I recently had a run-in with someone experiencing a mental health crisis who was also armed and intended to carry out an act of violence; and I have struggled with deciding how to talk about this. I do not believe that everyone who reads this blog should go out and attempt the same thing if a situation were to arise, but I wish to illustrate how important de-escalation is and why it should be one of the main focuses of any sort of self-defense curriculum. Self-defense should be about more than meting out violence when we feel threatened.

I’ve changed some names and details in this story in an attempt to maintain people’s anonymity and to condense the experience into a shorter version of events.

A while back I was in the middle of a fight camp, preparing for an upcoming muay thai fight in Chicago, and had been at the gym from around 4:30 pm to 9 pm. On my way home, I decided to stop by the store to pick up sugar free popsicles (the only treat I could have during a weight cut). While I was there, I heard a man shouting obscenities at someone in a nearby aisle. He stomped past my aisle and toward the back of the store where he dumped a cart full of canned goods that store employees were working out of.

The man, who was white, began to hurl curses and racial slurs at the black employees who had been working out of that cart. He was attempting to goad them into a fight, and as he continued his verbal abuse, more employees began to gather around him. I decided to intervene.

However, despite having just left the gym where I had been preparing to fight, my thoughts were far from a physical altercation. Instead, my thoughts went to my career as a special education teacher.

I am in my fifth year of teaching special education now and it has made a huge impact on my life. It has changed how I teach, it has changed how I parent, and it has changed how I interact with and view the world around me. For the first 3 ½ years, I worked exclusively with students who had a history of violent and aggressive behavior. During that time, I have been: punched, kicked, head-butted, stabbed, scratched, choked, spit on, and have been attacked with objects ranging from chairs and tables down to batteries and pencils. It can be… a lot sometimes. But I have always managed to de-escalate these situations.

Because it can be a lot, teachers like myself were trained in a system called ProAct, Professional Assault Crisis Training. The focus of ProAct – despite being a system designed to keep someone safe during an assault – is actually on de-escalation. In ProAct, using any sort of physical restraint is a very last resort; it instead focuses on avoiding triggers that cause distress, using crisis communication, and evading attacks.

So as I approached this man in the grocery store – still wearing my grappling shorts and my gym hoodie over my rashguard – my thoughts were far from fighting and were instead on de-escalation. Using the same calming voice I use with my students, I stepped in between the man and the incredibly calm employee he was berating and said something along the lines of, “Hey, buddy. It’s not worth it. Let’s get out of here.”

He agreed with a slur and stomped off. I checked with the employee to make sure everything was ok, and decided to go find the man again, as I fully believed he was experiencing a mental health crisis. When I found him again, he stopped and talked to me. I could smell the alcohol on his breath and he wasn’t making the most sense. I asked if he needed a ride or for me to call someone for him or to go get food somewhere. He talked to me for a minute, gave me his name, but then rushed off toward the back of the store once more, leaving me behind.

I eventually found him again. He had located another black man (who was shopping with his wife) to harass. He was once again using slurs and swears in an attempt to goad the man into fighting him. I called out to him by name, and asked if he still needed a ride, despite him never accepting one in the first place. He said he did, so I left the store with him.

He wanted to stop by his vehicle to retrieve something, and once he was at his vehicle, he decided he wanted to drive himself, but we ended up talking for two hours in that parking lot instead. He expressed his very racist beliefs and his desire to get rid of certain groups of people. As he spoke he became agitated and would begin to escalate himself. I would use “grounding” techniques to bring him back to the present and calm him back down. This happened cyclically around a dozen times while we spoke.

He was suicidal. He wanted to die. But he also revealed to me that he had intended to go into that grocery store and get in a fight with a black man so he could start shooting before he killed himself or before police showed up and killed him. It wasn’t until that moment that I realized he was armed and that at any of those instances in which he had escalated himself, he could have changed his mind and gone back in the store.

Instead, we got him calmed down and back to his home.

I could not help but reflect on this experience for days and weeks after. I still think of it frequently. It would have been so easy for any of the individuals he harassed in the store to take a swing at him. And while he would have deserved to get punched, it could have ended in death, potentially for anyone nearby.

As someone who spends an above average amount of time training to fight other people, it would have been easy for me to believe I should physically intervene in the situation as well. We see blogs and news stories all the time about various Jiu-Jitsu students or fighters controlling altercations in real life scenarios and we tend to hold those up as a standard of how to react to violence: with more violence.

But that’s the crux of the problem. Meeting violence with more violence is not always the best path forward when it comes to interpersonal conflicts. Instead, de-escalation should be implemented whenever possible. Not just for our safety, but for the safety of others; and frankly, even the safety of those who are the aggressors.

Without my training from my time as a special education teacher, I never would have known what a mental health crisis truly looked like. I would not have known that this person really needed a listening ear and not the fight he was craving. While I believe fighting and being able to physically defend oneself is extremely important, I also believe that the world should not be viewed through the lens of violence.

To a hammer, everything looks like a nail; to a fighter, everything looks like a challenge. If we are ever to build safe communities in which we truly care for one another, we need to have more tools in our belt than just a hammer.