Role Of Emotions In Self Protection

A majority of self defense and martial art training programs only focus on teaching defending skills and tend to avoid the emotional aspect altogether. It has already been established that most actions of human beings are driven by the emotional state and self defense too is not left untouched by the emotional forces that are at work.

Even the training lessons that do touch the emotional aspect of self defense only take frightened or angry state of mind into consideration. But, alongside these two mental states, a person’s emotional state has lot to do with his defensive moves. Most of us have this preconceived notion that the emotional state during emergencies largely depends on the blood type. However, this couldn’t be an excuse when someone needs to defend himself against some threat badly.

In fact, emotions go hand in hand with human body’s defense mechanisms. Human body is designed in a way to handle external threats on its own. However, our social, cultural, academic learning and education makes us unaware of the instinctive self defense potential that our body has.

Emotions And Self Defense

Anything a human being is exposed to, triggers a related feeling or some response at fundamental level in mind. This activity takes place spontaneously with our sub-conscious mind actively playing a role in it. In addition, this also happens well below the level what is prominently termed as ‘emotions’. These fundamental feelings can be categorized as ‘Attraction’, ‘Aversion’, and ‘Apathy’. Such human emotions are much simpler than feelings, like love, hatred, and ignorance.

Training set-ups for self defense programs are far different from those of the real tricky situations confronted in real life. Irrespective of the seemingly real situations created by the trainers during training sessions, some level of comfort stays in the minds of trainees. This comfort doesn’t allow the real emotions to play their part during self defense training.

So, it’s really difficult to use various self-defense moves learned during real time situations. During training sessions, a majority of trainees stay in good frame of mind and usually like what they are doing. In other words, most of the individuals during training are in “attraction” mode, and their moves are governed by their state of mind only.  A real-time brawl is rather much more difficult to handle, as the opponent in this case simply doesn’t worry about the injuries the other person could have. In such situations, it’s really important to keep your cool and focus on using learned tactics to defend against any potential injuries. In addition to this, one should also look for the weak points of the attacker to defend in a better way.

Such real time fights also involve psychological tussle and one who manages to keep his cool during these nasty situations can handle the attackers well. No matter how much a person has learned in self defense techniques, improper emotional state could only prove to be disastrous. On the other hand, an emotionally stable person, even a bit less trained in self defense techniques, can deal with these situations well.