There’s a cliche that when you’re under real life stress, you fall back to your training. It’s a cliche for a reason. The whole purpose of training is to instal

There’s a cliche that when you’re under real life stress, you fall back to your training. It’s a cliche for a reason. The whole purpose of training is to install these behavioral programs, whether in self defense or in a law enforcement or military context. I remember reading a comment on AskReddit from an Iraq veteran. They were clearing a house and walked past a stairway. He checks the stairway and there’s a guy pointing an RPG directly at him. Without even thinking, he shoots and kills the guy. This was his first real combat engagement, and he said he was kind of shocked that without any conscious thought his training just sort of took over. There’s another anecdote about the training thing. I forget where I heard it from, but the guy did lots of martial arts and knew the techniques to disarm someone attacking him with a knife. Anyway, this guy gets attacked with a knife, and his training just kicks in, and he successfully disarms the guy and takes the knife from him. And then—because this is what he does in training—he immediately handed the knife back to the guy, who stabbed him. That’s a pretty dire illustration of the point, I think, but people under stress can be extremely stupid exactly because they are executing whichever program got imprinted into their brain.