It took me years to comprehend the impact my firearms training had affected me. When I was in my 20’s, I never gave it a second thought. The things you grow up with, whether they are “normal” or not are normal to you if they are simply a part of your life. Another example of this was the programmed larceny that I was exposed to. My father used to say “If you steal something, steal something big – the penalty is the same either way, so you might as well make it worth the risk”. For years, even after I had started down the path of recognizing the world of lack these thoughts forced me into, I would find myself subconsciously casing stores when I walked in. Again, it’s not that I needed anything, I had enough. But in my mind, woven into the fabric of my sense of self was this concept of never having enough. When I was younger, I would get a serious endorphin rush when I would successfully steal something. There was a certain pride in being smart enough to plan, execute and exploit the weaknesses I saw in systems. These were the best moments for me, as the brief dopamine rush made me feel, even if just for a few moments, on top of the world.
When I first found myself on the firing range in boot camp, the weapon in my hands felt natural. Pulling the trigger and hitting my target was also a brain pleaser, as I was good at it. Each year, you have to re-qualify on your service weapon, which for me was the M16A1. This is the thing that separates the Marines from the other services – everyone is a basic rifleman. As a musician, I served with plenty of Marines that had been serving for over a decade – and several had purple hearts in their row of ribbons and medals on thor uniforms. A purple heart means that you’ve been wounded in combat, something you wouldn’t expect to happen to a musician. But again, even if you’re in the rear with the gear, you can still find yourself fired upon, and musicians would put their instrument down and pick up their rifle to defend themselves.
This was not something I had even considered when I took my oath, but it is something that became very real to me once I was serving. While the oath talks about protecting and defending (things I am and always have been very comfortable with), it doesn’t necessarily imply that you may find yourself pointing a loaded weapon at another human being with the intent to take a life. Again, none of this occurred to me at the time, but all had a deep impact on me regardless. You see, everything in the Marine Corps is about breaking things and taking lives. The concept of the military is built around this basic idea, and I thought that as a musician I would be insulated from this. I was wrong.
Fast forward, and I’ve now been back in civilian life for about a decade when I opened the first Quantum Martial Arts in 1995. I learned how to build a wall by tearing one apart, memorizing how the inside of the wall looked, taking measurements of the components and making a plan for building a new wall to separate the dojo from the restaurant. There was an accompanying feeling of anxiety that haunted me during these early attempts at remodeling that showed up in uncomfortable dreams. They always had the same theme, either vaguely getting in trouble for tearing something apart that didn’t belong to me, or getting stuck rebuilding it because I couldn’t remember the order to put it back together again. I had others around me who had done this kind of work before, and we had received the landlord’s blessing to make any and all changes – but still the anxiety was pervasive.
For many years, I saw my anxiety as being caused by stressful situations. On its face, this would make sense; for most of us anxiety is the frantic companion of difficult or traumatic situations. I always understood that anxiety can occur when there is no clear solution to an imminent problem, triggering a shift in metabolism, shifts in cortisol levels and shifts the amygdala into high gear. This results in a “fight, freeze, or flight” response and moves to bypass our higher centers for problem solving located in our prefrontal cortex. This does nothing to help us solve a problem, and clouds our ability to formulate a strategy.
When we are faced with such circumstances, we end up formulating tools that must first deal with the anxiety. If we are unable to get a handle on the runaway horses in our minds, we will start reacting instead of responding. If we’re not able to get our anxiety under control, it may turn into a panic attack, and then this becomes our response to stress. If we are able to gain a modicum of sway over our instincts, we may then rely on our intellect for solving the problem. But we still have to monitor our anxiety and ensure that it doesn’t return – or keep it bay long enough to formulate a remedy. We may even, after a time, develop tools for managing our anxiety so that our thinking becomes clearer and less reliant on mitigating our emotional responses. In any of these scenarios, the anxiety is still present, just to different degrees.
Understanding the ubiquitous nature of anxiety helped me to realize that the skills I had developed for creativity and building seemed to require anxiety to function. It was almost as though in order for me to put those mental tools to work for me, the anxiety had to be present. This is one of those early moments when I began to comprehend the profound effect your mental state of mind has on developing skills for navigating your life. By thinking that anxiety was caused by stressful situations, I came to see it as unavoidable, manageable at best. When I turned this around in my understanding – seeing that anxiety caused situations to appear unsolvable, I began to view anxiety as solvable rather than inevitable.
There is an emotional intelligence that emerges out of this, a way to see your emotions not as the substance of your experience, but rather an ethereal component. You have many ways of understanding the world around you including extrapolation, your material senses, and your emotional responses. When your emotions become so consuming, they can dull your other inputs and skew your response, but that is what many of us have learned to do. Focusing on managing your anxiety instead of solving your problem leads to the forging of poor mental tools.
The question arises – how do I step out of this cycle? If the tools I currently have are crafted with emotional responses I am in the process of leaving behind, how do I use those tools to delete themselves? How do I separate the valued skills of focus and precision gleaned from my firearms training from the underlying homicidal intentions?
Next: Bowing into the Dojo to embrace change….