Self Defense and Sympathy Do Not Mix

Personal Defense Connection
3 min readJul 31, 2022

Like Oil and Water, self defense and sympathy do not mix

If you are forced to defend yourself against a predator, you must not feel any sympathy for them…

Many of us, as children, were taught to not hit others. And when it comes to social skills, that’s a good thing. Now that we’re grown up, many of us choose to follow the social norms. We choose to be nice to others.

Social niceties will not help you

We like to think that the things that keep us from behaving like a thug (like social norms, decency, tolerance or even just the threat of consequences) are inside all people.

We like to think that if we just appeal to that sense of social norms and decency, we’ll be able to stop their violent attack.

But if we are violently attacked, we have to throw those social norms out the window. Social niceties will not help you.

You can’t reason with violent attackers.

“To you and me, the idea of being targeted for victimization is very personal and life altering. But to the violent predator, you are an object to be moved out of the way to get his need met. He has spent a lifetime rationalizing his actions, and you are simply the means to an end.” ~Bill Oliver: Forensic Psychiatric Technician.

You need to understand this about thugs and predators: They don’t care. They don’t care about right or wrong. They don’t care about you. They don’t care what you say. They have no moral code.

Your social nature may make you think that talking to the attacker will make him care. But you’ll be wasting valuable time that you could use to take action so you can get away.

Predators do not follow social norms. They are mentally prepared to do violence. They will use any means to get what they want. They don’t care if you get hurt or killed.

They have no compassion for the elderly, the young, the disabled, the weak… they have no compassion for anyone. None. They only understand violence.

They are brutal and vicious and don’t care about what is socially acceptable. They don’t care about social rules. And they won’t be talked out of attacking you.

Once an attacker has made the decision to assault you, trying to reason with them won’t work. That’s when you’ll have to fight back. And you’ll have to answer his violence with violence of your own.

Give yourself permission to be violent

To be able to effectively defend yourself against a violent attack, any sensitivity you may have about becoming violent toward a human being must be suppressed. Don’t be squeamish about injuring your attacker in order to save yourself.

If you are attacked, fight back. Become the attacker. Defend yourself.

Related Post: Beware Bad Advice -Tactics Edition

~Shereen

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Personal Defense Connection

Self Defense, Threat Awareness, Defensive Mindset, Firearms. I want to help people learn how to be safer. It's that simple. (PDC is on Tumblr)