Paranoia vs. Preparation

Great Little Self-Protection Tool

Recently had a conversation with a friend of mine concerned about the safety of his teenage daughter going to college.  She takes some unnecessary risks according to my friend, like walking alone across campus in periods of low-light.  I recommended my solution to such a problem: a two-dollar flat head screwdriver held upside down on the inside of the wrist inside a sleeve.  He did not like that idea, because it would cause her to constantly worry about it.

“I don’t want to make her paranoid,” he said.  “I don’t live my life constantly worrying about danger, and I don’t want her to have to live that way.”

My response was that if you are prepared, you don’t have to be paranoid.  I also told him that nobody is jumping out of the bushes to grab six-foot-four, two-hundred and fifty pound, middle-aged Marines like him.  Teenage girls on a college campus do need to be a little paranoid.  Not paranoid to the point that it debilitates a person or prevents them from living the life they want, but paranoid enough to be aware of surroundings using all five senses in concert.  Using all five senses at once does two things: 1) It causes your mind to become present-focused as it is impossible to remember or future-fantasize with all five senses; 2) it activates the so-called “sixth” sense, which is really just intuition about when a situation is potentially dangerous and should be left or avoided.

Situational Awareness is often talked about, but not fully understood.  It can be the deciding factor in a self-defense situation if it is utilized correctly.  Utilizing Situational Awareness correctly means you never get into a self-defense situation at all.  When you have a high level of Situational Awareness, and you trust your intuition—being informed by all five of your senses—then you can survive the ambush by never getting into it.  The best way to survive any self-defense situation is to listen when your sixth sense, your gut, your “spidey sense,” your women’s intuition, et cetera tells you to GTFO (Get The F--- Out).  That is the master level utilization of Situational Awareness.

By contrast, being aware of an ambush and still walking into it, while better than being caught unaware, is not the best use of Situational Awareness.  In the military, in war, sometimes you can’t avoid a combat engagement because you still have to accomplish a mission, or because you have orders, or whatever.  But, in the civilian self-defense world, if you knowingly walk into a combat situation, you are an idiot.  Or, if you are in a place and you start feeling a really bad vibe like something is about to go down, and you do not trust your gut, you have made yourself a victim.  Situational Awareness is not a tool to allow you to be irresponsible with your own life.  I have a pretty high level of Situational Awareness, especially in unfamiliar or riskier surroundings, but the intuition is only as good as the trust you have in it.

Situational Awareness should lead to one of two actions: 1) GTFO because you trust your instincts, or 2) you increase your readiness for combat.  Being aware you're about to get jumped does you no good if you don’t take the steps necessary to defeat the ambush in advance.  In other words, when my intuition starts telling me something is going bad, that is the time that I put my hand on the weapon, or if it’s the knife/screwdriver up my sleeve I get it into the grip I want and take it outside of the sleeve.  I might shift my walk/stance. 

“I have Situational Awareness, so I’m safe…even though I don’t have a gun, a knife, a screwdriver or running shoes and I can’t fight my way out of a wet paper bag…”

Situational Awareness is awesome, but it is not a panacea for self-defense because it is not how engagements are won.  Let me put it another way: spies don’t win wars; fighters do.  Now, some spies are also fighters, but my point is that information about the enemy, by itself, does not defeat the enemy.  You still have to have the capacity to inflict damage on the enemy.  Having every square inch of your yard covered by security cameras is useless if you don’t have the capacity to do anything to somebody trying to come in and hurt you.  The cameras are great Situational Awareness, which massively increase information and knowledge about the enemy, but if he’s “got the pistol, he’ll keep the pesos” unless you have a capacity to utilize the information.  Intelligence (Situational Awareness) by itself is only useful if you can use it to avoid an engagement; if you can’t avoid the engagement then Situational Awareness is far less important than the capabilities necessary to defeat the opponent.  It is not a panacea for self-defense; it is a tool for the preparation for self-defense situations.  Properly used, it gets you away from dangerous situations without ever being engaged.  If that’s not possible, then it eliminates the confusion of an ambush (which is the real danger), and it allows you to regain Initiative.  But, it does nothing for you if you do not trust the intuition it informs, or if you do not prepare yourself with the capabilities to do violence.

Soule
Easy 6
www.easy6training.com