Overcoming Your Deepest Fears
COMMON GRADUATE TESTIMONIALS
- “This was the best and most useful course I took in college.”
- “This class changed my life!”
- “I wish I took this class 20 years ago. I’m sending
my daughters.”
There are thousands of Model Mugging graduates who
have used their boundary setting and de-escalation skills to successfully
stop situations
from becoming violent.
These graduates give the greatest testament to the verbal art of
self-defense and the paradox of self-defense: The more prepared
you are to defend yourself the less likely you will ever have to.
Women
who know how to recognize and then effectively respond to potentially
dangerous situations can get out safely.
Model Mugging Graduates enjoy a happier and more fulfilling life. This Course Will Change Your Life!
RENEE SUNDARAM (Graduate) “Before
I took Model Mugging self-defense, I feared being alone at night. I
felt vulnerable and always on guard. Afterwards I still feel vulnerable,
but I have knowledge of how I can defend myself. This knowledge is
not in my brain, it's in my body. My body memorized the motions of
how to react to an attack. Drilling these options many times during
the course, they became automatic. No need to think, only react.
I discovered I am not helpless or defenseless. I do not need my father
or my brother to defend me; I do not need a weapon. I am capable
of defending myself. My body is my weapon, and a powerful weapon
at that.”
TINA FORBUS (Graduate
who successfully defended herself against an emotionally disturbed,
6ft, 250 pounds, assailant armed with a knife, even though she had
only taken the basics course. She is 5 ft 4 inches and weighs less
than 115 pounds)
" I am thoroughly convinced that it was Matt Thomas’ Model Mugging
training that saved my life."
 CLARE
MONTEER (Executive Director, Monterey Rape Crisis Center)
"
Model Mugging is not just a highly effective self-defense course,
but it has also helped former victims to become strong and regain
confidence in their ability to look after themselves."
GENEEN ROTH (Author and Seminar Leader - Breaking
Free, The Courage to Heal’)
"
Most of the women I see professionally have spent years wanting their
thighs to disappear, their hips to melt away. They feel nothing for
their bodies but contempt and disgust. Model Mugging teaches us something
we all need to learn: Women’s bodies are not decorations; they
are strong, they are powerful and when they are violated, they can
be deadly."
SHARON RIPPNER, Ph.D. (Clinical Psychologist)
"
The healing which Model Mugging provides involves a body healing,
an ability to change the body memory to create a positive outcome
by recreating an earlier outcome and winning. The release and healing
that I see from this process cannot be duplicated in any amount of
psychotherapy."
DENNIS EVANS, MD (Psychiatrist)
"
The course provides a very powerful psychodrama which, in a supportive
environment, facilitates emergence of issues and then mastery of
them. This takes therapy out of the oft times abstract armchair into
a very real and practical experience."
CAPTAIN DONALD FUSELIER (Carmel Police Department,
Police Academy Instructor on Officer Response to Victims of Sexual
Assaults)
"
The sense of personal empowerment that this training brings to its graduates
is beyond value. The program gives women a strong sense of their own
power and the ability to protect themselves from harm. Model Mugging
is the only self-defense course I would ever have my wife or daughter
take."
ROBERT BISHOP, Ph.D. (Program Director of Executive
Security International, the world’s top private body-guarding
academy)
"
Model Mugging should be mandatory training for any martial artist or
law enforcement officer who would benefit from facing their own fears.
More than any other training, it gives one a realistic sense, emotionally,
mentally and physically, as to what it is like to engage in mortal combat.
It is taught with compassion, humor and skill. I am extremely grateful
to Matt for teaching my daughter to protect herself "
LT. COLONEL JACK CHUE
(Helped design new physical, mental and hand-to-hand combat
courses for the U.S. Army Special Forces-Green Berets) "Transformation
at the deepest level requires at least these events:
- An experience of safety so as to allow great risking,
- An experience of success so as to encourage more risking,
- Acknowledgment that the success comes from one’s own power
and nowhere else.
The Model Mugging program achieves these extraordinary events over
and over again."
JERRY ROBINSON (President of Health for Life)
"
One hears that developing the Warrior Spirit requires years of martial
arts training or at the very least, a pilgrimage to the Far East.
Not so. Matt Thomas has found a way to develop it in a weekend. Poignant,
uplifting, primal and above all empowering. Model Mugging confronts
you with the reality of mortal combat and teaches you to survive."
THERESA SALDANA (Actress, Founder of Victims for
Victims)
"After my attack, I lived with so much fear. Model Mugging gave me a tremendous
feeling of self-confidence and healing."
PENELOPE SALINGER (Graduate)
"
Model Mugging has been one of the most challenging and powerfully
tranformative experiences I have every voluntary undertaken. It taught
me more than techniques. It reminded me that I am always capable
of more than I had thought. It held up a mirror before me, gently
forcing me to acknowledge my own courage."
Success
Rate of Graduates Fighting Back:
 Well
over 60,000 women have graduated from Model Mugging courses worldwide
and it is known that 206 have used their fighting skills since taking
the program on an average of 2 ½ years after graduating. Of
those 205 assaults, 200 (97%) graduates successfully fought off their
attacker.
Out of the five (3%) women who did not stop the assault,
two women were confronted by armed assailants where one assailant
used a gun
and the other used a knife. Both of these survivors were intimidated
by the weapon and chose not to surrender. (These two women did
not take the weapons training which deals with an armed assailant.)
The
third woman was hit over the head with a club-like object, knocked
unconscious and raped. A fourth woman was attacked on a transit
bus and was physically beaten but not raped. The fifth woman was
blitzed
by a mentally ill juvenile client and chose to curl into a protective
position until the client’s father pulled him off of her.
Of the 205 women who did fight back, about 40% forced the assailant
to flee and about 60% won by knockout. This data should be interpreted
with caution because there are individual and personal factors
that influence the reporting of both sexual and non-sexual assaults.
A Model Mugging graduate’s chance of being sexually assaulted
is significantly lower than women without such training. There
are various sources pointing to female victimization rates of 30%
or
higher and many survivors have a greater chance of being victimized
repetitively.
Most impressive are the thousands of graduates who
have used their boundary setting and de-escalation skills to successfully
stop
situations from becoming violent. A true testament to the verbal
art of self-defense.
There Are Never Any Guarantees:
Fighting back gives women the best results of stopping an attack.
Fighting back will not guarantee success and the consequences could
result in severe injury and even death. But that holds true for the
other three general options as well. Women who have fought back,
both avoiders and survivors, commonly feel better about themselves
when recovering. Women who were successful in fighting off an assailant
may still feel and suffer the effects of the post traumatic stress
disorder, specifically rape trauma syndrome, but with one difference:
they were victorious and won!
Knocking the assailant down does not mean the same as knocking
him out. You are not safe until you have decisively rendered the
assailant
unconscious. Even then he may regain consciousness and chase you.
Alternatively, he may run away before you are able to finish him
off, but you cannot count on that and you must still be cautious
because an assailant may pretend to run away, only to return and
attack you again, (Thomas, 1995).
Register for a Model Mugging course
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