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Old 04-16-2010, 03:05 PM   #20
Kevin Leavitt
 
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Location: Olympia, Washington
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Re: Developing courage

Quote:
Mary Malmros wrote: View Post
And yet, as others have pointed out, there are various kinds of training programs that are designed to teach people how to act in a crisis, without necessarily having had to deal with any real-world crises in the past. My EMT training was like this: deliberately stressful scenarios designed to simulate the stress of a real emergency (or, I suppose, to help people to realize if they're really not cut out for this sort of thing).

I think there is a difference, though, between this and the sort of "training for crisis" that one might do in aikido. While there are countless medical crises that can afflict the human body, they fall into definite categories, and there's a definite hierarchy of severity: faced with severe bleeding and a broken arm, it's a no-brainer which problem needs to be addressed first and how you need to address it. You can put someone through a training program that will teach the skills of assessment and tell them what the correct decisions are. I don't know that you can really do that with a sort of open-ended self-defense "crisis".
I think you can, however, I think when it comes to self defense, we go all over the map on what constitutes self defense and how do you frame the risk, scenarios, and the various was to mitigate those risk.

The problem with Martial Arts, is that most programs are designed around making it interesting enough for people to want to attend on a regular basis and go home with a warm and fuzzy feeling about what they did that night! If you don't do that, then folks don't come back and you can't pay the bills.

The point is, if you are being genuine in your efforts to rationally mitigate the risk of most self defense situations, as you know, most of what we do would be a waste of time, or at least a very poor delivery mechanism for skill...plus it would not be fun or interesting.

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