My Healing Journey (Part 4): Learning to punch and run

In body, in power

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Note: This post is part of a seven-part series on a multi-decade journey with sexual trauma and healing. It contains sensitive information including description of physical assault and self defense.

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I was feeling fired up after the mugging incident in France, so when I went home I decided to take an intensive women-only Krav Maga self-defense course.

In case you don’t know, Krav Maga is a specific form of self-defense developed and used by the Israeli Defense Forces. I would say that it’s not really a martial art — at least not in the sense that we think of martial arts as forms of physical contest that are beautiful or subtle in mindfulness, movement, power and energy. Personally, I would describe Krav Maga as being more of a MacGyver-style (resourceful and spontaneous) form of dirty street fighting.

Krav Maga is practical, and energy efficient. It involves training your automatic reflexes under stress, learning moves to inflict maximum damage with minimum effort, using environmental awareness and nearby aids to your advantage, and in the case of women’s self defense, learning how to fight smarter not stronger.

Everything is aimed at escaping harm, not overpowering your aggressor. It gives you trained reflexes and tools to have the best chance of getting the hell out of a real-world physical assault situation with your body and dignity intact.

A simple but extremely important part of the self-defense training was learning how to strengthen our natural reflex to scream. So much of our cultural conditioning goes against this primal response to danger. We are taught to be quiet, to be polite, to listen more than we speak. All this education on how to be a civilized member of society creates a habit of suppressing rather than expressing our voices.

One of the basic skill drills we did over and over again in this course was to practice screaming. Someone would startle us and grab us by surprise, and then our task in reacting was simply to scream. It was shocking how hard it was to release my voice to scream at first, even when we were directly instructed to do so.

By doing this drill repeatedly, we reinforced neural pathways supporting the impulse to vocalize (rather than interiorize) our panic instinct. What I learned there was that a well-placed loud scream is an incredibly effective weapon in combat, sometimes even more so than a well-placed punch or kick.

Another drill was aimed at building capacity for environmental scanning or “spidey senses”. Now in our modern device-dependent life, there is always the temptation to get lost in mobile technology. This leads to distracted attention drawn into virtual space, rather than diffuse awareness of our physical place.

We have strayed far away from our basic nature to be aware of what is around us. Yet, to make a broad sweeping generalization, women are typically wired to attune more easily to our surroundings, whether physically, emotionally or energetically. So this training helped us reconnect with and reinforce this innate capacity.

In this environmental scanning exercise, we would walk in a defined path across the room, with other bodies moving towards us laterally, from surprising angles and directions. The purpose of this drill was to help strengthen our sensing awareness of objects and movements detectable in our visual periphery.

With this peripheral awareness alone, the assault in Lyon could possibly have been avoided completely. If I had seen my attacker approaching out of the corner of my eye, I could have stopped in my tracks and stepped backwards quickly, and my body would not have been where he expected it to be in his running trajectory.

This course also taught us resourcefulness. We were trained to look around and see everything in our environment as a potential tool or weapon that we could use. Not only our voice, our teeth, our fingernails, our spit, the rings on our hands, or the spiky end of a high-heeled shoe, but also the height change in a curbed sidewalk, a nearby wine glass, a doorframe, or the edge of a chair.

Perhaps most importantly, we learned to value the element of surprise. If you are in a woman’s body, aggressors often underestimate their targeted victim’s capacity to fight back, and just the shock factor of a deliberately aimed response can create a brief moment of advantage. And a moment is all you need to get away.

To complete the Krav Maga course, we had to pass a test. It was a challenging one. For the final “exam”, we started from a vulnerable position lying flat on our back, knees apart, with an adult man lying on top of us, torso between our legs, and hands pinning our arms to either side. (The man in this role was wearing a face protector and full suit of body armor.) And starting from there, we had to figure out a way to free ourselves and get out of harm’s way.

No rules. No instructions. No choreographed sequence of moves.

It was up to us to bend, wiggle, twist brace, break holds, push, punch, kick, scramble to get out from under him any way we could manage. And once we were free, we had to stand up and run across a finish line marked by tape at the end of the arena, before he could catch up to grab an arm or an ankle.

Even though it was all staged, and safe, it was still terrifying. Completing this test was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do, both physically and emotionally. Many attempts ended in frustration and tears. But I managed to do it, eventually.

It was a life-changing experience for me as a petite woman to wrestle with and escape from a bigger, stronger man. My body learned from direct experience that even if I was starting from this extremely compromised position, there were many things I could do to impact the outcome of my situation.

So many drills and exercises in this women’s self defense training were not really about moves or strength or dexterity. What was so valuable about this course was developing a certain mindset and awareness. For me, this Krav Maga intensive course gave me critical confidence in the power of my physicality.

Did you miss Part 3 of this essay series? It is about a time when two opposite responses to aggression — freezing and screaming — occurred on the same day for me.

The next essay in this series, Part 5 of 7, is about how I witnessed the balanced and powerful “no” reflex arise in me spontaneously in a moment of confrontation.