How will YOU react when you’re attacked?

When was the last time you were in a fight? We’re talking about a real, physical altercation where someone was punching you in the face or wrestling with you on the ground and trying to hurt you.

If you’re like most men, your last fight was probably in grade school, assuming you’ve been in a fight at all. If you’re a woman, you’ve probably never been in a fight.

You can pat yourself on the back for being mature enough to have avoided a fight for most of your life, but in a self defense situation your lack of fighting experience could lead you to make a bad decision.

Here’s a quote from In the Name of Self Defense by Mark MacYoung:

Until you:
1. Develop the ability to take a hit without having an emotional meltdown
2. Have firsthand experience that you can be struck and it won’t “destroy” you
3. Don’t get all trauma-drama-esque and “triggered” over having been hit in the past
4. Get over your fear of being struck

You:
1. Have no baseline to accurately assess danger
2. Are likely to freak out and emotionally overreact when confronted
3. More likely to get furious and overreact to the insult of being struck rather than the actual danger
4. Will attempt to negotiate and de-escalate from a position of fear
5. Will attempt to deal with the situation from a position of overconfidence
6. Will be reacting to past events instead of what’s happening now.

That’s a pretty sobering observation. But this is something most criminals know about you. They choose their targets carefully and often use sudden physical force to overwhelm and startle you. A mugger, for example, might casually walk up to you then bash you in the face, knowing that in most cases, this will cause you to “freak out,” giving them the upper hand. Sometimes a criminal doesn’t even have to touch you. Just the thought of being in a fight could scramble your brain.

In this mental state, will you make a good decision or a poor decision? Will you use lethal force when the threat doesn’t warrant it? Or will you be too slow to react when your life is actually in danger?

No one is saying that you have to put up with a beating. You DO have the moral and legal right to defend yourself when you are in fear of death or severe bodily harm. The point here is just to point out that your reaction to the shock of being attacked is relative to your experience with physical altercations.

Most “gun guys,” and most people who carry a firearm for protection, do little more than go to the range once in a blue moon to poke a few holes in a paper target. This might make you somewhat more proficient with your firearm, but it won’t do much to prepare you for the emotional reaction you may have when assaulted.

If you’ve boxed or wrestled in school or taken martial arts training where you could spar with an opponent, you have a big advantage. You know you can get “hit” and you won’t fall apart. If you have no experience like this, it would be wise to get some.

While it can be intimidating, taking a “fighting” class, as opposed to a “shooting” class, could do wonders for your self confidence and dramatically improve your decision-making ability in a physical altercation.

And the more intimidated you are of taking a class like this, the more you NEED a class like this.