Welcome to my first blog post for Psychology Today! I’d like to share with you how I got here and what I’ll be offering in this space.

I think of fear of interpersonal violence as existing on a spectrum. At one end are people who think "nothing will happen to me" (denial), and at the other are those who are scared all the time.

I grew up in a big city where street harassment, starting for me when I was 11 (some 30 percent of girls in the U.S. experience their first public-space harassment before age 13), constantly reminded me of my vulnerability to sexual assault. I always believed that if anyone ever tried to rape me, there’d be nothing I could do because I assumed they’d be bigger and stronger than I was. So I was closer to the scared-all-the-time end of the spectrum.

When I was 28, I took my first self-defense class and learned that I did have options—that I did have power. That realization transformed my life. I now have options, and I understand that I can resist.

And it's not just about physical strikes. I also learned that I have the right to speak up. I found my voice. I learned how to ask for what I wanted and to say “no” when I wanted to. I had less fear, more confidence. I was less angry and prickly because it was now safe to be kind.

This transformation was life-changing for me.

I wanted more.

So I took all the empowerment self-defense classes I could find (read more about how empowerment self-defense is different from other types of self-defense here). I wanted to share what I had learned and give students a chance to transform their own lives in their own ways, so I learned how to teach it. About 10 years after that first class, I quit my day job to be able to teach more than just nights and weekends.

Empowerment self-defense (ESD) is........

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