ONE fact about real world self-defense is that it cannot be undertaken risk-free, and frankly it is just about certain that in a truly dangerous encounter with one or more determined aggressors you will surely be hurt. Many schools of martial art apparently fill students’ heads with notions of invincibility, and fail to equip them for the realities of anything goes personal combat.   We prefer to get all of our cards out on the table, as it were.

Yes . . . we can and do teach the finest and most reliable methods of interpersonal mayhem (“self-defense” if you prefer) and if you become expert in our methods you will absolutely stand an excellent chance -- probably better than 95% -- of successfully stopping a violent attacker from injuring you badly, or from doing the same to someone you need to protect. But some injury is just about inevitable. If an attacker comes at you with a knife, he has the advantage. Do everything right and you stand a good chance of surviving and dropping the attacker; but if you escape without so much as a minor cut or a stab wound somewhere on your body -- requiring at least some out-patient care, and a dose of antibiotics -- then you can chalk the outcome up to LUCK. Excellent as our training is, we make no claims for its being miraculous!

The wise student of self-defense and close combat expects to get hurt. Illusions of being some kind of superhero or “unstoppable warrior” must never be allowed to cloud a student’s mind. No matter how expert you are, no matter how strong you are, no matter what excellent level of agility and fitness you may enjoy . . . serious individual combat will almost certainly result in injury to yourself, should you ever be so unfortunate as to find yourself immersed in it.

So here’s the big question: “Are you mentally conditioned for the reality of being hurt, when and if you undertake to defend yourself?" More: “Are you working at conditioning yourself so that your immediate reaction to being hurt in an encounter is one that actually enhances your chance of survival and victory?”

There are two things that such conditioning requires:

• The acceptance of the fact -- at gut level -- that engaging in close combat is risky, regardless of what you know, how competent you are in your skills, and how long you have been training. Therefore, the idea that you will be hurt during an encounter, while not a welcome thought, is nonetheless an accepted idea. You’re reconciled to it. You simply do not expect things to be any different, and you are undeterred by this knowledge in any dangerous predicament. With this settled and finalized in your psyche, you will be uninhibited about carrying out the most essential thing for your success, survival, and victory: i.e. Taking the war to the enemy and destroying him.
  
• Being conditioned so that your immediate reaction and response to experiencing injury and its attendant pain is a KILLING RAGE. Like a lion or tiger or cape buffalo or other jungle creature whom Nature has programmed to become more dangerous when injured than it was prior to being hurt, your injury kicks you into a fanatical, aggressive, frenzy! You might not think so at first, but you can achieve this mindset. In fact you probably already have -- but not in regard to human combat. Ever stub your toe, bang your shin on a piece of furniture or hit your hand accidentally with a hammer? If so you more than likely became enraged. Pretty silly, but nevertheless true. Injured by insentient matter and you cursed, and perhaps even kicked, smashed, or broke something. Humans who hurt you, perhaps, have caused you mixed feelings. Possibly fear, confusion, wondering what to do; hesitating to do anything for fear of legal repercussions, and control of your rising desire to strike back, etc. This is what’s gotta GO. Your injury must become the instant tripwire that sets you into a killing frenzy reminiscent of that of a Great White!
  

You can do this if you work on it and at it in training! A quality teacher who knows what he’s about will help you greatly . . . but failing to have the good fortune of finding a qualified teacher, make up your mind to do this for yourself. While jungle beasts and other dangerous animals are programmed by Nature to be this way (for their survival) you will need to program yourself this way. And it is for your survival.

Violent offenders are extremely dangerous. The shock, fear, or momentary disbelief that your being hurt can cause, will likely be the only opening your adversary needs to do whatever he wishes to you -- and it won’t be pleasant. On the other hand, if your reaction to being hurt is explosive rage and the ferocity and ruthless disregard for your enemy that this easily makes possible, then -- short of administering a knockout blow or lethal injury -- your assailant will almost certainly be triggering his own destruction when he hurts you. And that’s the way it should be.

You want to react to your injury and pain in any dangerous encounter by:

• Exploding with maniacal rage. In fact you turn into a murderous,  wild animal
  
• Hatred -- cultivated by studying violent crimes and violent criminals and coming to resent their existence. Repeating and repeating and repeating to yourself as you study these monsters that they are in fact subhuman s––t and that they do not deserve to exist
  
• Indignation. This comes from appreciating your own worth as a decent human being and resenting the idea that anyone might attempt to harm you or yours, and violate you in any way. You are not a violent offender, so how dare these scum intrude upon your normal life with their evil!
  
• A desire to destroy. You want to damage and drop your adversary. He is no damn good, he is a monster, he does not deserve any consideration as a human being, and you will not give him any. This filthy and substandard excuse for a “human being” must be stopped by whatever means you have at your disposal -- right now! To hell with the f––ing bastard! Your life and well being are more important by far than his!
  
• An attitude of ruthless disregard for your enemy. No one who attacks another person without justification (i.e. acting in self-defense) deserves any consideration whatever. So give him none. Unleash full fury and keep on attacking and attacking and attacking and attacking until your foe is harmless and you are safe.

Your attitude and mind-setting resembles, in this regard, that of not only a wild animal, but also of one of man’s most intelligent and highly trained best friends: the guard or protection dog. There have been cases where these marvelous protectors have absorbed five and six bullets, and kept right on coming until the enemy was destroyed! An intelligent, well-trained dog who is normally friendly and loving possesses the ability to shift into an attitude of terrifying, totally focused, unrestrained aggression . . . and to savage whomever he must in order to defend himself, his master, and home and hearth! We all can learn a lot from these great animals.

And that’s our message:
Be a realist. There are no supermen or unbeatable warriors. We are all human and we are all subject to injury. We must be conditioned to become as great, as severe, as instantaneous, and as dangerous a threat to any extralegal vermin who undertake to prey upon us, as a jungle cat. And we must expect to get hurt, and be conditioned ahead of time to react to being hurt exactly as the most dangerous wild animals on the planet react.

One day you may owe your life to having absorbed this lesson.

FAILING to avoid trouble the next best action is to preempt it. That is, ATTACK THE ATTACKER! which we first formulated as our basic strategy in American Combato in the early 1970’s, for anyone seeking self-defense instruction and training for the real world. OK . . . attack the attacker. Simply and plainly put, and easy to understand. The problem lies in the doing. That is, confronted by an obvious threat that will not go away and that you realize must be defended against ––– the sooner the better ––– the big question is: WILL YOU?

For the typically decent individual it can be a tremendously difficult thing to “trip the wire” and take offensive action in self-defense. Nevertheless it must be done, and if you aspire to be able to handle real world dangerous violence you must learn to do it.

Merely learning reliable attacks and attack combinations will not guarantee that you will employ them without hesitation if they are needed. This concept applies to weapons and unarmed combat. There have been people whose skills and in some instances whose armament was quite adequate to deal with a dangerous threat; but because these people were not sufficiently attack minded their potential for effective management of their crisis proved to be of no use. So how can you be assured that, should the worst happen, you will go into aggressive, ferocious, preemptive action? There is only one way: You require a made up mind, and a decision that is settled within you regarding what you will do if it ever happens “for real”. 

“If I am placed in a dangerous situation where violence against me or those I love presents itself, then I am going to render that threat harmless. I will attack and keep on attacking until my enemy has lost the will and the capacity to cause me or mine any harm.”

Read that above statement a few times. “Feel” its meaning. Get with it. That is what must become your inviolate decision, made well ahead of time ––– right now, in fact! ––– so that there is no need to argue with yourself, equivocate, hesitate, consider, or otherwise delay a millisecond in a real situation.

This is not a trivial point. Virtually no instructors that we ever had (save three) ever addressed this point ––– and they did so indirectly. We believe that it should be brought out clearly and deliberately, stated firmly, and PUSHED to the Nth degree in mentally conditioning our students. It is too vital to be left to chance.

We are confident that our teachings ––– in person, and via such medium as DVDs and CD publications, etc.  ––– go to essentially good people who have no evil desire to harm anyone, but who merely wish to have a high level of competency in self-defense. Our understanding of such people (whom we have been teaching for well over 50 years) is that their essential decency and reasonable lifestyle makes for a possible mental block against violently harming another human being. That’s simply got to go. When a crisis strikes you cannot see “another human being”, but instead must realize that this scum before you will happily beat you, stab you, shoot you, stomp you, or do whatever its deplorable excuse for a “mind” enjoins it to do. It is not fully human, it is not at all civilized, and when it decided to be a predator it gave up any rights to being treated with anything but ruthless disregard and brutality. NOW GIVE IT WHAT IT DESERVES AND DO NOT LET YOURSELF OR ANYONE YOU LOVE BE VICTIMIZED BY THIS CRAWLING EXCREMENT!

These are the things that should be pounded again and again and again into your head by a qualified teacher, or ––– if you either train in a less-than-fully-adequate combat system, or on your own with DVD and book instruction ––– by you, yourself!

Your goal is simple, legal, honorable, moral, and by any rational standard, reasonable: It is to be 100% prepared to dish out the most fiercely merciless brutality when one or more extralegal pieces of s–––t decide that you or someone you love will be their next victim. You want to be prepared always, during your normal daily activities of work, school, recreation, family time, whatever, to turn into a vicious warrior ––– a merciless savage who is capable of meeting the worst and most dangerous violent garbage that may come at him from amongst the dregs of the society in which he lives.

We hope that you get this message. In those cases where intended victims of violence exploded with fierce action and the will to destroy their victimizers, they did just fine! The sewage does not expect that its intended prey will be able to offer much if any resistance. Otherwise, the sewage would look for another person to attack. So, thank God you will have the advantage of surprise, which as any military tactician knows is more than half the battle won, if the appropriate use is made of that advantage. Please . . . for your sake and for the sake of anyone dear to you, take this to heart.

Decide. Decide now and decide with all of your heart, soul, and mind, that if you ever find yourself (possibly, if you ever again find yourself ––– because we know that former victims of violence are among those who come to us for training) in a situation where scum has intruded upon your existence and threatens to maim or to kill you, it will be you who makes that vital first, preemptive move ––– and you will crush that evil bastard like a used paper cup! You can do it. Just make up your mind that you WILL do it.

Check 'em out! We have recently added:

1) A page that discusses the benefits of Guided Chaos for senior citizens, and
2) A Recommended Products page with shopping links to a variety of recommended self-defense books, tools and training gear. 

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