Most self-defense and martial arts instructors avoid the emotions altogether. Others limit their focus on a gross over-simplification of emotional response during an attack situation. But, beyond being scared or angry, what role do the emotions play in handling a potentially deadly situation?

Did you ever wonder about that?

Aside from being reactions to the moment-to-moment occurances as we go through our days, what role do your emotions play. For most of us, it’s kind of like your blood type. Apart from knowing what it is so we don’t get the wrong type if we need to have a transfusion, it just like emotions are just things that we “have” and have no control over.

In reality, your emotions are actually tied to our body’s own natural, human, defense system. It’s true. Your body is already hard-wired for self-defense from birth.

The thing is that, our sophisticated brains, socialization, and cultural, academic, and familial education has almost made us completely clueless that we have these abilities and functions.

So, what is the function of your emotions, and how can they help us in our defense? Good question.

It’s not the focus of this article to go into all of the inner workings of your human brain. Let’s just start with some very simple responses to stimuli from the world around us.

You see, everything that we’re exposed to, causes a feeling, or response at a base, primitive level. This happens without us being conscious of it, and also happens below the level of what we normally call our emotions.

These base “feelings” or responses can be generally identified as feelings of:

• Attraction - we’re drawn to it
• Aversion - we don’t like it, or…
• Apathy - we don’t care either way

Don’t confuse these primitive feelings with higher, more complicated emotional moods like:

• Love
• Hate, and…
• Ignorance

They are much simpler and tied not to the higher brain functions, but actually come from your primitive “reptilian” brain – also known as the R-complex – the part of your brain that’s primarily concerned with self-preservation activities like eating, procreating, and not-dying.

“Why,” you may ask, “do I want to know all this scientific mumbo-jumbo? All I want to do is pick up some moves to protect myself?”

And I would answer, “you don’t have to learn anything.”

Not if you just want to learn those “moves” and then hope that you’ll be able to use them in a real combat situation.

Here’s the thing. When you’re training in your martial arts or self-defense class, you’re in a differnt state – pumped up, happy, having a good time. Yes?

Looking at the base feelings I described a minute ago, that would mean you were in “attraction” mode, where you like what you’re doing and want more of it. The activity – the training – it feels good and, while perhaps difficult at times, probably not very threatening or dangerous at all.

Now, it doesn’t matter if you’ve ever been in a real fight, or ever been attacked by an enraged individual out for blood, I’m sure you can imagine what that must be like. You can almost see his eyes and the intense look on his face. Add to that, the pressure and intention he’s projecting and the smell of him – we can’t forget the smell and feel of him as he moves in on you.

Are you still in “attraction” mode? I bet not. And you’re not even in the real attack. You’re just thinking about it and you’re having an “aversion” response.

How do you think you’re going to feel actually being in the heat of the moment?

Right. Very different than in class or your own personal training sessions where there is no real danger.

If you get the idea of the role and great value that your emotions play in keeping you safe. And, if you learn what role they play in spearheading your body’s natural defense mechanisms, then you can also train to tap into their power and use them as tools for your own protection.

Realizing this will also allow you to tailor and adapt your actual training methods to accomodate, acknowledge, and use your emotions as the valuable tools they are.

Remember, any monkey can learn the moves, but a true expert – a true master – takes advantage of things that most individuals don’t even know about, or don’t know exist. So, do you have to study and use your emotions in your self-defense training? No.

But then, you don’t “have” to breath either. But I’d highly recommend it!

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