Thread: Who "decides?"
View Single Post
Old 07-04-2000, 09:13 PM   #5
Keith
Dojo: Susquehanna Aikido
Location: York, PA
Join Date: Jul 2000
Posts: 28
Offline
My experience, and one of my favorite "real world" stories. But before I tell it, I just want to say that for every story I have like this where things went just breathtakingly perfectly, I have about 20 where I twisted and forced and muscled. Just a little humility-covering. On with the story:

I used to work on an acute care psychiatric unit, and part of my job description was to deal with potentially violent situations. We had a patient who had acted out on the morning shift and been locked in a seclusion room. I was on evening shift, and we had to bring him his dinner. It was me, followed by a guy withthe patient's dinner, and then another guy behind him. We approached the door, and when I put in the key I looked through the little window and made eye contact with the patient. At that moment the technique was over, and everything that followed was just follow through that I watched. I said to the guy with the dinner tray "get out from behind me, his feet are about to be in the air there," and opened the door. The patient charge me and I stepped in with a direct iriminage. just before I touched him, his face jerked back and his feet went flying out from under him. He landed on the mattress, as I knew he would (even though I couldn't see the mattress through the window). I held an arm over him and pinned him against my shin while my coworker put his dinner tray down and got out of the room. I backed out of the room and locked the door. The whole time I felt like a spectator watching something occur. It didn't occur to me until later that I hadn't even touched him until after he landed. The rest of the evening I kept thinking "How do I get my students to fall that well?"

So you tell me who decided that technique.
  Reply With Quote