My Taekwondo instructor at Blue Wave (a very good New England Taekwondo association) is Master Gordon White; see my interview with him on his Taekwondo motivation here. Master White has a lot of good advice for us when it comes to Taekwondo sparring, including one of my favorite defensive tips: “Don’t Be There.” My friend Keyna Houston, who earned her black belt at the same testing I did back in March, made a handy picture (above) to illustrate the principle. If someone is trying to kick you in the head, for instance, the most useful thing you can do is to have your head somewhere else when the foot arrives.

In Taekwondo terms, this means using footwork and being aware of what your opponent is doing. If you’d like to see this in action, the difference between avoiding the kick and having it connect is demonstrated beautifully in this video, which you can skip if you’d like to just get to the point of this post.

Interestingly, kicks to the head have a lot in common with temptation. Like a kick to the head, it’s very hard to effectively block temptation. Also like a kick to the head, temptation can knock you flat. So one of the best defenses against temptation is to simply not be there.

What I mean by this is that a particular temptation arises when our minds are having certain thoughts. For instance, if the temptation you’re trying to avoid is buying something you can’t afford, temptation happens when you’re thinking about that thing, surfing the Web for prices, trying it out in a store, or otherwise occupying your attention with it. If your temptation is getting involved with someone when you know that wouldn’t be a good decision, it arises when you’re spending time with that person, corresponding with that person, or thinking about that person. Thinking, in this case, is “there,” the strike zone, ground zero, the bullseye on the target. When you’re in that space, you’re in danger of being hit with a kick you can’t block. When you’re not in that space, you’re relatively safe.

Given that, how is it possible to not be there? Well, just like in physical space, the way to not be in one place is to be in another. Find something else to focus your attention on or another way to meet your need. It’s hard to eat cookies when you’re chewing gum; it’s hard to feel lonely enough to be driven to make bad choices when you’re spending time with a good friend; and it’s hard to spend money on something when you aren’t shopping for it.

A single use of this technique won’t keep you safe forever. Just as in Taekwondo sparring, as soon as you evade one blow, your opponent is likely to move in to close the gap or to try to draw you in. But also as in sparring, the only way you can win the match is one choice at a time.

This is the seventh in a series of articles that draw on the field of schema therapy, an approach to addressing negative thinking patterns that was devised by Dr. Jeffrey Young. You can find an introduction to schemas and schema therapy, a list of schemas, and links to other schema articles on The Willpower Engine here.

How vulnerability schemas work
A person with the vulnerability schema has thoughts like these:

• What if something happens to the plane while we’re in flight?
• He’s late. Maybe he got in an accident.
• Business hasn’t been good lately. What if I get fired and can’t get another job?
• I can’t sleep when it rains because I keep worrying about flooding

Being vulnerable is part of being alive. No one is completely immune to natural catastrophes, disease, accidents, war, financial setbacks, crime, and all of the other kinds of trouble that can arise even when things are going well. Most of us either ignore this (“I’ll deal with it if it ever comes up”) or accept it on some level (“Sometimes bad things happen; I’ll just try to be prepared and not worry too much about it”), but people with the vulnerability schema have a lot of trouble letting go of these worries. Fear of something bad happening causes them to be overprotective, hyperanxious, or too timid to take chances.

People with the vulnerability schema generally get it from a parent who worried too much about things that might happen and passed the idea along to their children, insisting that the world is a dangerous place. Some children don’t acquire these ideas from the parents, learning from others or from experience that harm doesn’t lurk around every corner. Others, however, follow the model their parents (or other significant people in their lives) set.

Getting past a vulnerability schema
As with any schema, the vulnerability schema tends to come out in part as a series of broken ideas, like fortune telling (“I’m going to get swine flu from a sick kid at school!”) and emotional reasoning (“I’m so worried about earthquakes that I know one will happen before long.”) The day to day healthy habit of repairing these kinds of ideas helps weaken the vulnerability schema.

Also as with any schema, getting past a vulnerability schema means both accepting the idea of harm (“Sometimes bad things happen, and I’ll just do the best I can to get through them when they come up.”) and rejecting an obsession with harm (“Just because I’ve been worried about all of these things in the past doesn’t mean that I have to continue to be worried about them, or that I’m justified in my worry.”)

Photo by tj.blackwell