From ten-year-old girls to eighty-year-old women, we hear the exact same feedback about our classes: “I feel more confident.” I know these comments aren’t just about our self-defense classes at We Are Safer Together. Our colleagues all over the world hear the same thing from participants in Africa, Latin America, Europe, and Canada.
Beyond Preventing Assault
It’s not just hearsay or some fluke, the research into women’s empowerment self-defense (ESD) programs shows this training:
Empowers women in ways that go far beyond preventing assault. ESD training decreases women’s fear and anxiety and increases their confidence, their sense of self-efficacy, and their self-esteem. Learning self-defense helps women feel stronger and more confident in their bodies. Women report more comfortable and empowered interactions with strangers, acquaintances, and intimates, both in situations that seem dangerous and those that do not. ESD training can be healing to survivors of sexual violence. ESD classes also contribute to social change by transforming gendered ideologies and practices. (Jocelyn Hollander, PHD)
Moving from Fear to Confidence
After teaching people various forms of Empowerment Self-Defense for over ten years, I know this work transforms fear into confidence. Participants sign up for a class or take one through work expecting to learn how to knee someone where it hurts. And yes, they do learn that, but they also learn empowering tools like using their voice to set boundaries, assertive communication, self-assured body language, and how to ask for help.
The core training of ESD is Think, Yell, Run, Fight, Tell:
- Think: Assess what’s going on. Think about your choices.
- Yell: Yell NO! Ask for a bystander to help. Set a boundary.
- Run: Escape if at all possible.
- Fight: Strike them in a vulnerable place, and strike hard enough to hurt them so you can get away.
- Tell: Tell someone what happened. That could be your best friend or the authorities. A huge aspect of healing is telling the story of what happened.
Teaches to the Spectrum of Violence
How exactly does this training build confidence in women and girls? I think it’s because few of us are ever taught how to protect ourselves from violence or anything else along the spectrum of violence. Violence isn’t just physical attack. Violence includes emotional manipulation and abuse, gaslighting, identity-related aggressions, systemic racism and sexism, homophobia and anti-trans attitudes, bias and stereotyping, bullying, sexual harassment, and so many more dehumanizing behaviors.
Many of us go through our lives keeping ourselves safe by keeping quiet. By putting up with it. By smiling and nodding while we seethe inside. By starving our bodies or eating our emotions. By letting the emotions out only when we’re alone. By fawning and appeasing. By numbing and dissociating. By taking our anger out on someone else.
All of these are well-honed survival mechanisms. We have done a good job keeping ourselves safe. But these are learned survival techniques, ones that we adapted over time based on how society told us to behave and how we were punished if we stepped out of line. Let’s congratulate ourselves on being so good at keeping ourselves safe.
Also know we were born with even more tools to keep safe. Human beings assigned female at birth cannot be the only living thing on this planet who are not inherently able to protect themselves with natural defenses. Just as roses have thorns and kittens have claws, we have the ability to fight, to yell, to think, and to escape danger. We just need to be reminded that we can be as sharp as thorns and fierce as kittens, and as strong as we need to be.
Confidence and Safety Go Hand-in-Hand
Safety and confidence are intertwined. It can be very difficult to move through the world with confidence if you’re in survival mode. Some people may not have had the privilege of feeling fully safe. Their bodies are ever vigilant for the constant identity-based aggressions, systemic biases, and interpersonal attacks. We find that learning physical self-defense can even help you feel more confident in handling these types of violences. When you know how to fight, that you are worth fighting for, that’s when the confidence kicks in. Suddenly, you know what to do, what to say, and you feel more confident in saying, “No!”
Self-defense and assertive boundary setting are life skills that should be taught in age-appropriate ways at several points in our lives. Imagine how confident, how self-assured, and how safe youth, women, and seniors would be if they had the tools to avoid, prevent, and interrupt violence of all kinds throughout their lives?
If you want to feel more confident and transform fear into empowerment, sign up for a class and claim your power.
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