What You’ll Get From This Entry
Why the stories we tell ourselves to justify violence eventually shape who we become
How dehumanising an opponent creates moral injury and long-term damage
My own journey from scared, quiet kid to angry, hardened martial artist, and the price of carrying that persona
Why reorienting martial arts toward inner peace has become my only way forward
I no longer watch MMA. I’ll go into that more another time, but the short of it is this: as someone who grew up surviving childhood violence, and later dealt it out myself, I can’t do it anymore. Not as spectacle, not as “sport,” not as the neatly packaged entertainment it’s become. But that’s not the main point here, though it connects.
Recently, someone sent me a clip of an MMA fighter from my part of the world, where I grew up. In it, he dehumanised his opponent. On the surface, it may seem trivial, just hype, just words, just part of the fight game. After all, outrage sells. But what I saw wasn’t strength. What I saw was fear in his .
There’s really no reason to talk with such venom unless either you’re a sociopath (always possible), or you’re masking what’s boiling underneath — fear — and desperately trying to find a way to justify what you need to do to get through this. This reminds me of Jonathan Shay’s Achilles in Vietnam, a book I consider essential. Shay notes that dehumanising an adversary isn’t just a way to justify violence. It inflicts moral injury on the one doing it. You may not notice the fallout in the moment, but over time, even years later, it seeps out in behaviour, breaking down your psyche. Shay’s research connected dehumanisation directly to the later development of PTSD in combat veterans.
Which brings me to the deeper point of this journal entry: something I didn’t understand when I was younger, but I know now, and research backs it up. The story you tell yourself about doing violence, the narrative you create to make it palatable, isn’t just a story. Words spoken in your head or to others don’t stay words. They shape you. They become embodied. They change the nervous system, the body, and the spirit. The rhetoric you use to justify violence is not neutral, it gets written into your muscles, your chemistry, your identity. What you say, you eventually become.
My Story
Contrary to what people often assume, I hated violence growing up. I wasn’t aggressive. I was timid, quiet, an outcast. But living in government housing with an abusive alcoholic mother, I hardened up over time to survive. Later, the military and years working as a bouncer outside some of Johannesburg’s roughest nightclubs poured accelerant on that fire. By the time I moved into martial arts coaching full-time, I carried heavy trauma, deep anger, and yet I was still shit-scared of violence.
That contradiction defined me. I kept convincing myself I wasn’t afraid. I fed myself a steady diet of trauma-fuel and tough rhetoric to force myself into violence. I told myself I needed to be seen as a badass. Growing up dismissed, timid, ignored, I craved respect. I wanted to be feared. I believed if I stepped up every time — on the mat, in the ring, on the street — I’d finally overcome my insecurities. I thought if I could dominate anyone who challenged me, men would stop testing me, and I’d never again feel powerless.
So I built the persona. The tough guise. The no-nonsense, don’t-fuck-with-me attitude. And yes, it worked, well partially. Men stopped messing with me. Many feared me. Others gave me the respect I’d longed for since childhood. And here’s the uncomfortable truth: I’m 100% certain that wouldn’t have happened if I’d chosen a different path, say as an artist. Like it or not, the quickest way to gain respect among men is still to dominate physically. But it comes with a brutal price that most don’t want to acknowledge, as it is too painful.
The constant need to uphold toughness, never showing weakness, physical or emotional, is draining. It warps your mind, your worldview, your spirit. Instead of making me less angry, it made me more angry. The more I justified violence, whether as sport, self-defence, or street survival, the further I drifted from inner peace. Society tells men that this posture is required to “be a man.” For those who struggle with that archetype, the pressure is immense. You either embody it, or you risk being branded weak—a pussy. So we crave it, because the alternative is humiliation.
But cracks appeared. Off the mat. In my relationships. In how I saw other people, not as humans but as potential opponents. Slowly, I realised this path only leads to self-destruction. It doesn’t lead to peace.
Reorienting
These days, I’m constantly reorienting myself. I pay attention not just to what I do on the mat, but to how I speak about it, to myself and to others. My mantra now is simple:
If leaving the mat doesn’t make me calmer, more present, more focused, and more compassionate—to myself and to the world—then I don’t want to engage in that kind of training.
To many, especially those who’ve drunk the Kool-Aid of violence-as-entertainment or simply as a necessary, inevitable consequence of humanity, this looks like weakness. I’ve heard it before: “You’ve lost your edge.” But here’s the truth: I’ve gained my edge. Because the ultimate edge isn’t domination. It’s not intimidation. It’s not fear. The sharpest edge is inner peace, the kind that allows you to meet violence without needing to become it.
Ironically, the more I’ve embodied inner peace, the better I’ve become at handling violence. Not as an end in itself, not as a performance, but as a necessary skill in service of life. Violence is still there. The ability is still there. But it no longer owns me. And that, to me, is what martial arts was always supposed to be about.
As a caveat to all this: it’s really not that hard to commit violence. You can smash through an opponent on the mat, convince yourself it’s just part of the game, and tell yourself that if you’re not going all out, there’s no point to it at all. But the alternative, to choose inner peace, is so fucking hard. Honestly, I’ve fought and dropped some of the so-called best fighters in the world, and that was easy compared to confronting my real opponent: myself.
If you don’t want to face the real problems inside, the ones holding you back from becoming what I call a Mindful Warrior — someone anchored in inner peace — then use anger. It’s an excellent fuel source. It burns hot and fast, and it conveniently bypasses the need to wrestle with what Jung would call your unconscious. But here’s the catch: once you let anger justify your actions, your behaviour, your mindset, you risk getting stuck there forever. That’s what happened to me. I became angry at everything, my life, my situation, and I blamed everyone and everything else except myself.
Closing
If you take one thing from this: remember that the words you use to justify your fight — the story you tell — will eventually write itself into your body, and then show up everywhere, especially with those you love most. Choose your story carefully. Because in the end, the greatest victory isn’t over another man, it’s over the war inside yourself.
PS. If you would like to explore more of the Mindful Warrior Philosophy, you have access to a complimentary copy of my book The Path of the Mindful Warrior.
Much Love!
- Coach King
If what I’ve written here resonates, then you already know: there’s a different way forward in martial arts. A path that doesn’t glorify violence, but instead points toward inner peace — without ever losing the ability to protect yourself when it matters.
If you’re ready to walk that path with me, here are three ways to begin:
Read the book → The Path of the Mindful Warrior lays out the philosophy and practices that have shaped my journey. [GET YOUR COPY HERE]
Come train in person → The Mindful Warrior Experience on the Isle of Man isn’t just another retreat. It’s a reset. Three days of movement, presence, and real conversations about what martial arts is truly for. [FIND OUT MORE]
Join the Virtual Mat → If you want to train the Crazy Monkey method and explore inner peace at the same time, the Virtual Mat is where you’ll find me and a community walking this path. [JOIN HERE]
You don’t have to keep buying into the performance, the bravado, or the bullshit. Martial arts can still be what it was always meant to be: a practice for living fully, courageously, and peacefully.