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The four major problems of pain as motivation to comply | Strategic application of pain | Further Resources

George Silver expressed those sentiments in 1599. While he was talking about sword fighting, it shows that refusing to look at defensive training’s "sacred cows" is nothing new. And neither is the fact that this myopia costs both lives and serious injury to those that training is supposed to protect.

Until now I have not been critical of any approach to defensive tactics. However, when it comes to the application of pain, current policies are not only ineffective, but upon pragmatic review, a disaster waiting to happen. That is because they can cause more trouble than they fix. Unfortunately, many departments are in what is called "an escalation of commitment" situation. That is to say that despite the fact that pain control tactics are of limited success, they have so deeply invested in the idea that "It *has* to work!"

I am not saying that pain motivation is a total bill of goods. It's not, there is some solid stuff there.

But you should seriously consider that it was created and endorsed by the same "experts" who, on the psych wards, told the psychology  interns that when a patient became violent, "hide behind the orderlies." A course of action they themselves followed. There is a lot of schooling, book study, interviewing the mentally unwell and a few incidents observed, but they have very little "hands on" experience with the actual controlling violent people. In other words, the expert didn’t figure this out from rolling around on the floor. And now, without the benefit of having been there himself, he’s telling you what works down there.

The four major problems of pain as motivation
There are four major problems with the current approach to the application of pain to control a suspect. The first is that it is designed to work on "normal people." You are most likely to be dealing with an individual, however,  whose mental state has created an incredibly  high pain tolerance. While it may be news to the brass, it is nothing that patrol officers haven't found out the hard way.

Normal people will retreat from pain. Unfortunately that isn’t whom you will be using it on. Therefore the rules change. Just as during a typhoon, due to the radically different water pressure against a ship screws, a helmsman has to disregard all the 'normal rules' of seamanship to avoid being broached to; the what would work to control a normal person goes out the window against someone in a violent episode. This is the ultimate "Catch 22." PPCT works on normal people, but someone far enough gone to either attack an officer -- or attack someone else in your presence -- is not "normal.." Drugs, alcohol, psychosis and enraged states -- all change the equation entirely.

It is well known that people in severe pain go into "shock." When this happens the body releases epronepherene and other endorphines to handle the pain. A person in this state has a much higher tolerance to pain. What is important to realize is that most people who are in shock, aren't aware of it. In fact, many will insist that they are fine and attempt to continue to operate.

Recent studies have shown that the body often cannot tell the difference between physical  pain and mental anguish -- it releases endorphines in both cases. These endorphines block pain. Often what results is that people in a mentally aggravated state has a much higher pain tolerance. A study on individuals with high pain thresholds in mental institution was conducted and it was discovered that these individuals had high epronepherene levels . When these individuals were given endorphine blockers their pain thresholds returned to normal.

These scientific  findings largely undermine the idea of unilaterally controlling everyone through pain. Under "normal" circumstances, the idea will often work. But what constitutes "normal" for officers is significantly different than it is for a civilian. Your job routinely brings you into contact -- and conflict -- with those who are -- to everyone else -- incredibly rare. If only 1 in 10,000 people have this imbalance, guess which one is going to go off and you will be called in to deal with?  To you, the abnormal is normal.

The second problem is that human beings are not machines. You don't just push a button and a specific thing happens. Compliance is only one of three or four possible responses. Inflicting pain doesn’t have a guaranteed response -- because most pain compliance techniques are applied at the height of enraged, psychotic or stupid behavior. At this time and under these circumstances, application of pain often tends to spur the unacceptable behavior to greater heights - - not automatically force compliance.

Lt Col. Dave Grossman in his book On Killing  postulates that the old Fight or Flight model is flawed. His model is that there are actually four possible responses. Fight, Flight, Posture and Submit. With the old model you had a fifty/fifty chance of the person either complying (fleeing from pain) or fighting. Unfortunately, the odds presented by this new  model are only one in four that the suspect will submit.  When you inflict pain, the suspect has a much wider range of ways to resist than originally thought -- as many officers have found out the hard way.

The third problem is that you cannot "force" someone to comply through pain. Compliance is purely the decision of the perp. As long as he mentally maintains another goal/motive that is stronger than the message you are sending, then he will continue to resist. He will act on *his* motivation, not yours. Some people will never submit, they are so locked into their own mental processes that you will have to kill them to stop them. Against this kind of commitment, pain is either irrelevant or further motivation to continue fighting for his goal.

The fourth problem is that alcohol and other drugs physically slow down the nerve processing speed. The message physically does not travel as fast as it does while in a non-intoxicated state. Literally a drunk's email has been reduced to the Pony Express -- the message will get there, but at a much, much slower rate.

How often have you taken a drunk down in a jointlock only to have him --  when he is on the ground -- start screaming that you are hurting him? It’s not that you are hurting him, it’s that alcohol slows the neurological process. He was hurt during the takedown -- but, only when he's lying there in a cuffing position, does the message finally get to his brain!

These four problems seriously overlap and affect each other.

Strategic application of pain
The secret of successful application of pain is in the timing.

It's knowing when it will have the desired result and when it will send him haring off in the opposite direction from where you want him to go. The key to understanding this "window" is in the following statement:

Proponents of pain compliance techniques maintain that compliance/submission is a type of "flight." If you cannot ensure your safety through physical flight, then submission is another way of fleeing from danger. By ‘psychologically fleeing’ and admitting the other’s dominance, (a.k.a 'submitting') we prevent further aggression from that individual. When this occurs, the perp will quit fighting and submit to your control.

Unfortunately, what these same proponents tend to overlook is that flight is flight and submission is submission. Pain is just as likely to spur him to attempt to fight harder to escape. Then there is the  "fight" reaction and that will result in you getting kicked, hit, bitten, gouged and slammed into walls by a resisting perp.

When you inflict pain, you are sending a motivational message -- the problem is you can’t accurately predict what response you will get. He might submit; he might try to flee; or he might wheel around and attack you. The critical error in pain application thinking is that they assume that a bit of pain is going to stop a certain runaway behavior and cause it to turn 180 degrees from its original destination. You have just given him extra motivation to act, but you don’t yet have the control to determine what path he will take.

Assume that, most often, the person has reached the mental state where you have to physically control him because he is "experiencing an unacceptable message." Some sort of stimuli (whether internal or external) has entered his consciousness and has prompted this person to act violently. He doesn’t want a situation to be this way and his violence is to make it some other way. He’s going to use violence to make the world conform to his wants.

(Author’s note: This last statement is far more inclusive than it sounds. It can range from everything from criminal violence (give me what I want or I will hurt you), dominance (whose genitals are bigger), revenge (how dare you dis’ me or I will hurt you for hurting me), control (I will punish you not behaving a certain way ), self-regulating pressure valve (kicking the dog after a bad day at work) to paranoid dementia (Jesus told me I have to hit you). While these issues can seriously overlap, they are all forms of selfishness. In nearly all cases, the person is trying to get what he wants through violence).

You must know the timing of inflicting pain. You must know when to do it, when not to do. You need to know when to start and when to stop. While those may sound like the same thing. They are significantly different and unless you want to have a knock down drag out fight on your hands it is important to know those differences.

Three further complications arise. The first is that when someone is in an enraged, demented or intoxicated state, there are many physiological factors that make the addition of pain something akin to trying to outshout a hysterically yelling man. The message will not get through. This is because "all circuits are busy" (enraged state) or they are slowed down (drunk). By the time you apply enough force to get through to the person, you have often caused injury. The problem is that he doesn't know it until after the fact! 

Unfortunately, the degree of force necessary to overwhelm the "internal messages" of a person who is either mentally unbalanced or intoxicated is often well past the point where you cause physical damage. It is going to seriously hurt. This brings us to the second complication: If it keeps hurting after submission, there is no reason NOT to fight. Obviously, submission failed to stop the pain, time for Plan B. Keeping in mind that pain is a motivational message, this response becomes about as unpredictable as sunrise. When you add in the physical impairment of the nervous system and message delays, it should become obvious why drunk wrangling so often goes sideways. Add to this that often, under adrenalized conditions, officers continue to apply force. Remember this little caveat. The trip back to good behavior doesn't hurt.

The third (but by no means final) complication is cultural differences. By this I mean "street culture" more than any particular ethnic strain. In normal alpha/beta dominance behavior, aggression stops once submission is established. The hierarchy is established, and the pack can get back to the business of surviving. Unfortunately, this is not the case in many dysfunctional street cultures. In fact, among those circles submission is often the "go ahead" signal for either a rat pack attack by all, or a green light in the primary aggressor's mind that he can safely torture the victim. There is an unconscious assumption by the perp that if he goes submissive, he will be torn apart! Do not underestimate the power of this unconscious assumption. It is the source of all kinds of problems when controlling street people -- especially when inflicting pain at the wrong time just feeds that belief.

The bottom line is adding ‘limited' pain to an out of control situation is like trying to put a fire out by pouring gasoline on it during this time. Something has already set him off. By applying minor levels of pain -- supposedly to override his internal messages -- you are running a greater chance of him reacting to the pain as another "unacceptable message." It escalates the situation rather than force to him comply. And why not, you just gave him another motivational message that he doesn’t like to spur him on.

Unfortunately, the degree and type of pain you can apply is limited by departmental policy. Too little and it just makes the situation worse. Too much and you cause "undue" injury. The more you try to find the Goldilocks and the Three Bears balance of what is "just right," the more likely you are to further enrage him and provoke resistance. Eventually the situation will escalate to where you are justified in using extreme force. That is, however not only dangerous to you and the perp, but is a great way to end up in I.A.

The current approach to pain application asks that you do an impossible tightrope act. It demands that an officer accurately guess the perfect amount of force necessary to contain a disturbed person -- one just encountered for the first time minutes ago. It is nearly impossible to guess the exact amount of pain needed. This is like asking someone who is blindfolded to carry a pole with different weights on the ends, while walking a tightrope that someone else is jiggling. It's not going to work. Is it any wonder why so many patrol officers hold such disdain for pain systems?

Summing up the problem, pain is absolutely the worst way to get people to the ground. It is, however, one of the best ways to keep them there and docile once you have put them down. The trick is knowing that a shout won’t be heard in a hurricane, but a whisper can be heard in the lull of the eye. You simply create a calm time so your message comes through loud and clear.This uses pain, not as a punishment for having acted up, but as a deterrent for returning to bad behavior.

The answer lies in what is called "pattern interruption" Very simply, most people who use violence expect certain results/reactions from this kind of behavior. When things go awry in significant ways, they must mentally stop and re-orient before getting back on track. (If you have ever de-escalated a situation in a totally bizarre and inane way, that is exactly what you were doing. The unexpected response caused the guy to have to stop acting on his internal messages and figure out what you were doing). A fast and effective take down will create this interruption. It is during this downtime that you inflict pain. Instead of the pain adding motivation to continue down that path, it becomes something that the perp has to intentionally run through in order to get back on his old course of behavior.

One of the best forms of pattern interruption is to find yourself suddenly on the ground. NOT wrestling around and then falling over. But rather one moment he is lunging, the next thing he knows he is on the deck in a control hold. He has to mentally shift gears to figure out what has happened (at the very least to figure out how to get up and attack you again). It is during this moment, where he has to drop out of mental autopilot and use his cognitive process, that you hit him with pain. In other words, while he is still shocked about hitting the ground and deciding to get up and back into his tirade, NOW is when it starts hurting -- with a promise of it hurting a whole lot more if he keeps on with unacceptable behavior.

Now instead of pain spurring him on, he has to make a conscious decision to run through a veil of pain to get back to where he was before. And that is not a fun decision. It is during this time that you establish verbal control, clearly communicating that he won't be hurt IF he behaves! In order for him not to be hurt, he has to come out of his head and pay attention to you and your power. Remember, the trip back to good behavior doesn't hurt.

You will find that applying pain under these circumstances will not only have much greater effect on getting the message of "bad decision, pal" across, but that the actual amount of pain you must inflict to insure compliance is significantly reduced. This lessens your chances of accidental injury to the perp and your butt in the sling.

Realize that having this window of opportunity to effectively apply pain for maximum results relies on you, the officer, knowing how to overcome current problems with defensive tactics. Before you can have the luxury of this "lazy man’s way" of pain compliance, you must have conquered the problems with muscle, distance, unnecessary motion and the fundamental conflict of training philosophy that are so rampant in defensive tactics today. Otherwise you will be too busy wrestling with the perp to be able to do it effectively. I can’t guarantee that you won’t spill your coffee, but once you know how to overcome those problems, you WILL be able to do takedowns without even getting your glasses knocked off. When you can do that, getting into the window for effective pain motivation is a walk in the park.

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