Originally Posted by
MeatPuppet
For several years I was an assistant instructor at a large kung fu school. We would periodically have women come in who had been raped, mugged, or been victims of domestic violence.
You have to have a pseudo realistic attack if you ever want to learn how to shut down a real attacker, so some of the drills we did got pretty rough. We were always very conscientious when first introducing these women to the more physical drills, as they were prone to flash backs.
You could tell immediatly when when the drill was getting to them; they would begin to lose coordination, their movements were less fluid, tension began to creep into their body. If the drill were allowed to continue, they would have been in danger of a full blown emotional hijacking.
We never let it get to that point. Whenever I saw the first signs of distress I would stop the drill and ask them if they wanted to take a break. Many times the first thing they would say is "why?". In the first stages of a panic attack, the person is normally unaware of what is happening with their emotions. Their consious mind is slowly being pushed out of the drivers seat and the trauma induced reaction patterns are taking over. As the weeks and (sadly sometimes) months went by, you could see them slowly become more aware of their own emotions and begin to retrain themselves so that, eventually, those reaction patterns would remain burried and not something they would have to constantly fight.
We, as a society, are just beginning to retrain ourselves. We went through a traumatic event. The civil rights movement was good and necessary and we are better for it. But our challenge now is to learn to tell the difference between a racist issue and an issue involveing race. Far too many times we see a picture, or hear a joke, that has a racial component(it might even contain a racial stereotype) and our knee jerk reaction is to start flameing the person for being a racist. At one time, in our recent past, that was healthy. It no longer is.
We will be far healthier(and richer), as a society, when we learn to treat racial issues more intelligently and stop letting the trauma-induced reaction patterns from out past dictate our behavior. That's not to say we shouldn't react strongly to real racism when we run across it, we should. But we have to be able to tell the difference between what is and is not racism. Right now, we are having a difficult time doing that.[/diatribe]