Most survivors talk about how fast the attack happened, and while many violent attacks may happen quickly, there are usually things that can be done to help you survive or avoid the attack to begin with. That’s why staying on guard and paying attention to your surroundings are such an important part of self-defense. If you can avoid or at least recognize the attack ahead of time, you put yourself in control of the situation.
When criminals select their victims, nine times out of ten they select someone they believe can do them no harm. They are looking for weak and easy targets that can be easily attacked with little harm or injury to themselves. This is why you need to shift your entire mindset and be aware of how you present yourself in public. Believe me, criminals can smell weakness from a mile away. It’s not very different from a wild animal that attacks the moment it senses the slightest bit of weakness from its prey. On the flip side, if that animal sees you as a predator, it’s going to think twice about attacking.
Even if you don’t see a weapon, always assume your attacker is armed. If someone is crazy enough to attack, you must assume he or she is crazy enough to pull a weapon. Carrying a concealed firearm can definitely level the playing field, so you need to decide ahead of time if that’s something you are willing to do.
Far too many people freeze up when they are violently attacked. Some do so out of fear, others out of the misguided belief that someone will step in and help them. It only takes seconds to be fatally wounded during an attack, so you can’t count on police, or anyone else, to be close enough to stop the attacker.
If someone is in the process of attacking you, the time for trying to defuse the situation with words has ended. Although this might sound like common sense, in the moment, many people make the mistake of thinking they can still convince the attacker to stop. This is a huge mistake. You must realize that in most cases, a violent attacker cannot be reasoned with. Perpetrators don’t care about laws, and they probably lack the moral compass to be affected by anything you say. The attacker doesn’t need any justification to carry out the attack, and therefore you need to stop trying to reason with the attacker and fight back.
While there are a number of things you can do to avoid an attack, the actual attack is going to be anything but predictable. People make the mistake of thinking a fight is supposed to follow a set pattern, probably because they watched one too many Hollywood martial arts movies and have never been in a real fight. In reality, no two fights are ever the same; most violent attacks are very fluid events that rarely follow a set pattern.
Another misconception, again largely fueled by Hollywood movies, is that fights are an exchange of kicks, punches, and self-defense maneuvers. In a real-life fight, if you stand there and try to trade blows you’re going to be injured, maybe killed. Your number-one goal is to end the fight as quickly as possible, to limit the amount of damage the attacker can cause. The longer you allow the fight to drag on, the greater harm you put yourself in.
In a life-or-death situation there is no such thing as a “dirty fight.” This isn’t a time to worry about honor, or what people are going to think about you. It’s time to think about your life, and you need to do everything in your power to defend it—including things that might be considered “dirty fighting.” If you don’t have a gun, you need to attack with viciousness and with one goal in mind: destroying your attacker by any means necessary. Kick below the belt. Bite. Scratch and gouge. Pull hair. Whatever it takes to survive.
You must fight back. A big mistake that people often make when attacked is to cover their face and take the blows. They go into survival mode. While this might sound like a good thing, it’s the exact opposite of what you should probably do, and in most cases it will probably get you killed.
People often mistakenly think of fear as a bad thing. If you let fear control and overwhelm you, yes it can be bad, probably fatal. But if you can use that fear to fuel your attack, you have just tapped into your primordial instincts that have been protecting man since the beginning of time.
I’m not going to go too far into the biological effects of fear, but it is important to know we have these feelings for a reason. The fight-or-flight response is a powerful mechanism that our body has to deal with these situations, and you need to harness that temporary rush of adrenaline to fight your attacker with that same fearsome ferocity that fuels his attack.
When someone has chosen you as a victim, he’s already decided he can win. He is coming at you with pure aggression. This person has pre-planned the attack inside his head and probably has little to no fear. He has one goal and that is to destroy you. The only real way to fight that kind of naked hostility is to change your mindset and let that moment of fear drive your attack.