Tougher. Stronger. A year of great violence …

“I’m not by nature a violent man,” I told Rosi. I have to admit, I wasn’t much in the mood, and my heart really wasn’t in it. Never-the-less, moments later my hands would be around her throat, strangling her.

But that was okay.

Welcome to my experience of 2017 … a year that has involved two very life changing experiences, both it would be easy to chalk up as “violent”, but have involved for me and for those I’ve shared it with a sense of liberation, empowerment and camaraderie.

Tougher

Anyone who has followed me for a while will know of my passion for mental health — in the run up to the New Zealand general election I feel I’ve mentioned this weekly.

This year I was invited by organiser Mike Dawes to get involved with the IT Heavy Hitters — it’s an event which aims to train people in IT to take part in a boxing match in May to raise funds for The Key To Life Trust, an organisation that advocates and supports mental health.

The boxing training was physically tough, but there were varieties of touch sparring and “going for real” in the ring. Sadly my first training fight was also pretty much my last, as I took a bad hit to the side of my head. But I stuck around for training until the last week — after all, my involvement ran deeper than just “wanting to get a fight”.

What was fascinating was our trainers philosophy — he wanted us to get hit, and experience it. As he explained, “you’re not as fragile as you think” … well, except for me. [You’d have thought someone who’d done as much rugby as me would have laughed it off, but sadly no]

We had a social media group that still does keep us connected. What fascinated me was how I saw particularly women in my group emboldened as the weeks went on.

Friday night would be spar night, and typically Saturday morning you’d have a few people posting “injury selfies”. A bruise here, a black eye there. But never with any complaint.

Typically it would be the women more than the men doing such posts. It was fascinating to watch them realise “I’m okay with this … I’m tougher than I think”. To so many women who’d grown up and had the idea of being a victim pushed down their throat, this was something you could tell was extremely liberating.

More than anything though, we found we shared stories for our involvement. Over half of us had strong motivations to be involved — those of us with mental health issues we were battling, those of us who’d lost friends to suicide.

Stronger

It can be funny how life can conspire — as one door closes, another opens. The same weekend I found out I’d not be able to continue to spar or have a hope of fighting for the IT Heavy Hitters, I found another outlet…

My son was moving to the UK, and looking at taking on bar work. His mother was somewhat concerned about him, and was keen that he take some bare minimum self-defence course. As luck would have it, the guy who runs the salad bar at my gym was running just such a course!

To look at him, he seems like the kind of heavily tattooed friend your grandparents warn you about associating with — but looks can be deceiving. Darren is himself a victim of domestic violence, having grown up in a household with a violent, dominant father and witnessing it’s effect on his mother.

He runs regular self-defence courses in the basics of Krav Maga — it’s open to men and women, but it’s particularly to benefit women. Indeed, he does it as a fundraiser for the Wellington Women’s Refuge.

The focus of Darren’s training is about staying safe first and foremost — evading being hit, breaking out of chokes, avoiding being stabbed.

But it’s all tempered with common sense — there is no fake bravado here. If someone has a knife and asks for your wallet, you give it to them first. If they leave you alone, just get out of there … but if they then tell you to get into a car, you’re in trouble.

Darren himself talks about being mugged in Canada, and doing the hero bit, ending up needing stitches in his head, “it cost me $300 to get treated for that … I only had $200 in my wallet”.

We drill and drill again the techniques. To start off we all were quite light with each other. But especially from some of the women in the group there was a concern “do these techniques really work?” as they eyed up members like me who were almost twice their height and more that in weight.

As we got to know each other, we trusted each other more, and we played harder too. One member, Frances, actually quite bluntly told me I was holding back too much and I needed to be more aggressive with her. Ironically, such feedback helped me more than her. I wasn’t really comfortable about attacking a woman, something which was so counter to how I’d been brought up. But feedback from everyone helped me to realise a) they were more resilient than I’d given them credit, b) they would tell me if I went too hard, and c) I was preparing them for a situation where the guy attacking them might not have the same qualms, so I owed it to them to practice as close to reality as possible.

Beyond the original workshop, we really bonded, and ended up forming our own Krav Maga group under Darren. We’ve drilled the techniques, and they really do work — petite members of our group like Neha could flip me over when I sat on her as easy as a giant like Ben. Often they use something like your bodyweight vs someone’s grip strength, or just putting someone off balance to make the difference between your weight and strength irrelevant.

Darren’s dream for the group was that everyone would feel a little more confident and a little less the victim. But not reckless.

Again to me, the difference in attitude was greater among women than men, and it echoed the boxing. Where in boxing I saw women become more confident how they were tougher than they thought, in Krav Maga I saw women become more confident in how they were stronger than they thought.

If I tried to strangle or choke Rosi, she could break my grip, and put me in a position in which I was vulnerable. If I tried to pin Neha to the floor, she could roll me over and punch me in the face (or worse). If I tried to put Frances in a headlock, she could break out, and even get me on the floor.

Of course the key question was this … why was there such a gulf in my observation of the reaction between men and women in both groups?

To be honest — both men and women seemed more empowered by what they learned. It’s just the women seemed to feel a greater sense of it.

Now maybe part of that is that women are more used to sharing stories about things like this and opening up.

But also social programming no doubt has a factor — men have the idea of themselves being strong and durable pushed into their head. When I was at school, if someone beat me up, I’d often be told “why did you let them hit you, you’re bigger than them?”. Indeed it’s something that comedian Robert Webb echoed in his recent book “How to not be a boy”.

On the other side, women are programmed to see themselves as vulnerable and victims. It’s part of the reason why the movie Wonder Woman was so well received earlier this year — we’ve had female action heroes before, but somehow Diana of Themyscira became a figurehead for a movement.

Men learning how to be vulnerable, women learning how to be tough. It’s all part of the normalisation of gender roles. Whether you’re male or female, such normalisation isn’t about taking anything away from you, it’s about releasing you from a cage …

You from around New Zealand? The following links might be helpful …

So you wanna be a boxer? IT Heavy Hitters will soon be recruiting for 2018, find out more here. Or find out more about the great work that The Key To Life Trust does here.

Want to unleash your inner superhero? Find out more about the NZSOS New Zealand School Of Self-Defence here. You can see what the Women’s Refuge we support does here.

Fight like a girl … the headline fight for Wellington IT Heavy Hitters 2017 was my friend Sialei Rhoades …