The Art of Avoidance in Conflict (Violence)

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“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” - Viktor E. Frankl 

In my efforts to better understand the art of self-fense I came across, actually my wife quoted a terse version to me, this quote that really does speak to how we can achieve avoidance and deescalation in a conflict whether it involves violence or not. It is that one microsecond act we learn to apply that spans the void in the process of stimulus-trigger-response (tape or sub-routine or function). 

We are all on autopilot, automatically responding in a knee jerk way, where such tapes are triggered and before our human conscious logical brain/mind can intervene triggers the ‘click-n-whirr’ response. This is getting harder and harder to circumvent because of the increasing deluge of stimulus modern society is putting the human brain up against making it harder and harder to not depend exclusively on such automatic stimulus-trigger-no space/void-response. 

In such situations we have to train ourselves to have a higher level of importance on a new train primal conditioned response that will trigger a microsecond before the more automated unconscious triggers. In short, we need to trigger the ‘stimulus (that is the trigger for this trained trigger)-trigger the higher level before allowing the originally triggered trigger-trained primal conditioned response’ that allows us the microsecond moment to stop the inappropriate so that we can take actions to avoid and/or deescalate. 

In essence this is a last resort thing because if we train adequately and appropriately our awareness will see, hear, and feel such stimulus before they trigger the response and then we can consciously stop the triggering so that we may implement a strategy and tactics to achieve avoidance and deescalation according to the situational-stimulus-trigger-response of a primal conditioned response achieved, taped, and encoded into procedural memory. 

This, now that we have achieved a state of understanding all we have to do now is find a way to train, practice, experience and apply the primal conditioned response of awareness that will allow us to make use of the space, that void, between stimulus-trigger and response, to apply avoidance and/or deescalation. 

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“In order for any life to matter, we all have to matter.” - Marcus Luttrell, Navy Seal (ret)