If she was running towards you looking like this, you'd run away too..

Hi mates! The following was sent to me recently and, although it is short, shows that Situational Awareness means more than just watching out for yourself. It could also mean being able to come to the aid of another woman.

As with most cases, and particularly this one, the criminal wasn’t some Lex Luther crime genius, but rather a dumb opportunist who thought he could attack a woman while she was with her child because that made her an easy target…. He obviously wasn’t counting on her receiving assistance from a passerby!  

“Hey Terry, here is a story a woman told when I attended a local PD RAD course.  She was in the parking lot of the local Mall and witnessed an attack on a mother putting her child into her car.  This woman lost it, took off her shoes and ran toward the car, screaming, then threw her shoes at the guy.  He ran off, but due to her awareness she was able to give the police a description and he was arrested a short time later at the fast food joint where he worked. The putz had his uniform on during the attack.  If they could all be so stupid!”

If you ever face a similar situation and find yourself in a position to come to another woman’s aid, make as much rucus as possible on the way in – but dial 911 as you do. You can always begin giving information to dispatch in regards to your location, etc. if he doesn’t flee immediately.

Plus it means you are looking right at the guy as you give his description. You would not believe how tough it is to be accurate in your post event description of someone, especially with your adrenalin pumping!  

Of course, in this case, giving an eye witness run down about the attacker was nice and easy as he was wearing his work uniform…beautiful! 

As a Mother, you could be at particular risk for attack due to your propensity to focus your attention on your children, rather than your surroundings. You are highly unlikely to be attacked inside a store or a mall. But once you leave the high traffic area inherent in those locations and begin your trip to the parking lot, you are much more at risk.

Look UP! Look AROUND!

If anything seems wrong or out of place go back inside! You are most at risk on the fringes of populated areas caught in a sort of no-mans land between the store and your car. Now you should move your awareness level up into the High Yellow category and start thinking like a predator – where would you attack YOU?!

Think about it…

Keep the stories coming and even though you may never come to the aid of another woman in practical terms, you never know how many you might be helping by promoting awareness of the latest or oldest tactics used by criminals.

Cheers, Terry.

It was a bad day to be an empty bottle of detergent...

The following incident was sent in by a Situational Awareness Seminar Alumni who manages to single-handedly reiterate the importance of women being suitably well-armed.

In this particular case she was able to diffuse a potentially dangerous situation when some asshole thought it was okay to start threatening a woman – only he found out it isn’t okay very quickly!

This lady arrived at a four way stop; she had come to an actual stop and had the right of way when she turned right. The only other guy at the junction at the time didn’t stop at all, ran through the stop sign on the opposite side of the road and turned left behind her, his horn blaring the whole time. With hand gestures being thrown around left, right, and Chelsea, my seminar attendee did what she thought was right and pulled over to let him pass. Avoiding a confrontation with this guy, if he was that mad, was a good idea. 

 Unfortunately, she did the right thing in trying to let him pass, but he thought this would be an opportune moment to give her a piece of his mind.

Remember – she has done nothing wrong. Howevr, he jumped out of his car yelling at her, basically giving her every indication that he was madder than hell over some imagined infraction. He left his 7 year old child strapped into the car seat in his vehicle in order to accomplish this…parent of the year anyone?!  

Maybe his over blown sense of self-importance guided him to believe that all other vehicles should get the hell out of his way when he is on the road. I’m sure as he saw a woman driving a nice truck, he took it to mean he could do whatever he wanted.

I wonder if he would have jumped out of his car and been that aggressive if the driver of the other vehicle was a 6′6″ linebacker? I’m guessing probably not, but guys like him get really brave when it comes to threatening people he considers to be smaller or less able to defend themselves against this sort of aggression.

That was a mistake!!!

He was yelling at her all the way up to within a few feet of her truck, posturing and puffing his chest up. It deflated awfully quickly when he saw her place her .357 revolver on her dash board.

His hands immediately went up in the universal signal for surrender – maybe he has French ancestors…. And the situation was resolved. He trotted back to his car and went about his day.

As did my new hero.

I say this at every seminar I give; you can do everything right and nothing wrong, pay attention to your surroundings, not go out of your way to attract trouble, even do your best to avoid it completely, and it will still find you. Be prepared to be your own first responder. If there is a way to diffuse a potentially dangerous situation and escape, take it. But if you can’t be prepared to draw a line somewhere, and if that line is crossed then give ‘em hell!

In this case he wasn’t so angry that he was prepared to risk his life for the trouble. Which is why it is so important for a woman to very carefully review all assets she may have at her disposal and pick the one that works the best for her. In this case a gun worked wonders. In most cases it will diffuse things very quickly. If it doesn’t, well, it’s not an empty threat and the playing field is levelled. A 130lb woman can hold her own against a 6′ 4  nut job who thought it was OK to start threatening a woman.

It's all fun and games until someone loses an eye..

Nuff said!

Pass this along, ask your girfriends if anything similar has ever happened to them. If it has then write to me about it and we’ll include it here for all to learn from!

Cheers, Terry.

This is why I’ve decided to start posting a few of the stories sent to me from girls all over the country about how being “aware” and ‘Living in the Yellow” has kept them safe, or at least ahead of the competition! Hahaha.

Please, please, please keep sending me instances where you’ve pinged (noticed) something out of the norm and used your instincts to steer clear of the danger – I want your exposure to become a learning platform for all women everywhere.

Examples might be: seeing some guy loitering somewhere he shouldn’t be and paying undue attention to you or other women, a road rage instance involving a man threatening you, out on the town with friends and some guy was harrassing you, something that might have happened to you during college/high school, an ex-boyfriend who didn’t know how to accept it’s over, someone you noticed the last time you were out at the local park with your kids….and on and on the list probably goes!

I’d also like to hear about the things you didn’t ping, whether anything bad happened or not, so we can all learn from your experience. I will NOT post anything more about you than your story, first name and general city/state location (if you would prefer, you can remain anonymous). This platform for Situational Awareness is going to be a way to highlight different strategies employed by women everywhere to stay safe, and empowered – and your voice is important!

Ask your friends, your family members, your neighbors and your female co-workers about things that may have happened to them, and let’s get them down in electronic script for all to read!

The first posting in this series will be next Monday morning – in the meantime, if it was weird, strange, scary, funny, exciting, or anything you think other women can benefit from hearing, send it to me and we’ll get it up here, ASAP!!

Cheers, Terry.

Hello mates! After Monday’s Blog I’ve had a few girls comment on the fact they don’t think they could ever suffer through the sorts of injuries we were talking about. I beg to differ!

Aren’t you girls the ones that somehow manage to carry babies and then deliver them? I can tell you from personal experience my wife has a pain threshold that would make any man wince (except me of course, LOL!), and if you ladies are genetically tough enough to take that sort of punishment, you can handle anything.

 You just have to be sure to keep telling yourself you are so that you believe it in the event that it happens. Trust me, YOU are tough! 

We opened the door to something on Monday that bears some additional chit-chat: and it isn’t necessarily nice to think about, so I’d like you to brace yourself for what’s to come in this Blog.

I should say before we start that you aren’t any safer without this knowledge. So if you read this and start wishing you just never started, I understand your sentiments. While in the Commandos, I can remember the lectures about what we could expect to endure if we were ever captured by the enemy – it didn’t make me happy either.

But I can tell you what it did do… It made me realize that all of the prep work that we were expected to put into planning a military operation was there for a reason. Suddenly it wasn’t so much trouble to cross the T’s and dot the I’s.

Staying safe in the military is all about pre-planning, attention to detail and then staying flexible when it all unravels anyway.

You should view the following information in the same light. It’s not to make you so scared you feel like life’s not worth it, it’s to illuminate different possible scenarios so you are better able to plan contingencies around them.

Also, please keep in mind, that although for our purposes I have broken down sex offenders into the three basic categories as was originally defined by Dr. Nicholas Groth in 1979, there is a great deal of cross over involved in the way each of these offenders can and do often operate.

There are also a number of subcategories within each of these types as well. But in the interest of not making it overwhelming I’m sticking with the basics.

As I mentioned on Monday, if the guy who is robbing you seems a bit too calm, you might have a real problem. Yes, more of a problem than just being robbed.

In the broadest sense, there are three main types of rapists:

A – Anger

B – Power

C – Sadist

Why is this important to know, you might ask. Isn’t a rapist a rapist and whatever I do won’t matter?

NO! WHAT & HOW YOU ACT CAN BE EVERYTHING!

Firstly, we need to understand that of these three, the one you are most likely to encounter in a stranger attack is the anger rapist.

Anger rapists tend to use a significant amount of physical force when they subdue their victims—in most cases, far more force than is necessary to perpetrate the abuse. This often leaves victims severely battered and bruised on various areas of their bodies. Anger rapists also tend to be verbally abusive during their assaults—which are short in duration and very explosive in nature.

Anger rapists tend not to plan their specific offenses. Rather, they act impulsively to take advantage of situations that have presented themselves. Victim choice depends solely upon whom anger rapists see as vulnerable and available at the moment they decide they want to offend. Between 25% and 40% of known rapes are committed by men who are considered anger rapists.

http://www.csom.org/train/supervision/short/01_02_03.html

Center for Sex Offender Management – US Department of Justice

We should first take a moment to review this information. In light of the fact that the Anger rapist is the most likely to attack spontaneously, brought on by opportunity rather than clever planning, you are better able to realize when you might be at greater risk.

If you are alone and approached by a man, act first, act fast and, if necessary, apologize for your actions later.

He's not wearing this getup because of an allergy to sunlight. Hit first and ask questions later.

I’m not here to start giving you legal advice, that’s for your lawyer after the fact. But if you and your lawyer are chatting later over a nice cup of tea, that means you are alive and maybe that this heads up might have helped save your life.

It’s not that the Anger Rapist is necessarily looking to kill you. But the attack tends to be so violent and over the top that even if the physical injuries don’t kill you, psychologically you could be maimed to a degree that full mental recovery never happens.

Part of the lesson I teach in regards to Situational Awareness includes knowing the number to your local Victims Advocacy Group. Just because you have been made a victim once, doesn’t mean you should be made to feel like one again through callous mishandling of your case later.

Victims who contact and then go through the process of giving evidence to authorities with a representative of the Victims Group next to them, typically recover quicker than those that don’t.

Colonel Dave Grossman – Author, Speaker and Trainer, advocates post violent action debriefings with certified therapists for Law Enforcement Personnel for much the same reason.  He says,

“The likelihood of loss of life after a critical incident is greater than during the incident itself.” This is in part due to the enormous emotional strain of the encounter and an unwillingness to talk about what happened with the right people.

I would also like to state that “a callous” mishandling of your case might occur through no deliberate actions of the Law Enforcement Personnel at all.

Sometimes the very men and women who perform the duties of trying to keep these sorts of animals behind bars must distance themselves emotionally from the victims so they can keep doing it, day in and day out.

But when you are in what will be a very understandably heightened sense of vulnerability, anything other than the most caring of faces could be hard to handle.

Pre-planning to have this sort of information is not morbid, and the chances of this happening to you are very slim. But if it ever did, your long term mental health could be greatly improved by knowing this beforehand and being prepared.

I will carry on with more information about this topic on Friday, but as this is such a heavy thing to write, let alone read, I like to break it up into smaller chunks – for you and for me!!

Ignorance of the facts doesn’t make your life safer. It just means if anything bad ever does happen you stand less of a chance of ever fully recovering. And that isn’t fair to you, your friends, your family or your pet iguana, all of which expect you back, ASAP.

You are learning this for them.

Cheers, Terry.

I’m going to start out by answering a question I was emailed from Cindy in Colorado who asked,

“Why would a woman who is being robbed at knife point, or otherwise, suddenly change her mind about not handing over her valuables to the “bad guy”?

This is a great question – and once again sheds some light on our own attitudes towards what we think a bad guy should look like. A victim’s change of heart, in regards to handing over their valuables, is most likely the result of the guy not fitting the preconceived notion that SHE already had about him looking dangerous. 

Thinking clearly under pressure is all about bre..brea...breathing...OK, you can let go now...please..

Most of the time, bad guys do NOT fit our preconceived ideas about what a bad guy should look like!

They might even look relatively harmless. I know it may be tempting to say “screw you, kid”, when the guy demanding your jewelry looks like he’s 16 (& he might actually be 16), but unless you are supremely confident in your ability to handle the threat, and he isn’t after you personally, stick with your original plan – fighting is always a last resort and only when you life is in danger.

That’s because only when you are in fear for your life will the likely resulting injuries from defending yourself be worth the pain and suffering.

I’ve harked on about this before, and I’m more than happy to mention it again, breathing in deeply will help calm your brain down and help you think clearly.

Colonel Dave Grossman, an Army Ranger, West Point Graduate and author of several books on the psychology of combat calls the technique ‘combat breathing’.

I teach my Situational Awareness & Self-Defense students to breath at the first sign of trouble to help keep their minds clear. I learned to do this out of personal experience. I’ve been scared enough to have seemingly lost the ability to think clearly under extreme stress while serving in the Commandos - more than once!!

One of the first times this happened I was fortunate to have a salty old Sergeant looking over my shoulder telling me to,

“Calm the f*#@ down and start breathing.”

Honestly, I didn’t realize I’d stopped breathing!

In the sort of circumstances I’m referring to here for you, it will help serve two purposes:

1.        It will immediately start to help you control your anxiety level and the fight or flight response.

2.        It will aid your problem solving skills by allowing the parts of your brain that aren’t governed by 100,000 year old evolutionary ruling to begin functioning again.

3.        In this particular instance it also allows you to get a good whiff of your attacker. Drug addicts often have unusual body odor to go along with their already disheveled appearance.

4.        If you are calm enough to think clearly, then you can look for other physiological signs of drug addiction like pupil dilation, profuse sweating, or extreme agitation.

5.        If none of these signs are present and he’s too calm, then you could have some real problems.

We will get to number five in a moment.

If your robber looks like this, he probably isn't going to give chase for long.

One more thing about sticking with your original plan and handing over the items he’s after without causing more problems. When you pass the items over to him don’t hand them to him. Whichever item you think he’s going to value more, throw it a few feet past him so he has to go backwards (away from you) to collect it.

This is the ideal time to run in the opposite direction and create as much space between the two of you as possible.

Creating Space is The Golden Rule of Situational Awareness & Self-Defense!

The more space we have to work with, usually the better off we are.

The exception to this is during a robbery with a pistol that starts off at close quarters. Taking a firearm away from someone isn’t as physically challenging as one might expect, if you know and have practiced the technique. But this is one of those times where if you don’t have the skills beforehand, it’s best to let this one go by – now is not the time to begin acquiring the practice.

Cindy also wanted to know,  ”What if he stabs, shoots, or punches me anyway, even after I’ve handed over the items he’s after?  Then what was the point?”

“Surely it would be better to fight from the beginning?”

Hindsight is always 20/20!

I hate to point out the obvious, but bad guys do not think the same way rational law abiding citizens do. In most cases they are incredibly selfish, even borderline narcissists in some cases, with little or no empathy for anyone.

You might do everything I’ve suggested and still be stabbed, shot or beaten.

Creating space by throwing the item a short distance away from him might help achieve an extra second head start in running away. If he was holding a gun when you start running stay low, move as fast possible, and zigzag like a bird in flight.

It’s nearly impossible to shoot someone moving fast with a pistol. If he gives chase, there’s even less chance he can hit you, SO KEEP MOVING!

As for the question,

“What’s the point?” I can only say this, statistically speaking, you stand a much better chance of not being killed by complying than fighting. I didn’t say you wouldn’t get hurt.

Just because you might get shot or stabbed, doesn’t mean you will automatically die. There’s a better than 80% chance you’ll live no matter where you are shot on the body. That’s how good paramedics and doctors are these days!

If you are ever shot or stabbed – you are not allowed to die until I personally show up at the hospital and give you permission; face-to-face

There are untold cases of gang bangers, soldiers and police officers being shot and seriously wounded and surviving. You are made of the same flesh, blood and bone they are – the only difference is what goes on upstairs in the old noggin.

What you say to yourself mentally after being injured will play a much larger role in whether you survive than any other factor. Your body holds about a gallon and a half of blood. You can lose over a half gallon and still live.

SUCK IT UP. BE TOUGH. YOU WILL LIVE.

Thanks to Cindy for her question, and I will pick up with point number five from today for Wednesday’s Blog, as it also pertains to the sorts of attacker that prowl about out there. I will always try and answer questions sent in from readers first, as it usually means I need to expand on some area I’ve discussed in a previous Blog.

See you guys back here Wednesday for more on this topic. In the meantime, have a great couple of days and remember to keep ‘Living in the Yellow’!

Cheers, Terry.