Over the years, I’ve always appreciated the simplicity and clarity of practicing martial arts. When you enter the dojang, you enter a microcosm of the real world where all the racism, sexism, wealth and health inequities, etc. get left at the door. You practice and learn in an environment where there is mutual respect between yourself, your instructor, other students and the collective reality of the dojang. You are able to explore and connect with your mind and body, learning to better understand and manage conflict.
What you come to understand is that your response to conflict sits on a spectrum of possible behaviors ranging from the best defense is to not be there, all the way over to you can kill someone with a single strike. As you move across the spectrum you learn to: diffuse by communicating nonverbally; diffuse by communicating verbally; move and avoid; avoid and redirect the attacker’s momentum; redirect and apply a lock; use a body part to block, absorbing the attacker’s momentum; block and strike with the intent to stun or disable; block and counter with the intent to injure; or finally block and counter with the intent to kill, eliminating the threat permanently. You learn to apply these techniques to multiple attackers potentially mixing in weapons if available. As you become more skilled, you learn that to minimize the damage you are doing, you only want to respond to the level required to control the situation. It is just as easy to stun and disable a threat as it is to injure or kill, so why would you ever choose the more destructive behavior and all its consequences?
Day-to-day most of the threats we encounter are not physical but buried in the stream of information that is coming at us. As such, it is fairly easy to see that the vast majority of our conflicts can be managed through communication rather than escalating to physical conflict. Breaking it down a bit, a reasonable spectrum of behavior available for verbal and nonverbal communication would be: avoid, diffuse, discuss, instruct, debate, argue, use their words to divert, ignore, block, shock, intimidate, hurt, punish, undercut and terminate. Similar to physical conflict you only want to respond to the level required to manage the situation and we need to take into account the emotions playing out on both sides. The further across the spectrum we go, the greater the threat and the more our emotions tend to override our logic and reason.
As you learn to manage the spectrum of behaviors available, you come to understand that learning to fight better is not really what you are trying to accomplish. The reality is that you want to build capacity that enables you to overcome your fear, manage threats and not fight at all. Martial arts have stood the test of time, existing through centuries of political systems and cultures, coming back to a very simple view of first protect yourself, then your family and then those who cannot protect themselves. Maybe a bit of a dad thing, but it really resonates with me, and from the dad perspective, I’d flip it to protecting family first.
Translating the lessons learned in the dojang out into the real world and applying a physical, personal and collective reality (PPCR) lens, we see that conflicts generally occur at the boundaries between our realities. We need to understand that as a conflict escalates and manifests in physical reality, we eventually come up against a soft boundary of safety and a hard boundary of survival. The closer we get to a boundary the greater the threat and as we push up against a boundary, we trigger behavior to assess and manage the threat.
Threat assessment and threat management are instinctive behaviors that we need if we expect to spend any amount of time on the planet. Threat assessment comes down to understanding what is on the other side of the boundary and what is a reasonable expectation about its future behavior. Threat management comes down to understanding the spectrum of behaviors in our different realities that we can trigger with a reasonable expectation of the effect they will have on the conflict.
What gets complicated for us is handling our emotions. Fear is the big kahuna, driving fight versus flight. It is effectively our Spidey sense, alerting us to danger where we should be paying more attention. We need to manage our fear of the unknown, being wrong, failing or being judged if we want to learn effectively. Chronic fear, anxiety and traumatic stress can be disabling mental health issues. As a martial artist you refine fear into a sixth sense, where situations and subtle combinations of sensory information raise our awareness beyond that of a normal person. The problem with fear is when it overwhelms us, limiting the options we have available to manage the situation. Education, planning and training build the capacity to manage our emotions and enable more effective behavior.
While fear is a key component of our survival, love and compassion, a good heart, are key components of our ability to connect with others, enabling collective behaviors that we also need to survive and thrive. It’s easy to see that the love between a mother and a child spreads to partners, families, communities, religions, countries and groups in general. Love holds humanity together in spite of all the destructive behaviors we find ourselves choosing. I think we made it through the Cold War because, as Sting writes, “I hope the Russians love their children too.” Similar to fear, letting love overwhelm us may not get the results we want. Working with addiction we learn that “tough love” is a necessary tool, and if we want strong relationships we need to embrace the idea that “if you love someone set them free.”
Along with fear and love as primary drivers of our behavior, anger, potentially triggering rage, makes us dangerous but predictable which is actually a weakness when we are fighting. Anger often gets triggered when our expectations don’t match reality, whether it’s physical, personal or collective. Once our anger or rage is triggered, the adrenalin kicks in and our subconscious tends to take over control of our behavior, often leaving logic and reason behind. Sometimes anger is our best option but we want it pointed in the appropriate direction. We want to focus it where it will most effectively modify the behavior that is triggering our anger. Letting our anger bleed beyond the offending source just wastes time and energy and can create unnecessary damage.
When we learn how to manage our anger we also find that it’s a great way to learn about ourselves. Our anger makes it pretty clear what are our buttons, which more often than not, point to our insecurities and issues that probably could use some work. Along with exposing our buttons, anger also makes it quite clear how well we understand our realities. Knowing that our anger is often triggered by blown expectations, we can use our anger to show us what we haven’t learned about our realities that is resulting in our current situation. We want to understand, model and predict what is going to happen next, enabling us to set up more effective expectations and better navigation. Rather than blaming other realities for our anger, we find ourselves taking responsibility for our anger and asking “What did we miss?” With the huge volume of mixed information coming at us, we can’t possibly see everything coming, but how often we find ourselves getting angry or simply surprised, kind of lets us know how we are doing.
Learning to manage our anger and emotions in general, enables us to objectively look at ourselves as a unique personal reality with connections to physical, other personal and many collective realities. If we can get past the fear, it helps to examine the belief system that we have personally created as we have journeyed through life. A great exercise to do this, is to find a quiet place and effectively checkout for a while ditching all your beliefs and connections as best you can. Attempt to disconnect from your personal relations, family, work, religion, culture, politics, etc. and then try to drop all the beliefs, morals and ethics associated with these connections. Once you have stripped down as far as possible then build back only what makes sense, objectively evaluating each belief and connection. As you experience and learn more about your realities, you find that you can strip down even further and what makes sense becomes even clearer as you build back each time. If you have not tried the exercise it is surprisingly effective.
Being able to observe and manage our beliefs and emotions in our personal reality gives extensive insights into the behavior that we can expect on the other side of a conflict boundary. We can construct a model of the personal realities and their part in the collective realities on the other side of a conflict boundary and add them to the model that we are operating on in our personal reality. How well we model makes a significant difference in how effectively we are able to manage the conflict. Are the emotions at play overriding logic and reason? What is our understanding of the background, the experiences and the thinking going on? How well do we understand the belief systems at play? Ultimately we want to be able to understand and explain why the behaviors we are attempting to manage are being exhibited. The model we construct will always be incomplete and if we add in prejudice, judgement, fantasy, or simply don’t care, we understand even less.
When we look at conflicts with or between collective groups, we need to understand the collective reality and dynamics of the group and read the collective emotions of the group. Whether it’s an angry person or an angry mob, logic and reason are probably not our best option for threat management. Having participated in a riot at one point when I was younger, it was kind of stunning to effectively wakeup to tearing a turn signal light fixture out of a city bus. I experienced my brain shifting from being an engaged member of the rioting crowd and its violent boundaries, back to my personal reality where vandalism is effectively the same as stealing and definitely not acceptable. The stark lesson learned is that when members join a group they generally operate inside the collective boundaries of the group which align more with the personal beliefs, emotions and boundaries of its founders and leaders. How engaged members are in the group, drives how much their behavior is coming from their personal reality versus acting as an agent of the group’s collective reality.
Unfortunately, with all the judgement and emotion being communicated along with the behaviors coming at us, it is difficult at best, to dispassionately model and analyze the individual and collective behaviors, boundaries and intentions associated with a conflict. Being a reality based belief system, PPCR helps sort things out. Embracing our personal reality, we understand that our only direct means to interact with physical reality is through control of our body’s behavior, which brings our sense-of-self into a rather sharp focus.
It is clear that we each exist in our personal reality constructed in our brain, but from a collective perspective we also exist encoded in the neurons of the brains of the individuals and groups where we are connected. Effectively we have a personal identity based in our personal reality and we also have a public identity based in our connected realities. One we can reasonably control and the other not so much. First impressions, social status, connections, beliefs, money, power, etc. all play to our public identity but often are disconnected from our personal reality. Similar to our anger pointing out our insecurities and issues, the level of focus we place on our public identity, specifically our persona, image and quest for money, fame and notoriety, is often pointing to areas where we are overcompensating and could benefit from some work on ourselves. Inversely, the harder someone is coming at us the more we want to learn about their realities. We need to understand why we are seeing the behavior we are experiencing. Are they attempting to exploit or manipulate, or are they simply acting out attempting to deal with their own issues. The more we understand the better we can set expectations and respond effectively.
As we respond, if we are being honest with ourselves, we don’t actually control our thinking but more set a direction, attempting to navigate our realities. Our memory and the belief system that we have built is based on our experiences, direct and indirect, and what we have learned and understand as a result. We can consciously direct ourselves toward new experiences, learning and training ourselves to handle things better. Other individuals and groups can push their experiences and information into their associated neurons in our brain but at best they are influencing our navigation and certainly not controlling our thinking.
Understanding that we can’t directly control thinking, our own or others, we can however, influence and manage the experiences and information that is flowing into our brain as well as others. This places limits, good or bad, on what can be learned and potentially incorporated into our and other’s belief systems, potentially changing future behavior. Once we get past the imminent physical threat of a conflict, what matters most is what was learned and how it will affect future behavior. The rub is that our brains function by finding the neural solution pattern, our intuition, that best matches our situation. In other words people do not make the decision to do the wrong thing. This means that in a conflict either side is doing the right thing from their perspective, or at least what benefits them or others most. Unfortunately if we think we’re doing the right thing, we’re not necessarily that interested in learning or changing our future behavior and more interested in changing future behavior on the other side of the conflict boundary.
Right or wrong from whatever perspective, individually we have the ability to say, do and learn whatever we want. If we find ourselves in conflict with another person or group we can deal directly with the conflict boundary and manage the consequences. When we are a member of a group, while we generally benefit from the group’s behavior, we individually don’t have direct control over how the group manages its conflicts. We often find ourselves supporting the group’s beliefs and boundaries driven more by emotion, rather than logic and reason in our personal reality. Sometimes coming to grips with what we are doing as an agent of the group can be a tough pill to swallow. As we learn more it may become harder to simply accept the boundaries that come with membership in the group and we have to do more to deal with it.
Deconstructing conflict like we have in this post, we see that when we translate the lessons learned in the dojang out into our realities, if we find ourselves being driven by emotion and we are fighting, or even arguing, we probably are not navigating very effectively. Managing conflict requires either a change in belief and behavior or at least an agreement to behave cooperatively requiring tolerance, respect and trust to move forward. Agreeing to disagree, or simply ignoring, allows us to move forward but if there has not been a change in belief and behavior, the conflict is not resolved and will potentially return in the future. We can’t control thinking and attempting to put boundaries on what is acceptable behavior can only influence future behavior. Ultimately, learning with a resulting change in beliefs is required to actually resolve, rather than simply manage conflicts.
So what does this all really mean? I would say that conflicts are the result of the behavior of the billions of personal and collective realities all playing out in our shared physical reality. The conflicts are experienced as stress potentially causing us to learn both personally and collectively. Effectively, we are evolving both personally and collectively, not through gene mutations but through learned memory patterns encoded in neurons of the brains generating the billions of personal and collective realities that exist in the world. Information technology is enhancing our ability to learn and our knowledge is growing exponentially. As a result our belief systems are evolving as we learn. Much of the divisiveness we are experiencing in the world, whether it’s about where we are going or whether we should change at all, is the result of our learning both personally and collectively. The question we each have to ask ourselves is “What is our part in the evolution of our realities?”
Unfortunately a large portion of humanity isn’t even in the game, effectively unaware of their part in their realities. Simply understanding the existence of physical, personal and collective realities and then building an understanding of how they work, is a necessary place to start. In future posts we’ll explore and hopefully provide insights into collective realities of families, business, politics, governments and religions, as well as into systemic problems like racism, sexism, classism, wealth and health inequities, social disparities, mental health, the pandemic, climate change and gun violence. Hopefully understanding these issues from the perspective of PPCR will provide relevant information to help figure out what your future behaviors will be and what is your part in the evolution of our realities.
As always, I hope that I have left you thinking and questioning. Please leave your comments and feedback on our Connect page where you can also sign up to receive notifications when future posts are available. Lastly, if this all makes sense to you, please endorse the PPCR perspective and invite your friends, family and connected realities to follow this blog and take part in the conversation.
Carpe Diem