…but if you're walking at the end, it's worth the effort.

David L. writes:

I have been an email subscriber for some time and have purchased one of your books.

Your guidance helped me avoid a potential social violent situation yesterday. I was in a restaurant eating lunch when another customer thought I was staring at him and his girlfriend. I overhead him make the comment that if "that mf'er doesn't stop looking at us, I'm gonna…" He was about twice as big as me, very muscular, tattooed and overall scary looking. I ignored his comments and went about reading my newspaper and thus a potential conflict was avoided. This could have easily escalated but I remembered your advice about avoiding violent situations if at all possible.

What troubles me is I feel like a wimp. Do you think I handled the situation the right way and what could I have done had he chosen to escalate the situation to a violent level?

David,

First off, I want to congratulate you on a job very well done. You successfully navigated and defused a sticky social situation that had the potential to get needlessly ugly. Everybody got to get on with their day. Nobody had to go to jail, the hospital, or the morgue.

In the social/antisocial realm, this is an absolute victory.

But it isn't easy, is it?

If it were easy, we wouldn't even have to talk about it. Hurting people is easy–it's everything else that's hard. Navigating that social fog, using empathy to suss out emotions, body language, voice and social skills to steer the situation into calmer waters. Whether it's talking your way out of trouble, ignoring it and disengaging, or simply getting out of there, that stuff's complicated. What if he's just having a bad day? Or, deep down, insecure?

On my worst days, it's a struggle to be patient and let the stupid stuff slide, especially when that other guy has earned my anger.

And then there's always ego.

What if I look weak? Is it really victory if I let him 'win'? And my answer is that anything that gets you on to the rest of your day, the rest of your life, is victory. In the social arena this means avoiding the avoidable… in violence this means hurting people.

Successfully avoiding the stupid social stuff doesn't always feel good. There's the whole ego-driven aspect of feeling like a wimp, or a coward. And really, the problem there is that killer ego. It's important to leave ego out of anything that could edge toward violence… otherwise it can be the thing that drags you over the line.

What we'd all want to do in your situation, at least in our heart-of-hearts, is face down that guy and tell him just where he could stuff it, give him the icy stare, make him afraid and then, if things got out of hand, beat the living daylights out of him in front of his woman. That would show him. And make a hell of a story to tell our friends, to boot.

I think we all know that's not how reality tends to work out.

You risk getting stabbed or shot to death, getting knocked down and brained on the concrete. At the very least you're going to be marked up and unnerved with loose teeth. Or, if we flip it, best case scenario gets you sued for medical expenses, worst case is prison for manslaughter.

And for what? Ego.

So much less hassle to just let it go, claim the moral victory and enjoy the rest of your uncomplicated day.

Everyone I know who's made a serious study of violence, of taking the human body apart, of stomping people into the ground so they can't get back up, all those people will literally go out of their way to avoid the avoidable.

In terms of ego, I will admit that this is made far more palatable by coming as a choice, instead of feeling like it's your only option. In other words, it's a lot easier to let a jerk have his way if you know what to do on the other side of that. Knowing how to hurt people allows you to graciously accept the luxury of choice.

If you're feeling bad about it because you didn't feel it was a choice, but rather the only thing you could do, I recommend you train to give yourself other options, if only to take the ego out of the equation, to divorce yourself from the idea that:

social threat –> aggression –> violence

is an unavoidable, everyday chain of events. And then I recommend you keep on keepin' on, just like you did, successfully avoiding the avoidable.

Daily victories like that earn you the same thing as hurting people in life-or-death situations: it gets you out of a sticky patch and into the rest of your life.

Keep up the great work!

Chris Ranck-Buhr
 TFT Master Instructor

PS. As for what to do if the situation had escalated, there's always getting the hell out of there. Again, much easier to do when it's a choice. If it got to him doing violence to you, the only answer, unfortunately, is to hurt him (that's why we have self defense classes & DVDs).

It's also why we go out of our way to let the stupid stuff slide. Once you cross that line, there's only one answer, and it ain't pretty, and no one's going to be happy when we're done.

PPS. Lastly, I've been in restaurants where the seating and lack of decor is such that every time you look up, you're staring right into the face of another customer. And since repeatedly looking at someone can be construed as aggression, this can lead to situations like yours.

I remember a story from a guy I trained with long ago, from when he was traveling in Thailand. This guy was a no-nonsense, get-straight-to-it kind of guy, and if it looked like violence, he'd be the first to get at it.

He was sitting in this cafe and every time he looked up, this tough-looking ex-pat was staring right at him. He tried to let it go, but after several minutes of this he figured if it was on, he was going to get it done first. So he pushed back from the table and got up to go after the guy–and noticed that there was a TV above his head with the sound off. The guy was just watching TV.

He sat back down and finished his meal in chagrined silence. Ever since that moment he always took the extra second, when given the choice, to be sure the threat was real before hurting people. And he always felt that it cut down dramatically on the number of bad situations he ended up in.

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