Verbal Self-Defense Practice, Part 1
Your Mind and Life are Sacred Territory—Trespassers Will Be Punished
DISCLAIMER: the following shall not be construed in any way as professional psychological advice, nor shall any statement contained herein be construed in any way as promoting reckless behavior.
The Truth about Violence
When I was very young, I told my teachers that I wanted to be a “peace warrior” when I grew up—growing up in a terminally progressive environment, my interest in warriorhood was seen as “problematic”. I was told that people who want peace never fight. For whatever reason (could it be mass hypnosis?), there are a lot of people out there who either can’t or won’t acknowledge that there’s a massive difference between offensive versus defensive violence.
The purpose of defensive violence is to neutralize another violent person—this should be common sense. Neutralizing an aggressor, in fact, reduces the amount of violence that might otherwise occur. When faced with an attacker, are you supposed to brew some tea and sit down to have a chat with them? What if they go on to hurt other people because no one cares to stop them?
If you ask me, it takes a predatory mindset to insist that others not learn how to defend themselves—or be deprived of the tools necessary to defend themselves. There shouldn’t even be a debate about this. If someone wants to disarm you, it means they’re either bloody naive or they simply hate you—it’s gotta be one or the other.
In any event, this article is going to be about psychological violence, rather than physical violence. Psychological violence can be broadly defined as any attempt—whether “successful” or otherwise—to destabilize your mind or relationships through the use of deliberately weaponized communication. Psychological violence is not honest disagreement, criticism given in good faith, or clumsy communication.
Think about it this way: let’s say your friend tries to give you a hug, but accidentally knocks your beverage out of your hand. Obviously, this is not an act of physical violence—it’s an honest mistake. The same principle applies with psychological violence—someone may accidentally hurt your feelings by the way they speak to you, but that doesn’t mean they meant you any harm.
Unfortunately, casual psychological violence permeates modern communication—social media, and the entertainment and educational sectors are particularly to blame for our disrespectful, modern mass “culture”. Today, we’re going to learn how to punch back (verbally!) at someone who attacks or disrespects you—there are essentially two components to this:
Recognizing attacks when they happen
Responding effectively
The core skill you need for responding effectively to attacks is to know how to stay calm and balanced in the midst of battle. For this reason, I highly recommend reading Hypnosis Practice: Rapid Relaxation as a prerequisite for learning the material in this article. The better you are at keeping calm, the better you will be in a fight—verbal or otherwise.
Your goal is to learn how to neutralize aggression so that you can move on with your day. It’s really that simple. Your mind, your relationships, and your affairs are sacred territory, and trespassers are going to learn that you’re not someone to be messed with.
(The following material might not apply if you’re dealing with abuse in an intimate setting. We will deal with that subject in future posts.)
Prep Work
The fact of the matter is, if you stand for anything in this world, you will be faced with detractors and trolls.
Your first line of defense is to be a decent human being. In martial arts, having good posture gives you the foundation you need to throw a good punch or kick; being of sound mind and character is the psychological equivalent to having good posture.
Do your best to treat others kindly, seek truth honestly, and live as gracefully as you can. Let the drama junkies eat themselves—no doubt, there are a lot of people who earn money and followers by making a spectacle of themselves and stirring up drama. But any “success” derived from that kind of behavior is ephemeral at best. Mark my words, your dignity is worth more than all of the riches of the world combined. (“Influencer” culture is the death of true culture anyways—it’s making the world a more retarded and aggressive place.)
It also helps if you have a good sense of humor. Someone who is kind-but-firm, who doesn’t take shit from others and who can make the room laugh is practically invincible.
How to Know When You’re Under Attack
It can be easy to mistake an honest disagreement for an attack. The key difference between someone disagreeing with you (or giving you honest criticism) versus someone attacking is you whether or not they have approached you in bad faith.
In other words, what is their goal in talking to you? Are they trying to have an honest conversation, or are they simply here to insult you? It’s entirely possible that they feel under attack because they misheard something you said, and are responding to their own imagination rather than anything you factually said.
Either way, your winning strategy here is to ask them plainly where they’re coming from. The question, “what do you mean by___?” is very useful for this. If they refuse to give you a straight answer to that question, then you may very well be dealing with a bad faith actor.
Some people may struggle to answer you coherently—it’s possible that they don’t fully understand where they’re coming from, or that they’re just not very bright—but a good faith actor will at least make an honest attempt to answer the question.
In person, it’s much easier to tell where someone is coming from, because you can hear their voice and see their face (usually). Online, it’s much trickier to know what you’re dealing with. Either way, you don’t want onlookers to think you’re cruel or unhinged, so asking for clarification is almost always a winning move, even if you’re 99% sure you’re dealing with a bad faith actor.
EXAMPLE: Once I saw an interview with Robert Downy Jr in which the interviewer kept bringing up his past drug use. After a few questions, he simply asked the interviewer, “I thought we were going to talk about my movie? Isn’t that what we’re here to do?” The interviewer replied, “oh yes of course that’s what this is about” but then continued to bring up Robert’s past drug use—causing Robert to get up and leave the interview.
Had he simply gotten offended and stormed off, then he might have come across as sensitive and/or weak; but because he gave the interviewer the opportunity to clarify his intentions, he exposed the interviewer for being a bad faith actor. You could even see cameramen shaking their heads in disapproval at the interviewer for screwing up the interview. To onlookers, it was clear who was in the wrong.
The Basic ‘Why’ and ‘How’ of Psychological Violence
Now, people who attack you verbally are trying to:
Discredit you, and/or
Get under your skin
It’s always one or both. In order to do this, there are two kinds of attack:
Direct—this is when someone insults you out in the open. In other words, they make no effort to hide their intention. The strategy here is simple: just respond to the insult.
Indirect—this is when someone insults you in such a way as to be able to claim plausible deniability. The strategy here sometimes requires that you conversationally lead them to betray their intention, after which you proceed to respond to the insult. The “what do you mean?” question usually does wonders in this situation.
An assailant may come at you individually, or they may be part of a group. If they’re acting as part of a group, then there’s a high likelihood that they are being paid to attack you (or people like you). Paid trolls tend to be unoriginal and lazy—with a handful of notable exceptions. Either way, the tactics you use will be very similar. If you have the balls to stand up for anything that’s valuable and worthwhile in this world, consider it a compliment when trolls show up to your doorstep, ready to make themselves available for target practice…
Different Ways to Win
If you’re having an argument with someone who’s arguing with you in good faith, then the way to “win” is simply to also engage with them in good faith back. Sometimes people who disagree with you have something valuable to share, or they’re trying to fix a problem in their own life—your goal here is to genuinely look for the value that they’re trying to provide to you or to themselves and help them achieve their goal.
In the case of a bad faith actor, “winning” usually happens when you expose their bad intentions and make yourself look better than them. It may sound a bit childish, but that’s the bottom line—our mammalian limbic systems don’t care about much else than that. Once open hostility has been established, you want to deal a decisive blow against them within one or two replies. How do you know you’ve done this?
If the person you’re talking to becomes unhinged then that’s one way to know you’ve landed a good hit—as far as 99% of onlookers are concerned, the winner is the one who retains their confidence and poise. When a verbal battle takes place in public, more often than not you’ve won if you merely keep your center. Once the other guy loses it, then the crowd will usually side with you (unless you’re in hostile territory, in which case the winning move is to simply not give a shit).
If the other person retreats, then this could also indicate that you’ve won, but it could also mean that something else took their attention away from you. Either you’ve won, or it’s a stalemate—it depends on the situation.
Whether a crowd is present to observe the fight or not, you want to practice the kind of maneuvers that would win a crowd either way—that way, you’ll be ready for the fights that truly matter.
How to Lose
Most street fights are over very quickly. For all practical purposes, verbal fights work the same way. You want to establish the upper hand and end things quickly—it’s not a good look to stick around and keep bickering, because it suggests to onlookers that you got “got”.
As the saying goes, “if you argue with an idiot, they’ll drag you down to their level, where they’ll beat you with experience”. The only people who are worthy of the effort it takes to get to the heart of any matter are those who argue in good faith. When it comes to bad faith actors, you just want to deliver a verbal killshot or two and move on with your day.
Losing a verbal battle is more about energy than it is about “words”. The most brilliant, witty retort in the world may fall flat if your overall energy is defensive. That said, if you don’t offer at least one response, that can also appear like a loss to onlookers as well. You want to a) stay centered, b) be able to respond and c) be measured in your response.
If you find yourself in hostile territory, it may well be impossible to win the crowd no matter what you do—in those cases, the best (and maybe only) option is simply to not care. Not caring can be a superpower in the right context.
How to Practice Fighting Back
In Martial Arts training, we do drills until we’ve ingrained effective responses in our muscle memory. The same holds true when learning how to fight verbally. Instead of practicing kicks and punches, you’re going to practice reframing and effective mockery.
Just like in Martial Arts, you’re going to need practice partners.
But where does one find a practice partner? Indeed, you don’t want to piss off your friends. If you practice trading insults with a good friend, you might accidentally hit a sore spot and lose him as a friend. When you practice physical combat, it’s easy to see where not to hit—with verbal battles, it’s much harder to know where the “no go” zones are located. For these reasons I don’t recommend honing your verbal jousting skills with people you want to keep as friends.
Instead, you’re going to create anonymous social media accounts (aka burner accounts) and use them to train how yourself how to fight verbally. IMPORTANT: don’t make a lifestyle out of getting into fights online. You’re one and only purpose for doing this is to learn certain skills, so you have them available for when it matters. Sadly, a lot of people online are trolls and lowlives looking for a fight—you might as well use that fact to your advantage and turn them into your “training partner”.
People are willing to say the nastiest stuff from behind an anonymous avatar, which means that your average “in person” verbal fight will actually be tamer (at least in terms of literal content) than your average internet battle.
Anonymous online battles, all things considered, are probably the safest environments where you can learn how to stay calm and respond effectively.
Make sure your burner account is NOT traceable to you. Only do this on forums or social media sites that don’t require you to provide your phone number or any other identifying information. Also, don’t link your burner account to an email address that you use in your real life—create a new one. You want complete and total separation between your burner account and the rest of your life.
I can’t stress this enough: your goal is NOT to add more negativity to the world—instead, you’re learning how to respond to negativity when it’s directed at you. By learning how to defend yourself, you will reduce the overall level of violence and negativity in the world. THAT is why you’re doing this.
To end up in a fight online is easy: all you have to do is disagree with someone about something. Like a bull before a red flag, many people will start retaliating if you tell them you think something they said, did, or believe is wrong in some way. Hell, you could just tell someone that their favorite band sucks. BAM—you got yourself a verbal jousting partner!
At the end of the day, the best way to learn how to fight is to fight.
With that said, stay tuned for part 2, where we’ll get into some specific linguistic maneuvers that, if used correctly, will demoralize and/or frighten your assailants to the point where it’s unlikely they’ll ever bother you again. Or, alternatively, they’ll lose control and make a spectacle of themselves.
Either way, it will be a win for you.
ADDENDUM: almost forgot to mention something… don’t ever try to ruin someone’s day unless they tried to ruin yours first. Disagreeing with people online is not a means to start fights with innocent people—you’re not even there to start fights per se, you’re just making yourself available for a fight. Before you even resort to fighting, first go out of your way to resolve the conflict—you want to be certain that your jousting partner is truly deserving of your aggression. You don’t want to pick on anyone who doesn’t deserve it.
In any event, more details on how to do this ethically and effectively will be revealed in part 2. Stay tuned!