Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect privacy.—Ed.
I am on my back. Ben is perpendicular to me, his legs bent around my body, one heel planted near my waist, the other by my neck. He has a grip on my right arm, which is locked outward so that, when I try to pull away, my bone feels liable to snap. This position is called an arm bar. I have no idea how he got me into it, and I certainly have no idea how to get out.
“You shouldn’t be able to move so fast,” I say.
Ben laughs. He releases my arm, and I roll out from under him.
Ben is a friend I met at the bouldering gym who coaches children’s classes at the Grove City Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Academy. Located in the same plaza as a loan company and a live-entertainment lounge, the gym consists of two rooms that are largely empty, apart from mats and a few rows of bleachers. The space smells strongly of rubber and bare feet, and I can easily picture it packed with kids eager to launch attacks at Ben, their tiny, frustrated bodies resorting to slapping and kicking when the formal techniques of jiu-jitsu prove too limiting to provide the release they need.
Ben and I are the only ones at the gym. He offered to give me a free lesson after I told him I was interested in jiu-jitsu, but not enough to pay a membership fee. With most men I would be nervous, particularly given that the windows in the building have been grayed out, making it impossible for outsiders to see in. Men are not nice to be nice, I have learned. Men are nice because they want something in return.
But I don’t think Ben wants anything in return. Ben wears a rainbow “Keep Jiu-Jitsu Gay” shirt. He jokes about being an eighth-grade dropout, though the reasons why are less than funny, and he spends afternoons repairing the childhood home he paid off for his parents, taking breaks to ride four-wheelers and drink lavish amounts of Twisted Tea. Ben and I became fast friends, likely due to similarities in our upbringings, and in the beginning I did question his generosity. When he paid for my beer or offered to pick me up from the airport, I worried it was too much, that eventually he’d want something I wouldn’t be able to provide. When I said as much, Ben told me to shut up and thank Karl Marx.
“Don’t feel bad about the arm bar,” Ben says, popping a piece of gum into his mouth. “Jiu-jitsu is sort of my thing.”
He’s showing off, but it isn’t unwarranted. He’s given years to this sport, and it’s evident in his actions. As he teaches me submissions—moves that force your opponent to give up—he glides in and out of the steps like liquid. I, on the other hand, move as though made of rust. The mechanics are too unfamiliar for me to maneuver with anything close to the speed I would need in a fight. And that’s if I can remember the steps in the first place. When Ben has me put them together on my own, he often has to shift his body to fit my submission.
“All right.” Ben claps his hands together. “I’ll show you one of the choke holds. That’s what everyone wants to learn.”
Ben explains the rear naked choke hold. The submission is effective because it creates an anatomical mismatch: it pits one person’s arms against another person’s neck, a region of the body uniquely vulnerable to attack. It can quickly render an opponent unconscious, and because it is applied from behind, defending against it can be very difficult. Once you’re locked into a rear naked choke, it is nearly impossible to escape.
Ben pulls over a dummy he’s named Stupid. A sadly slumped sandbag, Stupid barely resembles a male human: his shoulders are disproportionately broad, his arms too long. When Ben sits him on the mat, Stupid’s head immediately falls forward. I laugh. I know I should be paying attention—Ben is showing me steps I will need to follow—but the demonstration ensues with such hilarity. I’m still thinking about how ridiculous the dummy looks when Ben asks if I’m ready.
I don’t hesitate to say yes. Ben showed me the choke, and now it’s time to practice it. I am surprisingly nervous, though. I trust Ben enough to know he will stop as soon as I want him to. The issue is, I have never been very good at recognizing when that moment has come.
I want to say that when Gavin told me he would kill me, I did not believe him, though there was nothing to suggest he was bluffing: He held me down in bed, his hand on my throat, knees locked around my waist, the alcohol-induced sheen to his blue eyes suggesting he could commit to his words without much thought. But the fear I should have felt—that I had felt minutes before, when I was running around, trying to escape him—was gone. I was gone. I had retreated into what the two of us referred to as my “shutdown mode.”
When I shut down, the screams and cries and mania that had overwhelmed me moments before evaporated. It was as though I were a computer that had frozen, my hard drive taking a break after having been overworked. My body would go limp, my gaze dead. Even the need to blink disappeared. If my eyes dried out, I never felt it. I never felt anything at all.
Years later a counselor at a women’s center would tell me I was experiencing depersonalization. It was a defense mechanism, a way to protect myself from environments that I could not see another way out of. What she said felt right, although I was not yet ready to believe her. I was still with Gavin at the time. I had gone to see her because she offered sliding-scale counseling, and Gavin and I had discussed how my extreme mood swings—screaming at him one second and completely vacant the next—were likely a reflection of undiagnosed bipolar disorder. The counselor did not find such a diagnosis credible. She mentioned PTSD. I stopped seeing her shortly after that.
Whatever the cause, I found immense comfort in shutdown mode. It was as though I’d discovered a new world, one in which material consequences did not exist. Gavin did not feel the same way. He said it was manipulative, even abusive, of me to shut down. All he wanted was resolution, and I was triggering his abandonment issues by giving him the silent treatment. In the tired mornings that always followed our arguments, his words were very convincing. His father had died of an overdose when he was a teenager, and his mother, while still physically present, had long-standing mental-health problems that made emotional connection with her son impossible. Gavin had already lost so much. It was cruel to close myself off, to disappear when he needed so badly to be let in.
During our arguments, however, I felt no such sympathy. I hated Gavin. I hated how he refused to let me see my friends alone. How he had to accompany me everywhere but could never be ready on time. How he blocked my exit when I tried to leave without him. How he chased me down the road or through the house when I made attempts to escape. How he locked me in the car or in the bedroom when I said I couldn’t do this anymore. How he talked at me for hours from behind those locked doors, insisting there was an understanding we could reach, that we could not walk away from each other until we had reached it. I hated how he trapped me, how he gave me no place to go except deep within myself.
That’s where I was the first time Gavin threatened to kill me. After we’d been arguing for who knows how long, I shut down. He yelled several times for me to snap out of it, and when I continued to stare blank-faced at the floor, he threw me onto the bed. I’m sure he wanted me to catch myself, sit up, do something. Had I, things might not have escalated.
I stayed limp, let my head bounce unpleasantly against the mattress.
As he climbed on top of me and repeated his threat, I still want to say I did not believe him. I want to say that, if I’d felt the pressure on my neck increase to the point of danger, I surely would have clawed, flailed, bit. I want to say I would have fought, but I don’t know if I can.
When I struggled, my effort did nothing but exhaust me. Gavin was stronger, louder, and faster, and his hypervigilance gave him an energy I could not match. If I screamed, no one would help me. Surrender was the only form of resistance I had left. It was the only way to hold on.
Prior to my lesson with Ben, I observed a class at the jiu-jitsu academy. It had already started when I arrived, and the sounds of breath and bodies filled the gym. There were about forty people spread across large rubber mats, some thin, some muscular, many in-between. They ranged from teenage to middle age, but nearly all of them were men.
One of the few women was Wendy, a black belt with numerous world titles to her name. In her fifties, she was lean and tan and had a large back tattoo that peeked out from her spandex top. She did not possess the mass of some of the other participants, but her strength was clear. I watched her take out men ten or twenty years younger, holding them down, locking them into a jigsaw they could not escape. It’s how she got to be a black belt, and why the gym photoshopped her face over that of Hélio Gracie—a member of the family cited as the founders of Brazilian jiu-jitsu—and hung the framed image up for display.
Because there was a tournament coming up, the coach was running intensive drills: roll for one or two minutes, change partners, and repeat. As these intervals continued, some students opted to sit out, their energy spent. During a break Wendy came up to the bleachers where I was sitting, and I asked her about her experience practicing jiu-jitsu as a woman.
“I didn’t even want to ask anyone to roll at first,” she said in a soft voice with a hint of rural drawl. “I’d just make eye contact and wait for someone to ask me.” She explained that she’d started in a women-only class, and when it got canceled due to a lack of retention, she’d had to transfer to the coed group. It took a while, but now she had no problem taking charge on the mat. The only people she wouldn’t fight, she told me, were white belts.
“Those guys will do some dumb shit,” she said. “I’m not looking to get hurt.”
When Wendy got the chance, though, she still liked to roll with women. They fight different, she told me. I asked how.
“More defensive,” she said. “They’re used to fighting for their lives.”
Red dots pinpricked my face. They freckled my cheeks, outlined the contour of my jaw, and made my eyes appear bruised. I stared into the bathroom mirror, tracing my hand along my skin. Broken blood vessels. I recognized their pattern from times when I was still with Gavin and had cried hard enough to cause a similar, though far more modest, pigmentation. Their presence had always surprised me. I associated broken blood vessels with injury, with an impact you should feel. How could they mark my face so heavily when I could identify no clear violent origin?
This was not entirely accurate. There had been violence, though I may not have registered it as such. When I had ruptured blood vessels during my relationship with Gavin, it was after running and screaming and locking doors and begging him to go away, please just fucking go away. And in the bathroom, as I looked over my stippled skin, I knew what had caused that too.
I had spent the previous evening with Josh, a man I had been seeing sporadically for a few months. My recollection of the night was blurry. There had been beer, then shots, then driving with the windows down, singing along to Three 6 Mafia cranked all the way up. It was reckless but fun, and the night ended the way I had intended it to: back at his place.
From there my memory fragments further. I know he asked if it was OK before he slapped me. I know I said yes. I know he asked again before repeating the act. I know I said yes again, even though I hadn’t liked the first one. The slaps weren’t abrasive enough to hurt my face, but my skull throbbed from dehydration, and the impact caused my head to rock, back and forth, back and forth. My brain churned with each one.
It was a relief, then, when he moved his hand to my throat. Despite what had happened with Gavin, I didn’t associate choking with harm, probably because enough previous partners had done it for sexual pleasure. It also may have to do with my not classifying much of anything done to my body as harm.
Before Josh applied any real pressure to my throat, he asked once more if this was OK. Once more I said yes, and this time I meant it, happy my head would finally have a moment to lie still. The pressure on my neck built as he choked me, and the skin on my face tightened. It went on longer than I expected, and certainly longer than I wanted, though I never indicated as much, not even as the pressure began to spread to my eyes. He might have even asked an additional time if I was OK. If he did, I’m sure I tried my best to nod.
The next day, after seeing my speckled face, I looked up the side effects of erotic asphyxiation online: difficulty breathing and swallowing, hoarse voice or cough, headaches, lightheadedness, and, of course, the broken blood vessels. I had felt these side effects when I’d come home from Josh’s, but prior to looking in the mirror, I had attributed them to a bad hangover.
I’m gonna tell people you gave me a black eye.
I texted this to Josh along with a photo of my darkened eyes. I was joking, of course. I didn’t even realize I was expecting a response until I read his reply.
Ha ha.
It’s not that I wanted Josh to feel guilty, just a little remorseful. I wanted him to see my face and think we did take things a little too far. Really, I didn’t even need that much. He could have just asked if I was OK.
I can’t blame him for not asking. That wasn’t the dynamic I had set up. When Josh had tried to be sensitive with me early in our relationship, I’d shut him down. He was several years older, and that age gap made him wary. He compensated by making sure I knew how much he valued my intelligence and apologizing when he said anything that could be interpreted as remotely out of line. I made him stop. I was not a fragile creature.
I did try to goad him into the response I wanted by texting him about the strange looks I was sure to get. But Josh was done talking about my eyes. He was more interested in my boundaries. He wanted to push them. He wanted to see how far I would go.
For the first time in that relationship, I experienced a sense of fear. Josh was kind. I knew—still know—he never wanted to hurt me. But those articles I’d read on asphyxiation listed side effects worse than ruptured blood vessels. They listed heart attack. They listed brain damage. They listed death.
So much could go wrong if things went too far, and it was so easy to let things go too far. I remembered how it felt to have Josh’s hand on my neck. I remembered feeling like I might pass out, thinking that the alcohol swirling through his system might cause him to harm me more than he could realize. I remembered feeling those things and still doing nothing to make him stop. Oh had been my only thought. Oh.
Before I met Wendy at the gym, I read an interview with her in which she described a match at a Las Vegas tournament. She had started the match poorly and thought she was behind in points when her opponent got her in a choke hold. The clock was ticking down, and she believed that even if she got out of the hold, she wouldn’t have enough time to take the lead. It was only once she tapped out that she learned she had recovered from her poor start. She had taken the lead, which meant she hadn’t even needed to break loose of the hold to win. All she’d needed to do was not tap out.
“Everyone was yelling at me not to, but I couldn’t hear them,” she told me. “I was in what I call my ‘spiral of despair,’ and when I get worked up like that, I can’t hear anything.”
The detachment Wendy described sounded similar to what I experienced in shutdown mode. Although I never lost auditory perception, words did lose their significance. I could hear them, but it was as though they were being spoken to somebody else. Now I wanted to know if Wendy could relate. I wanted to know if she ever experienced her “spiral of despair” outside of jiu-jitsu. I wanted to know if she had experienced it around a man. But these questions might seem prying and inappropriate, and they very likely were misguided. I told myself a woman can disassociate for more than one reason. I told myself not to project my history onto her.
Instead I reached out to Jennifer, a childhood friend I had not seen in over a decade. We were still Facebook friends, and I remembered seeing her post about how jiu-jitsu had helped her overcome prior experiences with abuse. She agreed to a phone call, although she warned me she was not some world champion; she had been practicing for less than a year and referred to herself as a “squirrely white belt.”
Jennifer told me she’d spent her first few months of jiu-jitsu in constant fight-or-flight mode. She had grown up being abused by a family member, and the physicality of jiu-jitsu proved highly triggering. But, little by little, the anxiety started to dissipate. She could trust the men she rolled with, and that trust made a difference in her body. After a few months, she was no longer crying on her drive home.
Cognitive behavioral therapists would likely say jiu-jitsu helped Jennifer override her initial reactions by introducing frightening stimuli within a safe environment. She gradually began to reprocess her trauma so that, each time she encountered the trigger, it wasn’t as overwhelming. “Sometimes it sneaks up on me, though,” Jennifer said, referring to a recent bout with an instructor’s son, who’d gotten her in a choke hold. That was fine; she tapped out and felt OK. But as they repositioned their bodies, her face got pressed to the mat, and she began to cry. At first she wasn’t sure why; the physical pain had not been serious. But when she reflected on the moment, she realized she had been mentally transported somewhere she did not wish to go. “If I close my eyes, I’m eleven again and back home,” she said. “I keep them open, though, and I’m grounded. I’m safe.”
I have never readily adopted the opinions of those around me. Particularly when I was younger, I preferred dissent. It made me feel special. Unique. I grew up in conservative rural Florida but pursued a degree in gender studies. I learned how constraining feminine norms could be. Yet, in my relationship with Gavin, this knowledge offered me no protection. Worse, it offered me the illusion of protection.
I was in my early twenties when I met Gavin; he was in his thirties. Tall, with a nose that had been broken more than once, he was a new hire at my gym, where I was friends with the employees. While everyone initially liked him, negative talk began to circulate after he started seeing a girl much younger than him. His coworkers said he was taking advantage of her. Later, when he and I began to go out, he warned me they would say the same about me.
“I can’t be easily manipulated,” I told him.
“I know,” he said. “It’s what I like about you.”
In retrospect it would be easy to frame Gavin as a predator. I wasn’t particularly interested in a relationship, and it’s likely I never would have gone out with him had I not felt such a staunch need to prove my independence. He might have seen that in me and used it for his benefit. But if he did, I don’t think he was aware of it. I think Gavin needed to believe I was invincible as much as I did, because then there could be no hurting me. There could be no abuse.
Even now I still struggle to see his behavior as anything other than a logical response to someone as flawed as me. For as long as I can remember, I have felt responsible for the well-being of those around me. I find this propensity to be fairly common among people who grew up in less-than-happy homes. A parent or sibling is upset; you want to help them; and when you can’t, you internalize the fault as your own. The inclination to blame oneself is an attempt to assert control, which is what I so desperately craved with Gavin. Part of me needed to believe I instigated everything that went wrong. If I was the cause of his aggression, I was also the one who could prevent it.
Sometimes I wonder if I should have been more up-front with Josh about my past, if things would have gone differently between us if I had. It probably wouldn’t have mattered long-term. I needed careful attention—more than I was willing to admit—and when we talked, it was usually through text when he was at work, and he was too distracted to understand the full meaning of my words. It’s possible, though, that if I’d been more open, he might not have been so insistent on testing my boundaries. He might have seen I was also testing his. How far would he go? I needed to know: How much pain did he think I deserved?
Ben has me practice the choke. He sets the dummy in front of me, and I immediately forget everything he showed me. I don’t know where to plant my feet, how to cross my arms, what he is referring to when he tells me to remember the seat belt positioning. Over and over he says I’m creating too much space.
“Stupid should not be able to wiggle around,” he says.
I half-choke the dummy five or six times. I can’t say I’m any better the sixth time than I was the first, but Ben tosses Stupid aside and tells me to perform the choke on him. He can sense that if I keep practicing, my exasperation will rise faster than my skill level.
“All right, li’l momma,” he says, sitting down with his back to me. “Let’s see you choke me out.”
I hesitate—partly because I’m trying to remember the steps to the move and partly because I need to wrap my legs around Ben’s waist, which feels like a violation. We’re friends, but not the sort who go around intertwining limbs.
“Come on now,” Ben says and pulls my legs around him. I have to throw down a hand to catch myself, feeling like a child who’s been given an overly enthusiastic slap on the back.
Once I am in the correct starting position, I go through the motions of the choke hold. With enough pointers from Ben, I eventually get my arms crossed around his neck, which means all I have to do is row my shoulders back and squeeze my biceps. I do so, feeling fairly certain that my poor technique won’t allow me to exert any real pressure. And yet, in two seconds, Ben taps.
I drop my arms.
“And that,” Ben says, rolling onto his side, “is how you perform the rear naked choke.”
At first I assume Ben tapped to be nice, that he feigned surrender to make me feel powerful. He coaches kids, after all. He knows how to be encouraging. But as I watch him on the mat, red-faced and coughing to regain his breath, I realize that is not the case. Yes, he could have gotten out of the hold at any time, but the tap out was real.
Ben pushes himself up, swallowing hard and still flushed. I expect to feel some sense of victory: he was my opponent, and I defeated him. I don’t. I feel guilty, mostly, and a little uneasy. It seemed like I had exerted no pressure at all before he wanted me to stop. What if I hadn’t? What if I’d held on for a second too long?
“Does jiu-jitsu have any safety measures?” I ask.
“The tap,” Ben says. “The tap is sacred. If someone didn’t respect it . . .” He pauses, his face contorted in disgust. “It would be like he murdered someone. And he may as well have, because it would be a social death for him. People here look out for one another, and they’d be on him in a second.”
“What if you’re rolling with someone who doesn’t tap? If you keep going, you know you’re going to hurt them. What do you do then?”
Ben sighs. “You see this a lot with white belts. They come in here determined not to tap. I tell them they’re gonna, and once they feel the choke, most times they do. Almost anyone will panic at that amount of pressure. But if they really insist on not tapping, I will let them pass out.”
I raise my eyebrows.
“I know lots of people have triggers when it comes to choking, for tragic reasons,” he clarifies. “But you’re not going to hurt someone with these kinds of chokes. Not unless you’re being malicious.”
I mull over Ben’s words: Tragic. Malicious. I don’t like them. They’re too simple, and they feed into the victim-villain binary that I have always found reductionist. What happened between Josh and me was not tragic, and he certainly wasn’t being malicious, yet my blood vessels still burst. Even with Gavin the situation felt more complicated. Malicious connotes an intentionality I don’t think I could ascribe to him. I had gone somewhere he couldn’t reach, and he choked me to bring me back. While the act was wrong, regardless of his reason, his behavior felt rooted in desperation more than anything else. If I am being honest, there was probably more malice on my end. I was never conscious of my motivations when I shut down, but I did hate Gavin. He was a monster. Deep down I’m sure I wanted him to see that. I wanted him to prove it to himself.
I don’t say any of this to Ben. We’ve already been at the gym awhile, and I know he needs to leave soon to help his mother. He is giving me a free lesson, and I would hate to come off as ungrateful—or, worse, too sensitive.
“Ready to give it a go?” he asks.
“All right.” I take a seat on the mat. I tell myself there is nothing to worry about, that the dangerous side effects of erotic asphyxiation do not apply here. People pass out all the time in jiu-jitsu, Ben included. Even if I don’t tap out in time, I will be fine. “Let’s do this thing.”
Ben moves more quickly than I expected. Before I know it, there is an arm around my neck. Then another. Then pressure, an impossible amount of pressure.
I tap.
Ben backs away, giving me lots of space. “You didn’t even let me finish the move,” he says teasingly.
Disappointment hits me so hard that I consider asking for another go. I want to show him I am capable of holding out. Very capable. He can choke me until I’m blue in the face. I can take it. It’s one of my best tricks, in fact. My body remains while the rest of me disappears.
“It felt bad,” I say instead.
I don’t try the choke again. Which isn’t to say I never will. I am constantly searching for the line between too far and not far enough. If my body were a tree, I’d want my branches bent within a breath of snapping. Such proximity to my limits means they’ll sometimes be surpassed, and jiu-jitsu seems like it could provide a relatively safe environment for that to happen. Just not today. Today it feels more important to stop, to show my body that even if we can withstand, it doesn’t mean we should.
