Induce Pain To Create An Opportunity To Escape To Safety

In many of my self-defense seminars and courses, I teach that the goal is not to win, but to get home safely. Escape to safety is a common theme regardless if I’m talking to a group of teachers in an Active Shooter Response class or a group of women about woman’s self-defense and rape prevention.

Obviously, escaping to safety isn’t always as easy as it is to say. There are times when you may need to use physical self-defense skills to create an opportunity to run toward safety. An important key to remember is to induce pain to create an opportunity to escape. In Kelly McCann’s book “Combatives For Street Survival: Hard-Core Countermeasures for High-Risk Situations” he calls this “Principle No. 5: Escape Through Pain-Induced Pathways.”

Often, if you create a sudden, sharp pain in your attacker, it results in an uncontrollable, instinctive reaction of some kind. For example, if someone grabs you and you strike the back of his hand hard and violently with a tactical pen, flashlight, or even your knuckles, he will probably snatch his hand back or release his grip. Naturally people have different pain thresholds, but if you create pain, you usually create a reaction. This reaction to pain creates opportunities, usually space, between you and your attacker. You can then exploit this this opportunity in different ways to support your escape.

The reaction and space between you may provide an opportunity to reassess the situation to determine your best course of action, or what needs to be done next. You may be able to simply escape at that moment. You might have to attack back to end the situation. Again, the key I want you to remember from this post is to induce pain to create the opportunities for those other options: escape or continued attack.

There are many ways to create pain, and the situation will dictate the appropriate level of pain needed. Learning the more pain sensitive parts of the body to strike arms you with locations to strike. One of my favorites is the throat, as it can be extremely painful to be struck there. (However, it is also a potentially lethal strike in that you can cause severe bodily injury or even death with it. Because of this, you must be justified in its use.) Besides striking, you can press into the little notch under the Adam’s apple with your thumb, finger, pen, baton, small flashlight, etc. and create pain in that manner.

When assaulted or attacked, induce pain in your attacker to create the opportunity and space to escape to safety.

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