Different Types of Fights

Tuesday, March 10th, 2009

Rory Miller (Meditations on Violence) describes three different types of fights:

The dominance display sometimes goes to a fight. Not usually, unless you let your ego get involved. I call that one the Monkey Dance and it is common, predictable and seemingly genetically imprinted to be safe. On the rare occassions someone dies in a Monkey Dance it is by falling and hitting their head.

There’s also a display of solidarity, the Group Monkey Dance. There are two levels of this. Both suck, but one can be brutal and pitiless beyond what too many people are ready to accept in their comfortable, safe worlds. The high level GMD is the one type of attack that scares me most, because it is the one that I have least experience dealing with and the one that I have trouble even imagining a high percentage response. I know two strategies to survive them, I’ve used one of those… but I have no evidence that my survival had more to do with what I did than it had to do with what the bad guys didn’t do.

The third is the Predatory Assault. This is the one I think of when I am writing about survival and self defense. This is the one that I plan and train for. [...] The person attacked has to be trained for immediate action regardless of the nature of the attack. What kind of immediate action? It really doesn’t matter. Turning and running could work. I’m partially to irimi. One guy I knew could reliably kick the knee from almost any position. Palm heel to the face is good. But it must be immediate, must bypass the cognitive process.

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