Understanding Survival
Updated: Dec 12, 2019
Recently, there have been a few different memes and discussion threads that have stirred up lots of feelings, so I figured that maybe I should add my perspective, too.
Any behavior, response, tools, skill or lack thereof that helps a human to survive a threatening situation should never be judged. Any action a person uses to protect themselves should be honored.
Learning new behaviors, responses, tools, or skills is not to say “you should have....” “could have....” or if you “had....” things would have been better. For one, there is no way to know that. Second, there is no way to test that. And third, wanting to learn new things is about creating a better future, not a judgment of our past.
The goal of practicing new things is to make them ours. Maybe a technique was something we knew but forgot. Maybe there was something that didn’t work in the past but might now. Maybe there are new things that we never thought about doing.
All good.
Whatever happened in the past, if you are here today, healing, learning, struggling and surviving, you've done what you needed to do to survive. No one has the right to judge that or take that success away from you.
There will never be a perfect self-defense system that works appropriately in all situations, and certainly not one that works for every different individual. A good system teaches you how to trust yourself and sharpen your emotional, physical, and verbal skills.
And in the case of Empowerment Self-Defense, tools are designed and based on the most basic of human rights.
We, in ESD, focus on Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: "Everyone has the right to life, liberty, and security of person."
How they choose to “secure their person” is their choice.
Now if we could only spend more time getting more people, especially those with power to really make this declaration worth something....
[sigh]
A girl can dream though, right?
