Therapeutic Self-Defense: Training for Survivors of Violence and Abuse

This essay was originally published several decades ago, and I used to maintain it on my Edgework website. I don’t think that this was ever the best place for it. Rather than an essay for therapists who wish to teach self-defense, it is really meant for martial artists and self-defense instructors who either happen to be therapists, or who need to work in tandem with a counselor, because you are attempting to teach protective skills to victims of abuse and violence. Teaching survivors requires humility: just because something is easy for you, or seems to be something anyone would want does not mean it is so for someone who is wounded. All too often, self-defense classes for traumatized individuals can be likened to being asked to run a hundred yards on a broken leg. Surely, the runner desires to reach the finish line, but all the attempt provides is failure and pain. Hence this essay.

Note: That I refer to the victims of violence primarily using “she,” “her,” etc., does not mean that I am ignoring male victims of violence. “S/he”, etc. can be graceless locutions. It is a limitation of our language. 

An individual comes to therapy. She carries the scars of beatings, the memories of rape, or perhaps, still defending against abuse long forgotten on a conscious level, but patterns of movement and muscular response. She works hard and bravely. She faces her history, tells her story, reworks it, and integrates it into a new view of herself and her life. And yet, for many such individuals, a core belief of helplessness remains unchanged. A sudden noise, a particular intake of breath or rustle of clothing, a harsh word or an over-eager lover, and beyond all control, the thought or feeling arises, “He’s here again”or “She’s coming to get me, and this time I won’t be able to escape.” The person may find herself in a new abusive situation without any understanding how she got there again. Or she may panic, and not know why, or dissociate, or react with volatile anger.

The soul is not some disembodied energy or mind that lives in our head, something that we can integrate and heal by thought and image alone. The soul is part of our flesh. Somehow, the body, too, must be involved in therapy.

There are many therapies that work through accessing various somatic and emotional states: however, even seemingly direct mobilization of aggression such as striking a pillow or twisting a towel cannot convince a survivor of assault or trauma that she has the means to maintain her own integrity in the face of attack. What is necessary is that the individual knows that she can detect dangerous situations, can move in such a way that she does not appear easy prey to a potential abuser, and knows that she has the ability and strength to devastatingly hurt anyone who attempts to violate her again, if she chooses. To these ends, self-defense training can be invaluable.

Self-defense, however, is not a simply matter of the acquisition of fighting skills. What is a valid defense of the self? I believe that the self is that which is most intrinsically human and personal within us. Above all else, it is the self that is wounded in any assault. The only valid defense of the self is that which protects the integrity of the self. Combat itself can be a violation, even if one wins.

A number of years ago, I was asked to teach a one-day seminar on street self-defense, focusing specifically on what to do if attacked. I focused on methods of devastating counter-attack. Near the end of the day, one woman suddenly walked out. I quickly followed her, and asked what was wrong. She told me that she had signed up for my class as part of her recovery from childhood incest. She had always, despite success in her work and relationships, felt vulnerable – powerless on the most fundamental level. She had not been able to force her father to stop his rapes, and believed that she could not stop them now, were he or someone else to attempt to do it again. She had trained in all the techniques I had offered, and, in fact, was performing them quite competently. However, we had just been doing an exercise in which we all screamed “NO!” in a tone of outrage and rejection, and she found that she couldn’t scream – she could not <refuse.> She turned and said, “After taking your workshop, things are much worse. Before, I believed I was helpless, couldn’t have done a thing to stop him. Now you’ve proven to me that I have the strength and skills to fight back – but I still can’t say ‘no.’ I won’t be able to fight back next time either. I may have the skill, but not the heart.”

I tried to help her reframe the training as an exploration of her limits, giving her information on where she needed to work next, but it was not the time nor the place, and I was not the person to process the issue therapeutically. I hardly knew her! I had naively assumed that anyone who signed up would want to fight back, if only they had the means. The idea that dissociation, ‘learned helplessness,’ splitting, or even ‘identification with the abuser’ were modes of self-defense, created in horrible circumstances to somehow protect the soul’s integrity, was beyond my own frame of reference. My training was anything but a defense of her self’s needs.

In my other profession as a crisis intervention specialist, I often worked with survivors of abuse. Some of these people had gone through various types of self-defense courses, but I became quite concerned with the results of many of these individuals’ training, seeing it as similar to the story told above. My concerns centered around two issues: what was taught and how it was taught. Many self-defense courses assume that the main subject to be learned is how to defend oneself against violent attack, particularly attack by strangers. It is true that street violence or criminal break-ins are terrifying acts, and we need to be prepared against them. However, the majority of assaults, particularly those of a sexual nature, are perpetrated by family or acquaintances. Although the level of violence and violation are equally horrible, the events leading up to the assault can be quite different. This has relevance to averting an assault before it has been initiated. What is particularly important in preparing to defend oneself against abuse by a known individual is the ability to sense on a subtle level when something is wrong, invasive, or out-of-sync within the context of what a decent relationship should be.

Criminal assault by strangers can be far less complicated. I remember a noted martial arts instructor in New Haven. A friend of mine was at a Planned Parenthood office with her when a small street gang invaded the premises. Single-handed, she kicked and punched five young men into stunned, respectful submission. However, this strong, powerful woman was in the thrall of her teacher and lover, who held her virtual prisoner at his dojo. One of her women’s self-defense classes disbanded in crushed disillusionment when they appeared for practice, and she said through the door, “George won’t let me open the door today.” Abuse is often far more powerful than something that can be resolved by punches and kicks alone.

One of the modern trends in self-defense classes is a dynamic workshop that functions as a rite of passage. In such workshops, a group trains in extremely effective methods of combat, which they practice against heavily padded instructors: full force. The last day of the workshop is a graduation ceremony in which the participants defend themselves against an assailant, often in a replay of an assault they suffered in the past. They defeat their attacker this time with power and rage. This can be a wonderful experience for most participants. Many people, despite skill in dojo simulations, are overwhelmed when flooded with an unexpected burst of adrenaline. As their stomach hollows, their breath flutters and their hands shake, they interpret this not as a call to arms, but as a sign to surrender.  Their previous experiences with adrenaline were associated with helpless submission to or ineffectual defense against rape and assault. They have no experience whatsoever of adrenaline ‘shock’ fostering victory.  Therefore, such courses enable the person to learn to function effectively at a state of high emotional arousal, and win.

There is considerable evidence that experiences learned in high arousal states are ‘burned’ into the nervous system. This makes biological sense.  If one is terrified by a snake and snatching a stick, pins it to the ground and then kills it, it stands to reason that the organism that remembers this and reacts in similar fashion even quicker the next time will survive longer than the organism ‘traumatized into amnesia.’ When helpless, however, the organism ‘burns in’ that experience, because it you are still alive, you, by definition, enacted a survival strategy. Thus, a child lying silently beneath the heaving weight of an adult rapist learns that to survive is to freeze, and perhaps to ‘go away’ into dissociation. Without the experience of successfully fighting back against a similar assault, simulated or not, the organism cannot believe that another strategy will keep it as safe as once again freezing and dissociating. Even if it is a simulation, it must feel so ‘real’ that one experiences a victory. This is what such self-defense courses attempt to provide.

Initiation rites are an increasingly common facet of our culture. Rebirthing, Rolfing, seminars of all kinds, work from a ‘breakthrough’ metaphor in which, through a dramatic experience, one’s whole life is changed. It is analogous to a kind of religious conversion. What makes this metaphor even more compelling is that abuse survivors have been initiated in a rite of destructive passage. How attractive, then, to break through body and emotional armor, emerging like a butterfly from a cocoon!

Although a properly taught breakthrough workshop, with trustworthy instructors, may be enormously healing for some, if not most survivors of even severe abuse, it may be hurtful for other participants, despite the sensitivity of both instructors and fellow students. Because of the lack of therapeutic orientation, there is little understanding of many of the negative results of such training, particularly when ‘masked’ in what is claimed and believed to be positive outcome. What if the self that an individual is learning to defend is split and dissociated?

• One student might identify with her abuser, and the violent aspects of the training may be embraced, not in protection of the whole being, but merely as an embrace of the same power that was used to oppress.
• Others may idealize the trainers and some of their fellow trainees. The individual is strong only to the degree that they can maintain a fantasy that they are powerful through identifying with the teacher or seniors. One often sees this in martial arts schools where a student derives a sense of self through stories about or behavior like their ‘marvelous’ teacher.
• Some people become inflated, and given that the training often does not address the more subtle aspects of aggression in human relations, they may confidently walk into situations where they should never go, no matter how strong they might be.

For vulnerable individuals, then, a more therapeutic orientation is required. For this reason, I worked to develop a method of self-defense training for survivors of abuse or other trauma. Therapeutic Self-Defense is a workshop for established therapeutic groups of survivors of abuse, or for those otherwise concerned with issues of power and integrity. It is done with the participation of the group leader/therapists. Each workshop is crafted to meet the needs of the people in the group. Among the most important of these needs is empowerment of the group itself. The first step is for the therapist to consult with the group on what skills they wish to train. Once the group has reached a consensus, the therapist and I consult on the best means to accomplish their aims, and also, what clinical issues the training might evoke. It is this consultation process which empowers the group. I am ‘contracted’ as an outsider, offering specific skills rather than someone who ‘takes over’ the group.

It is important to remember that the main objective is therapeutic. The skills I teach are the most effective that I know, but the purpose is not to create warriors in a weekend. The purpose is to help individuals delineate power and awareness that they can use in the real world for their own protection, and also to separate themselves from strategies which no longer serves to preserve their integrity.

The therapists’ presence makes the space far safer for both the participants and for myself. Through participation in the workshop, the therapist can appreciate for her or himself how difficult it is to learn how to fight in defense of oneself. The therapist can more deeply grasp why clients reject or do not follow up on common-sense exhortations and suggestions that are ‘obviously’ in their best interest.

One very valuable exercise is a study on how to walk in a centered fashion. A participant walks across the room. I ask them to consider, without verbalization, what they are trying to express in the way that they move. Then, I (or sometimes other group members) imitate their walk. Being imitated accurately is a very powerful experience, far more so than seeing oneself on a videotape. It easily evokes understanding into ones effect on others. I ask the group to consider me as I imitate the participants’ movement pattern, and say what they think they could do with someone moving as I am moving. Then, pointing out that this is the way that the imitated person is moving, I ask her if there is any dissonance between her intention (what she wants to manifest), and what she is, in fact, expressing physically. If there is dissonance, I make suggestions on how to alter her movement patterns, attempting to be congruent with both her intention and her physical structure.

This is also a wonderful way for the therapist to show his or her human side without inappropriate self-disclosure. The dis-illusion that a client might experience, seeing her therapist bumble through a technique can be brought back into the therapeutic relationship and transference/projection issues can thereby be studied. In one group, I had the therapist walk across the room. I asked the group members to consider her walk, and people began rhapsodizing how graceful and balanced she was. I then imitated the walk and was able to point out that she projected an air of distraction, as if being a tourist in a lovely country and therefore, was not in an aware state to pick up danger signals around her. In addition, she moved like a dancer, with her center of gravity high in her chest, and although beautiful, she would be very easy to knock off balance. This became a fruitful avenue for the therapist to pursue in later therapy sessions, using this example to point out how easy it is to shift from respect and love to adoration and worship in any relationship.

The therapist’s presence also makes experimentation safe. Let us imagine an individual who has used a set of strategies (dissociation, trance, freezing, ‘compliance,’ etc.) to survive. In a non-therapeutically oriented group, led with the best intentions in the world, she may not feel safe enough to try another strategy that I might recommend. What if she tried it, and got hung out in some fearful space? What if she flashed back, hallucinated, shifted into a trance or altered state? Having the therapist right there makes it safer to try new things.

We were doing ‘boundary work’ in one group. In this exercise, we study interpersonal space. The ‘receiver’ sits, and the ‘giver’ speaks to her, moving closer and further away as they do so. The receiver attempts to sense when the spacing of the relationship feels ‘wrong.’ They then try to remember the nature of the signal that told them so. We experiment with a friendly story (“I got a beautiful new cat,”), an attempted con (“I just bought a new vacuum cleaner, and I bet you’d just love to come over and sweep my house. C’mon . . . “) and anger without direct threat (“You were half an hour late, and my clothes got soaked in the rain. How could you!”) The object of this exercise is to make clear that we have very subtle signals that tell us when something is dangerous. We have been socialized to ignore these messages, and then are caught ‘unawares’ in a violent situation.

In the incident I am referring to, one woman froze during the ‘anger’ exercise: her husband had always used a loud voice as a weapon, and the angry voice made her flinch and cower in terror. Given the context, I would have had neither the leeway nor rapport to really assist the woman through this; at best, I might have had her sit out the exercise, or stop it so that the group could offer her support. The therapist, however, simply took her next door to a breakout room where they did process work regarding her ‘collapse.’ It proved to be an access route to some righteous anger that she has since used in the protection of her children against her blaring bellowing husband. Without her own therapist’s presence, I can imagine her frozen, wasting both her money and a priceless opportunity for healing.

In its ‘standard’ format, Therapeutic Self-Defense is taught in either a one or two day workshop. The first (or sometimes only) day is largely concerned with the more subtle aspects of self-defense, which are all that we run into in 99% of our daily experiences. Practice includes:

• How to walk, survey one’s surroundings
• How to make one’s movements congruent with one’s internal state
• How to consciously create a movement style to protect and conceal a vulnerable inner state
• How to sense when one’s boundaries are intruded upon
• Use of the eyes and the voice to exert one’s will on an invasive individual

I also teach a set of physical exercises from China, called Eight Brocade that very powerfully enable the participants to learn to tolerate the physical and psychological effects of tension and release. The vulnerable person, un-at-home in her own body will feel unsafe in any situation, because, vulnerable, one feels out of control.  When one learns to physically control one’s own somatic organization, one begins to take control of one’s own life – from the inside out.

In a fundamental sense, most abusers are predators, and like the animal kingdom, predators seek to prey on that which appears weak and vulnerable. The first days training focuses on how not to appear ‘appetizing’ to predators. As most predators function out of their own perceived best interests, a trained individual will often be avoided as “too much trouble.”

A second day is focused on actual combative techniques. As most readers are surely aware, the development of a high level of fighting skill is a process that takes many years. Martial arts require a re-education of both natural and learned reflexes so that one responds to threat in a sophisticated, highly trained manner. The techniques that I teach, however, are based on flinch and fear reactions. The neuro-muscular system is required to learn nothing new other than a different application of movements already known. This alone can be enormously healing. The very movements in which an individual tried, and perhaps failed, to fight off an attacker, the reflexes in which one’s terror is enclosed, are now the movements of escape and fighting back.

There is often much processing in subsequent therapy groups. Many such individuals have, on a core level, identified themselves as blameless victims. They can feel innocent, at least, because they believe themselves to be incapable of violence. To realize that they, too, can maim, even kill another can be shocking. However, they then often realize that violence is a choice that each of us makes. A possibility within each of us, it is not a force out of control. The survivor can realize that their abuser chose to hurt her, another important issue to work with in therapy.

Some people in the workshop may choose to further hone their combat skills, and may therefore choose to follow up in other self-defense or martial arts training. Even in one’s day training, however, people can be far more capable of fighting in self-defense if it is necessary to do so. It is not that their skills improve – it is their ability to actually use what they already know.

On a clinical level, the results are sometimes totally unexpected. One very slender young woman came to her next therapy group outraged at what ‘happened’ during the workshop. We had practiced some forceful escapes for being grabbed around the wrist, and she woke up the next morning with bruises all over both arms. Her outrage was due to the fact that she was sure that everyone who saw her would assume that her boyfriend was again abusing her. The therapist was able to use this incident to help her see how much energy she had invested in protecting and covering for her boyfriend. She was quickly able to grasp what she had been doing, and this became ground for further work on issues of enmeshment and co-dependence.

I am personally disinclined to practice or teach ‘break-through’ training. I believe that fear is an envelope that needs to be gently stretched, not ripped through. Therefore, all the techniques in this workshop can be practiced over-and-over again, in slow motion, either with a supportive partner, or among the group. Skills are built up over time. This also preserves the lessons as a ‘community heritage.’ Each person becomes necessary as a repository of part of the knowledge. If one person forgets, others will remember for them. This does a small part in creating a vital community for people who have often been totally isolated.

It is important to address my role in the group in greater detail. I am a paradox for many members, a man who expresses strength, seems to be ‘comfortable’ with violence, and yet, is gentle and supportive. In addition, I am a one-time guest in the group. It is very easy to me to become a mythological figure to some individuals, either as a savior, a romantic ideal or in some cases, as “surely an abuser in disguise.” These issues also become grist for the therapy mill. The therapist can agree, that s/he, too, found me to be someone who seemed to be very helpful, but that there is a lot that s/he, too, doesn’t know about me. Therefore, all can study the line between the person they actually met, and the one who is so easy to create from good (or bad) feelings and past history.

Follow-up reports from therapists have been quite positive. One timid victim of childhood rape found herself helping her husband fight off an attack by two men. The members of one group often get together for walks around town, checking out each other’s walk, giving each other feedback on what they are aware of as they walk. They jokingly refer to themselves as “psycho bitches from hell.”

Three individuals have successfully defended themselves from assault. One literally apprehended his attacker for the police. Some individuals have begun to make changes in their lives, changes that require both bravery and confrontation of old issues and current situations. The groundwork properly laid, several individuals have joined martial arts schools as well as participating in more mainstream self-defense courses. Therapy is enhanced regarding issues of power, fear, idealization, and the abandonment of old defenses now that more effective methods are at hand.

I do not believe that self-defense instruction alone can come close to replacing therapy. However, the acquisition of non-abusive power is a step towards recovery of the state of graceful being that we were all born to have. It satisfies the self’s need for concrete skills for the loving protection of itself. This accomplished, more energy is free to be devoted to healing that which has been wounded.

Afterwards

This essay was originally published in somewhat different form in Aikido Journal in 1994. My career has changed quite a bit since those days. Although I still present a number of types of training regarding de-escalation of aggression, I no longer offer training in Therapeutic Self-Defense.

Although it is no longer something that I wish to do on a professional basis, I still believe that it can be a very valuable component of therapy for those who have been violated. If a group of individuals wished to be trained in this procedure, I would be willing to do so, and ‘certify’ them in the process, were I to believe that they fully grasped the method. (In other words, participation alone would not be enough – it would be a professional training.)  I would envision a four-day training, with an annual refresher of one to two days. To qualify for training:

• Participants would have to have some advanced level of martial arts training
• A willingness to learn the necessary psychological information to work with such a population.
• Purchase and study of my book, Grace Under Fire, is a pre-requisite before enrollment
• Each person must arrange to work with a counselor or psychotherapist as a kind of supervisor/mentor to become further educated in working with individuals who are survivors of abuse and violence. The prospective psychological mentor must be given a copy of this essay and be willing to work with the trainer on an ongoing basis, as needed.  It will be up to each trainee to arrange this on an informal or a professional basis.  One option, if all instructors are in the same city, is to have a group that meets with the psychological consultant on a regular basis.
• I do have the time and the desire to teach these skills, but I do not have the time to do the organizational work to set up such a training, and to formalize a certification process, etc. But if, by chance, this essay does elicit such interest, please let me know.  In any event, for all those who are working with survivors of violence, be you martial arts instructors, law enforcement personnel, prosecutors or therapists, I do hope this old essay may provoke some thought.

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