Over my years of teaching self-defense and personal-safety/self-protection, one of the most common rebuttals I receive when advocating the importance of learning how to protect and defend yourself is, “I already know how to handle myself”, with the sometimes addition of, “it’s all just common sense anyway”. Sometimes, these statements are qualified with validations such as, “I used to live in a bad neighborhood” and/or, “I went to a pretty rough school” etc. The issue is that we sometimes – me included – put too much emphasis on the value of our own experiences of aggression and violence, whether they are valid or not, and fail to realize that experience by its very nature is limited by context i.e. I have experienced violence in certain and specific settings, which may not be representative of all types of violence, for instance most of my firsthand experiences were had working door and bar security; valid, but not universal. Oftentimes, I would guess, those that make statements such as “I know how to handle myself”, have never really been in truly dangerous or threatening situations, but have imagined and created the risk they felt, and then concluded that because nothing happened, they “handled” the situation e.g. someone walked through a rough neighborhood late at night and nobody assaulted them, therefore they know how to look after themselves – without understanding that unless there was a motivated offender present, they were never actually in danger; yes, in a bad neighborhood as opposed to a good one there is a greater chance of running into a motivated offender, but it would be wrong to conclude that it’s inevitable. There are too many people who believe in their abilities, because they “dealt with” incidents that were never going to turn violent e.g. not every seemingly aggressive statement, we might have experienced is a precursor to violence. To have meaningful results, we need an adequate sample size, and a sample size of one, where aggression and violence are concerned, just isn’t enough to draw meaningful conclusions from– especially if we are inadvertently and unknowingly the reasons for it i.e. our actions and behaviors cause the conflict.

In understanding and dealing with violence, context is everything, and sometimes we can create a context that doesn’t reflect reality e.g. if we believe wearing a hoodie, having tattoos, and/or keeping your hands in your pocket, signifies that someone is about to attack us with a knife, then everybody we come across who looks and behaves in this way is a potential attacker; and if we’re not attacked or assaulted, then that becomes an armed assailant we dealt with, and another experience that reinforces the idea that we know how to handle ourselves. I have lost count of the war stories I’ve heard where nothing happened, but something could have happened – without the presence of a motivated offender, there actually isn’t any danger, and it’s all too easy to imagine and create motivated offenders.

Good Situational Awareness (SA) isn’t synonymous with paranoia. I have lived in some low-income and reputedly bad neighborhoods in my time, and those who I knew who engaged in criminal activities didn’t do so on a 24x7 basis e.g. I have had conversations with known muggers who didn’t try and rob me, not because of who I was or anything I did, but because they weren’t motivated at the time to do so, on another day, at a different time, things could have been different. Just because you thought you should have been attacked but weren’t doesn’t mean that you “handled” the situation – in fact you could do everything “wrong” and still not be assaulted, because there wasn’t a motivation on the part of the other person to cause you harm (at that particular) time. I’ve de-escalated a lot of situations during my professional career, however I don’t know if all or any of them would have turned physically violent; the number/volume would suggest and indicate that some of them would, but I can’t be sure enough to quantify it. However, the goal of de-escalation is to take the emotion out of a situation, in order to resolve a conflict, rather than to simply avoid a violent outcome, and so I have grounds to say that my de-escalation of certain incidents was successful – though I couldn’t say definitively that I avoided X-number of fights.

My issue with personal safety being simply common sense is that, for starters it’s not that common e.g. I don’t know one person who hasn’t at some point in their life walked down a dark alley, and secondly it is based on a certain understanding of how the world works, and a specific profile of an aggressive and violent individual e.g. rapists look and behave like this, child-molesters can be identified by this, gang-members act and behave this way, etc. Aggressive predatory individuals are a heterogeneous group, who use violence in many different ways, to achieve many different goals. If you are looking to classify individuals into specific roles so you can easily understand their behaviors, because this is what common sense requires, you are likely to be surprised; violence although conforming to certain patterns and loose frameworks, is far from simplistic. It is also worth noting that predatory individuals who commit premeditated acts of violence, understand “common sense”, and know how to bypass it, and snake around it. Common sense usually involves a rigidity in thinking and expects individuals to conform and act in a certain way, and unfortunately the people we are trying to protect ourselves against understand this.  

I can imagine situations where I don’t “know” how to handle myself; I can hazard a guess, based on my experiences, and understanding of violence. I recognize this gives me material to draw from, and an opportunity to create a workable solution, but it would be arrogant for me to say I “know” – this doesn’t mean I lack confidence but rather that I recognize that no two situations are the same, and there’s a need for creativity rather than a strict adherence to a set of rules, that result in a predictable outcome.