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Like many women, I grew up hearing messages from my family, peers, media, and others about how to keep myself safe. So much of the advice focused on restrictions and what not to do. Don’t go walking late at night. Don’t go places alone. Don’t go to parties or drink alcohol. Don’t wear a short skirt. Don’t go to the city. Don’t wear headphones because that might distract you. Don’t put your hair in a ponytail because it’s easy to grab. Don’t, don’t, don’t. But I was born with the wanderlust gene – I wouldn’t be content staying in my small hometown. I had a deep desire to travel and see the world, explore big cities, and learn foreign languages,…

By Anastasia Higginbotham What Is Enough? Recently, my teaching partner and I taught a class of high schoolers. For the fourth and final class, I shared a goal to look at the question of: What is enough? In terms of their self-defense education, I offered a list of what can be  in plenty of situations enough to keep ourselves safer. Volume/being heard/being loud; Sharpness, as in: clarity of intention and execution, focusing your voice and body with a singular goal; Targeting, as in: aiming for a part of the body that is especially vulnerable; Slowing down to speed up, as in: practicing slowly to build in smooth transitions and generate momentum; Rhythm, as in: strike, breathe, strike, breathe, assess; Congruency,…

I am grateful for having a wonderful gynecological surgeon. When it came time for a full hysterectomy, via laparoscopy, having an experienced and talented doctor with great communication skills was a huge comfort. Luckily, not only was she supportive and compassionate, but she also fought hard for insurance coverage and won that battle on my behalf. She held so much power – the power of subject matter expertise, the power of life and death during surgery, the power over my future – safe from the ovarian cancer that took my mother. I needed to, and did, trust her completely.  Prior to surgery, I let my doctor know I only wanted her to do the procedure, not any interns or fellows.…

The most powerful lesson I’ve practiced, as both a student and instructor of Prepare programs, is about being able to stay present to and bear what I know in the most intimate moments of boundary violations and danger, whether they are caused by the actions and behaviors of strangers or people close to me. To me, this is among the most formidable challenges our school-aged students face. For a young person to have the ability to know what they know is radical; to be able to act on that knowledge paves the way for transformation.  We get stuck on not wanting to know.  As a child, I responded graciously to adult attention and behavior aimed at me that can only…

Of the many gifts that my time with Prepare has given me, the “muscle memory” for handling difficult situations is among the most profound. Being surprised, frightened, or confused can impact anyone’s ability to think clearly or strategically, but knowing that I have trained to respond automatically when confronted with potential danger has immensely increased my confidence walking through the world. Combined with a deepened trust in my intuition, and a belief in my right to safety and dignity, I’ve developed a stronger conviction in my ability to handle volatile situations whenever and wherever they may arise. As I was running errands on a sunny summer afternoon in my busy Brooklyn neighborhood, I walked by a man and woman standing…

Over the course of my 5 years working with Prepare, I have come to lean on experience from my 15+ year career as a studied professional musician to introduce and explain the concepts of muscle memory and adrenaline-state training. The parallels between learning music and learning empowerment self-defense are deep. Lived Experience The process of learning music involves putting names to sounds you’ve been hearing from infancy and for me there’s a clear parallel with the evocative nature of violence and resistance to violence simulated in a Prepare class. Scenarios you’ve thought of, worried about, planned for, are given names, conceptual and societal frameworks, and can be confronted head-on. Communal Learning The method of muscle memory training that Prepare utilizes…

I was born and raised in New York City as a white middle-class person. I went to decent public schools that tried their best to keep me safe. I was never taught about transness, and my knowledge about sexuality was strictly internet-based. This made coming out to myself, my friends, and my family challenging. When I came out as transgender, I didn’t know about the “T” in LGBTQ+. I might have seen stereotypes and fetishized examples of transgender folks from the media, but that was not enough for me to truly understand my community. If anything, only being given stereotypes about transgender people made me more concerned about fitting into those exact stereotypes to belong, when in actuality I wish…

Boundaries Are the Real Fight for Our Lives by Anastasia Higginbotham Both of my children, ages 13 and 17, are now getting around and going further from home than they ever have, on their own and with friends. They make decisions about what they see, who they see, and how they spend their time. I have long enjoyed the stretchy, invisible thread that binds us to each other, and find them both to be reliably where they say they are and easy to find when I lose track of them or they forget to be in touch.  I don’t worry much and Prepare has a lot to do with that–my own training (IMPACT Basics 2001) and theirs. The younger one…

Education Empowers, Not Rules and Restrictions by Kristin Schlotterbeck I grew up in a conservative environment that held girls to a lot of restrictions about how to act and behave. The same restrictions did not apply to boys in my community, which struck me as fundamentally unfair.   Since many of these rules focused on what women wore, I got the message that it was girls’ and women’s responsibility to not attract men’s attention and that, if anything were to happen, the woman was partly, if not mostly, to blame. The details of what could happen were never spoken of outright. Today, my work focuses on violence prevention that does not restrict the behavior of people targeted for violence, but rather…

More death in the news.  We may not be responsible for creating the ideology of white supremacy, but we can be responsible for doing something about it as my teacher Loretta Ross says.  Our first impulse is to reach out to people we know who belong to the group that was most directly affected.  We express our horror and outrage and offer our love and support.  They are grieving but not surprised at the latest expression of white supremacy in the form of violence against their community.  The exchange is short, they thank us. We post on social media and maybe carry a sign at a march.  But what if … our outreach during crisis isn’t what someone most wants from…