I started role-playing for the VPD. I also don't know if this role-player mindset is what would kick in if I ever find myself in a situation where I have to use violence for self-defense.
If "role-player mode" has indeed become my default for threatening situations, there are some decidedly good things that come with it. I definitely like the idea of maintaining my ability to think during threatening situation - being able to strategize and even consider what level of force is appropriate would be very useful. However, there is one huge potential trap to using a role-player mindset in a real-life situation. Most of the time as a role-player, I have to lose. It is my job provide a challenging situation to the other person, and do my very best to make sure that they are successful in dealing with the situation. In fight scenarios, this means that I have to let them win without making it obvious or easy. If I go into a real-life fight with a role-player mindset, it might include that "the other person has to win" bit. There are things that I do to try to mitigate this. Primarily, I set myself different win conditions, or a different definition of success. I consider it as a win or success for me if I am able to provoke emotional buy-in to the scenario (and it's easy to tell if you have it) and provide cues to lead the participant(s) to an appropriate response. That way, I can still think of it as a win even though I come out much the worse for wear from the actual physical confrontation. Hopefully this means that if I am faced with a violent situation in real life and I go into role-player mode, I can still be effective by essentially telling myself "in this scenario, your win condition is to get away, or to make it so that they can't hurt you anymore". That's basically what I did today. I'm also guessing that even in a role-player mindset that the additional stress, adrenaline and pain of a real-life, potentially lethal encounter would counteract any tendency I may have to use lower levels of force when higher levels are fully justified. I'm sure that there are other training things that the Valkyrie instructors and I can think of to mitigate the "I'm supposed to lose" part of a role-playing. Unfortunately, there's no way to know for sure unless I actually end up having to physically fight for my life. Given that, I'm perfectly happy to live in uncertainty.