Violence is rarely the answer, but when it is, it’s the only answer.
As a society, we have focused nearly all our energy on the first part of that statement. We don’t just want to believe that violence is rarely the answer—we want to believe it is never the answer—and 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 we’ve 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 civilian—I’ve 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.
It’s relatively rare in my business to have a student who doesn’t 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 don’t have to? A bigger, stronger, faster person, intent on doing you grievous bodily harm, is a base fear of every human. It’s 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 don’t need to worry about this. I live in the right neighborhood. I have the right friends. I am a good person. Stuff like this doesn’t happen to people like me.” I’m sorry, but you’re 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 you’re a woman, maybe the fear erupts to the surface when an unfamiliar man walks into the parking garage elevator with you. If you’re 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 threat—especially if they appear to be bigger, stronger, and faster than you—you 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 anomaly—a 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 it’s 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. It’s 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 aren’t 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 (we’ll 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 you’re 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.
I don’t want to live like that, and this book is for those who don’t want to live like that, either.
Obviously, I hope violence never visits you. But we don’t always control whether we experience violence. That’s never entirely up to us, because violence is an equal opportunity offender. It cuts across all demographic lines—race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, nationality, socioeconomic status. There is no amount of privilege or social standing that can make you immune to, or allow you to opt out of, violence when someone has identified you as their target. The choice you do have is whether you’re going to be ready for it. I believe that the wisest thing we can do is ready ourselves for the kind of moment we hope never happens. The solution to fear is not denial and wishful thinking; it is knowledge, preparedness, and confidence.
My goal with this book is to arm you with all three of those virtues by changing the way you think about the subject of violence. I want you to be one of those six people in my class who are willing to learn from the misfortune of others not because you want to, but because you need to. Knowing what violence is, preparing your mind for what is necessary to either avoid or deploy it, and developing the confidence that you can get it done when it counts are life skills we’ve all been ignoring for decades. It’s time for that to change.
I grew up with dreams of invincibility. For as long as I can remember as a Navy brat, I wanted to be a frogman, better known today as a member of the Navy SEAL teams. Just before high school, my family moved to Coronado, California, where the SEALs have their training base, and we lived in Navy housing directly across from their infamous obstacle course. I remember watching in awe as guys navigated the course. I couldn’t believe there was a job out there where you got paid to work out, hang out at the beach, dive, shoot automatic weapons, jump out of airplanes, and just blow stuff up.
I spent the next ten years learning everything there was to know about the Navy SEALs. By the time I finished high school, I knew everything about SEAL training. I knew about how to prepare for it, I knew where to hide food during training, I knew which teams to go to. In college at the University of Southern California, I did Navy ROTC and worked my tail off. When I graduated, entered the Navy, and got selected to Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL (BUD/S) training, I had become exactly the kind of guy I just warned you about—I was bigger, faster, and stronger than all my peers. I was a machine. And with the Navy’s help, I would become a killing machine.
I was tenacious. I led my boat crew to successful evolutions time and time again during the first phase of training. We even won Hell Week—the five-day gauntlet of exhausting, sleepless, physical and mental punishment they put you through at the end of the first phase to cull the herd. I flew through every aspect of SEAL training after that. I was inarguably the top guy in my class. We started with about eighty men and not one of them could touch me.
About two weeks prior to graduation, in the last phase of training, we were on a very basic dive mission; our task was to practice tying explosives to a submerged object. I had a minor sinus infection that day, but I didn’t think much of it, so I dove in without a second thought. I felt the pressure against my ears but forced myself to continue deeper into the cold Pacific Ocean waters to complete the evolution. Everything was going fine—I was swimming well, I found the obstacle—but as I was mounting the explosives, an underwater wave hit the side of my head. (There are waves underwater, just like the ones on the surface). The wave had enough force, combined with the pressure already exerting itself against my body, to burst my eardrum. I felt a shock of cold surge up through my head, like ice water shooting directly into my brain. Then I felt warm liquid leaking out of my semicircular canal. As soon as that warm liquid oozed out, I went into vertigo and lost all sense of balance. I had no idea which way was up. The only thing that saved me was the guide-rope attached to the inflatable boat on the surface above me. I was able to pull myself up the rope, but just barely. The whole time it felt like I was pulling myself at a forty-five-degree angle toward the bottom.
When I broke the surface, my head was slapping against the water uncontrollably and a couple of the instructors struggled to pull me into the boat. Blood was pouring out of my ears, and I was shaking violently. They quickly assessed my situation and I stabilized before even getting to shore. But when the Navy doctors examined my ear, less than half an hour after the initial trauma, they told me that it would never fully heal and I knew my career as a SEAL was over. It was never going to happen.
It ended up being a turning point in my life. It was my first experience with real injury. I had been hit hard and knocked down, I’d sprained and twisted things, I’d been hurt, but I’d never been fully incapacitated by physical injury. I had trained my whole life to be bigger, faster, and stronger than anyone I encountered—to be invincible—yet none of that could help me when this tiny membrane I couldn’t see was ruptured by a wave of pressure I couldn’t see coming, and it left me with no control over my body. Almost immediately I had a profound realization about the power of injury. A tiny change in pressure from an unexpected opponent had stopped me cold. This insight—though I didn’t fully understand it at the time—would guide the rest of my career and, as it happens, become a central premise of this book.
After I recovered from my accident, I moved into special operations intelligence at the Naval Special Warfare Command until I got out of the Navy in 1991, right after the U.S. invasion of Panama. At the same time, my experience with injury led me to learn everything I could about trauma to the human body—how it works, how to inflict it, and how to avoid it. At the time, the lion’s share of self-defense instruction and hand-to-hand combat tactics—both in the civilian sector and in the military—were designed around defending against or exploiting the differences in human beings. But the injury that caused me to lose my career as a SEAL helped me to understand that there might be a better approach: focusing on the weaknesses that all human bodies share. After all, certain areas of the body are always vulnerable, regardless of size, speed, and strength. I was living proof of that.
Perhaps my most influential teacher about the weak points in the human body was an expert on hand-to-hand combat and special warfare, named “P.J.,” who’d found a niche in the private sector after it got out that he was training SEALs in hand-to-hand combat. When I completed my active duty service, P.J. asked me to help him train several large corporate clients whose security personnel wanted to know everything P.J. was teaching the SEALs. I had decided to take six months off after getting out of the Navy, so I said yes. That six-month break quickly turned into a decade of training Fortune 100 companies, international aid agencies, and NATO military detachments all over the world. It was probably one of the most exciting, eye-opening times in my life.
P.J.’s training concept was deceptively simple: because the body follows the mind, effective combat is all about shutting down your opponent’s most valuable weapon—his brain. A debilitating injury to the body takes the brain out of the equation and destroys any strength, speed, or size advantage the opponent might have. My diving incident was a perfect example. It didn’t matter that I was strong: the injury to my inner ear destroyed my sense of balance and orientation, and forced my brain to deal with the acute trauma to my body at the expense of engaging the body parts I wanted to control both to complete the dive evolution and swim to the surface. I was completely helpless and vulnerable. And if someone like me, who is not just bigger, faster, and stronger, but also tenacious and fiercely mission-focused, can be laid low by injury, so, too, can others who seem to benefit from all possible advantages.
That was very much the foundation of a weekend training seminar I ran for a group of investment bankers in New York City, all of whom traveled extensively overseas. They were most concerned about the risks of international air travel and what they could do to defend themselves against attackers who would almost certainly be armed. I showed them what could be legally taken on an airplane—by them or by hijackers—including scissors and box cutters. This seminar took place on September 8th and 9th, 2001. We videotaped the whole thing for other members of the group who couldn’t attend. I flew home to Vegas Monday evening, September 10th. We all know what happened the next morning.
The tapes from those training sessions—which took place at a facility destroyed by debris from the collapse of the World Trade Center towers—marked the beginning of my work in self-defense instruction as the sole focus of my career. The lessons contained within those tapes became the foundation of my study of violence, which began in earnest that day.
In the following chapters, I am going to talk to you about violence. I am going to tell you stories about a select few of my students and clients—some who knew what it took to survive when their lives were at stake, others who sadly did not. I am going to teach you what I taught them: the principles of violence.
I am going to put in front of you the evidence and the data that back it all up. Together we will examine some uncomfortable truths and attempt to destigmatize and demystify some popular misconceptions about self-protection. My goal is to get you to change the way you think about violence, so that you might fully understand it and finally free yourself from the prison of helplessness and vulnerability. By the end of this book, you will have the knowledge you need to minimize the potential for violence in your life, be prepared to deal with violence when it enters your life, and have the confidence that you will be successful when it matters most.
While I will teach you how to think about training,* this isn’t a step-by-step, “punch here, kick there” encyclopedia of training techniques. This book is about stamping the principles of violence into your subconscious. It’s about turning your brain into the ultimate concealed carry.
In my years of studying this material, I’ve come to understand one central truth that sits at the core of self-protection and thus will sit at the core of my approach to this book:
Techniques get you killed. Principles save your life.
It’s like that old saying: give a man a fish and he will eat for a day, teach him how to fish and he will eat for a lifetime. The same is true of self-protection. Teaching you a few techniques in this book will only help you in a few scenarios. But if I teach you the principles of self-protection, and change the way you think about violence, you’ll be able to handle any scenario without hesitation.
Thus, I’ve organized the book into ten chapters that examine violence in the modern world and teach you what you need to know to live comfortably, confidently, and securely in that world.
There are two parts, each containing five chapters:
Part 1: How to Think About Violence—is about accepting some unpleasant truths about the nature of violence in self-protection, while developing the mindset and intent necessary to engage with violence in time to, one day, save your life. You know how they tell addicts that the first step to dealing with an addiction is admitting you have one? Violence is the same way. That’s why it’s important that these ideas kick off the book.
Part 2: How to Think About Using Violence—is about the principles of training you need to understand to evaluate and engage the training modalities best suited for you. These are the fundamental physical principles necessary to prepare yourself for the worst and execute an effective plan of action under pressure.
The concepts in this book will lay a critical foundation for correctly processing and performing the mental and physical elements of self-protection. Understanding the methodologies and principles behind violence is the only way to properly employ it in a real-life situation. As you read on, you might feel like you’re jumping into the ocean for the first time, but you’ll soon adjust and easily keep your head above water. To be clear, getting comfortable with the subject matter doesn’t make you one of “them”—one of those asocial psychopaths who traffic in indiscriminate violence. I talked to many of them in the research for this book. I promise, you’re not them. And I promise that I am not an advocate of violence for violence’s sake, no matter how chilling or upsetting you find some of the language you are about to read. I truly believe that violence is almost never the answer. But when it is, it is the only answer, and we all need to be prepared for it.
Throughout this book, I will be leaning on the masculine pronouns—he, him, his—when I am not telling a specific story. This is not out of disrespect for the fighting capacity of women or disregard for the frightening degree to which they are victims of certain violent crimes. Many of my best, most dedicated, and courageous clients are women, and everything in this book applies to them equally. I’ve made this choice because men are disproportionately responsible for the asocial violent crime committed in our society as well as the many mistakes made in instances of social aggression that lead to grave bodily injury and death. I am using the male pronouns because men are the ones who need to be talked to directly, over and over again, for the lessons to get past the ego defenses.
Okay, let’s jump in!