Psychology of conflict

Ving Tsun, Chi Sau, and the Psychology of Conflict.

"Victory is reserved for those who are willing to pay its price." - Sun Tzu

A very important question in martial arts is this: why do so many experts still get beaten in fights, and why others, less skilled, don’t? People ask themselves things like “Why can’t I, with my ten years of training, feel more capable when about to defend myself?” or “Why am I scared?” or “Why did I forget everything I knew as soon as I needed it?”

The usual answers “attitude” and “fighting spirit” are neither helpful nor instructional to those students who don’t have “it”, or those of us who have to teach them. But there are answers. The average martial arts student is a decent human being, who simply doesn’t want to get abused, hurt or intimidated any more. Our job is not to turn them into killing machines, but into someone who is far less likely to get hurt than before they started training. This is a very important point.

Surprising though it may seem, it is well established that there is a powerful in-built reluctance against the vast majority of people seriously damaging each other deliberately, especially “up close and personal”. To my mind, the vast majority of martial training fails to address this critical point in any appreciable fashion. Military studies show that in a life and death situation, without very special training, something like 85% of people delay in acting to eliminate their opponent, even if they are going to die. 13% will act with great reluctance and suffer for it afterwards, and the last two percent feel no problems, and some even enjoy it. This last two percent we can ignore, since they are the natural fighters, and they become war heroes, mercenaries, Special Forces, or assassins and thugs. Unfortunately for the rest of us, these people are likely to be the ones we have to defend against, since some of them like fighting and are good at it. Other military studies have shown that after appropriate training, more than 95% can and will respond appropriately. Then they suffer guilt for it, but that is another story.

Until more applicable studies are done, we can assume that, although our problem is not precisely that of the military forces in getting people to fight, there are close parallels. These facts have important implications for those who wish to learn to fight.

Fight or Flight?

The first thing we have to deal with is that the idea of “fight or flight” as being the only two options - this is completely incorrect. As is well known to animal behaviourists, this choice only occurs between different species. Within species there exist powerful mechanisms to prevent the destruction of each other, simply for the protection of the species. In the case within a species there are two other possibilities, making the whole picture “Fight or Flight or Posture or Submit”. Which position an individual takes within this depends on many factors. Most fights start with posturing, which often looks ridiculous once you recognize it. Submitting is usually just letting them have their way. Not always a good option for our own pride, and often the reason why most of us started training. But if it doesn’t hurt to let them have their way, logically why not let them have it? Do you really care enough to fight, to hurt and to be hurt? Posturing back, and the fight may begin, or the other might back down. Or a cold look may send them scurrying. Arguing or explaining will not change this. It is a waste of time, and only distracts you, the victim, not the aggressor. Arguing and explaining appeals to the intellect, which is progressively being shut down in conflict, so you are trying to appeal to a part of the attacker’s brain that isn’t available. Conventional Ving Tsun wisdom: Think of nothing, not how big or how strong, or what he is saying. Wait, and respond as you have been trained, and that is all. That’s fine.

But how do you do that?

One difficulty in those who wish to learn to fight is that most types of training do not deal with the most important problems. Most training deals with the physical skills to deal with the attacker’s punches or kicks, rather than the mental skill of enabling the defender to do so in a real situation.

Fear and Anger

Fear and anger do much the same things – such as release adrenaline. First thing to realize is that when adrenaline starts pumping, the heart rate rises. As this rises, the forebrain – the smart part where we learn and remember things – progressively shuts down. This is why we forget our skills, and why people who are furious or terrified cannot be reasoned with. The part if the brain we are appealing to has been disabled.

We lose fine motor control.

This is why we shake and tremble.

Glucose is stripped from our blood for emergency responses, leaving us feeling tired and weak, and possibly nauseous.

The blood vessels in the skin constrict so if we are injured, then we bleed less. This why we go pale.

It all happens for perfectly good reasons – to enable our body to cope with damage, and to enable a faster part of our brain to take over for the survival of the body – call it the mammalian brain for the sake of argument. This part has many useful features for the individual under threat.

Once conditioned it never ever forgets. Its response time is a minute fraction of the forebrain. It doesn’t get tired, drunk, confused, panic, drugged or is ever truly asleep. But it is hard to teach – think of it like teaching a smart dog. You have to repeat things over and over again, thousands of times until they become reflex. You must be unambiguous in your training or it gets confused – only a few things can be learned at a time until they become reflex before moving on to the next thing. It learns better when exhausted, and when the forebrain is otherwise engaged.

Conditioning

Another factor is conditioning. Not physical, but mental. It is also called inoculation – exposing little by little to increasing doses of the things you need to be resistant to.

If you have never taken a hit as hard as that in a fight, then you will not know how to deal with it when it happens. If you have never been exhausted and still had to train, you will not be able to do it in a fight, but give up when you really need to give a supreme effort. If you have never trained while injured, or sick, or whatever, you will not know what it feels like to have to do so. A fight will more likely happen when you are not feeling your best since you will not be sending out signals of confidence and assurance – the reasons why those who are good at martial arts are attacked less often than those who are insecure. If you have never trained to use every single bit of power and speed you can, fully exerting yourself to the full, you will never know what you can really do in a fight. If you always wear pads and gloves in sparring you will never feel normal in a real conflict, and a part of all training in martial arts should be to make the unfamiliar become familiar. Sparring is particularly inefficient since most rules do not allow you to use the most important techniques – strikes to the weak parts of the body. It conditions you to strike tough areas, exactly the wrong sort of automatic response you need to save your life against a ruthless bigger tougher opponent – and Ving Tsun always assumes that this is precisely the kind of person who is attacking you. Sparring usually has size and weight divisions which go further to ensuring that people are not exposed to larger attackers.

Chi Sau is the way in which much of this is learned. It is called operant conditioning, and is well understood in modern psychology. Because of the process of chi sau, all of the above can come directly from appropriate training in this vital drill. But you must do it correctly. If you do not, it will not and cannot work to condition that part of the brain we most need to do so. You are wasting your time, and will not be able to response when the chips are truly down.

Firstly, chi sau is not a game – and ‘winning’ in chi sau has little relationship to what you are actually trying to do, which is largely training yourself to have combat reflexes and techniques, not earn points. There are techniques that some people use in chi sau (and some unfortunately work well in chi sau, causing the students to over use them in training) that would get them killed in a fight, and these techniques shouldn’t be trained. All strikes must be positioned as if you are going to carry them out, striking through the person (as in the pic with David Peterson), not flicky moves or soft strikes or striking to the surface, as is all too often the case. You should be able to perform just as well slowly as fast, regardless of how your opponent moves.

One very bad thing is to only hit your opponent once, then start again, as if one hit wins or loses. This is conditioning yourself to only hit once, and your training partner is training to think he is losing if he gets hit. Someone hits you, you should hit back immediately. Once you hit someone, hit them again and again. This unfortunate “playing tag” practice is all too common, and in some places is actually a “rule” of chi sau. It is definitely a very common rule in sparring. This is not the way to train to fight.

Circling your arms around in Poon Sau is futile. You aren’t driving a bus. They must have forward energy, changing from effective tan sau, bong sau and fook sau as they move, not nominal positions. Doing nothing but light chi sau will never work either – some must be heavy, to build muscles, reflexes, and, especially in beginners, sensitivity. Light chi sau of course has its uses, but correct heavy chi sau (not strength, not muscular power, but heavy due to correct waist, correct position, correct technique and good forward energy) is vital step in the process of learning to fight and win.

People aren’t scared or angry in training. Your opponent isn’t really trying to hurt you. You are not really trying to hurt them. People don’t hate you in training either, and this is a very important factor.

The best solution to this is the challenge match, which is illegal, and to my mind not ethical to expect people to participate in, in the modern world. Instead, the way we must deal with this is by conditioned response. Your mammalian brain takes over, and you hit your opponent by reflex as soon as he moves.

The first factor that you have to deal with is that this person wants to hurt or kill you. This is where most people freeze. It is a terrible thing to realize someone dislikes you that much. But the truth is that isn’t what the other guy is thinking at all – we just take it personally. Forget what he is thinking and just respond the way you are trained, by reflex. If everything goes well, you will hit him.

Now you have to finish him off.

Being a decent human being means that we don’t want to – but you must. Over the years I have known many martial artists who let their opponent get up, who then beat them up because fear made them ruthless and desperate. I have known several body guards and a number of really ruthless fighters and they all say the same thing, virtually word for word in every case – “you have to really f**k them up right away”. If you have trained hard and correctly, you will automatically follow and strike very hard several more times before you have to think about it, thus negating the problem.

The next thing you feel is elation. You feel good that you succeeded, that your training worked, that you aren’t hurt. There is nothing wrong with this. Many decent people suffer guilt at this, thinking that they thought they were better people than that – that this elation is the kind of thing that “bad guys” feel. Not true. It is OK to feel good at success. However, some people become junkies for this feeling – this isn’t healthy at all.

Usually the next thing is guilt. You can feel nauseous if you have really hurt him, and remorse. That’s OK too. It doesn’t make you less of a human being or less of a man or fighter. It is normal human compassion. Don’t wallow in it, but don’t worry about it either.

Another form of guilt is where we don’t act when we needed to – we sat there and didn’t defend ourselves, or defend others. Our pride suffers, as does our self-esteem, and all our doubts return. That’s OK, too, especially if you didn’t get hurt. Learn by it. We tell ourselves that we should have hit them, that they needed hitting – but that isn’t the point of training in martial arts. Punishing bad guys isn’t what we are about, but about surviving the fight. If the fight can be avoided, what do you care what they think? They waived their rights to have an opinion when they tried to fight you. If your friends think less of you, they should think about what they would have done – and why didn’t they do it, if they thought it was so important?

Fighting is the loneliest thing in the world. You are on your own, and even those standing next to you probably won’t respond in time to help – it takes tens of seconds to appreciate a situation, but only fractions of one second for a situation to occur. It isn’t their fault if they didn’t help either – the fight was over before they could respond. Their biochemistry and training couldn’t gear up to the rate that the fight is operating on.

You cannot be proud of winning a fight – you didn’t invent this system. You can take pride in the fact that you trained hard enough to use it, but maybe your opponent wasn’t up to your standard. Or you might have been lucky. Similarly, you can’t be ashamed that you lost the fight or didn’t use your training. The incident occurred before you had enough correct training. That was the luck of the draw. (The picture is where my friend the recently deceased Wu Chun Nam is winning vs. Northern Praying Mantis practitioner, in 1961)

All you can do is train some more, so it won’t happen again.

Key Points:

Some key ideas for training these mindsets are these:

1. Always do full and hard punches at full extension of the arm. This will mean you will hit hard as you can every time. If you do not punch hard in training you will never punch hard in a fight.

2. Always follow through, with follow up techniques as well as always moving through the enemy rather than to him. If you don’t do this in training, you will not do it in a fight.

3. Always chi sau remembering it is training and not about winning.

a. If you are never being hit, and always beating your partner, you are not training, you are not learning anything. Learn to handicap yourself by going slower or weaker or training at a disadvantage, so you learn to progress even when you have no one more advanced to train with.

b. Stop when something works, and get your partner to try it on you. Train until he can use it on you. Find a solution and both train it so it doesn’t work anymore on either of you. This way you both progress.

c. Remember that just because it works in Chi Sau doesn’t mean it is good. It has to work in a fight.

d. Remember to follow up strikes, not just hit once.

e. Control your enemy and win.

f. Remember to not give up just because you got hit once. You don’t want to do that in a fight.

4. Always punch the bag as hard as you can. If you don’t, you will not learn to hit hard in a fight and knock the guy down.

5. Other useful training methods to give ourselves the stubbornness not continue and not give up are:

a. doing long Siu Lim Tao forms,

b. training no matter how sick or injured,

c. training to or even past exhaustion, at least periodically.

These ideas give us the will to continue and never surrender. It is an unfortunate truth that people who play at training will never get this.

We cannot control the world in which we live, but we can control ourselves, and respond according to our understanding of the world in which we live.

Most of the illustrations are stolen from the internet.