So I thought it might be worthwhile (and we'll see how that judgment pans out) to start a thread discussing:
1. How do you recognize when you are in that cycle?
2. What do you do to break out of it once you recognize it?
One of the places where a cascading crisis often turns up that results in an absolute disaster is with aircraft crashes. Before you have a crash of most aircraft, you have a lot of factors that have to come into play that often a change is just one of them will result in the disaster not occurring. Quite commonly when the pilots of doomed aircraft have made decisions that end up being part of that negative cascade, they are actually making the proper decisions based on the information available to them at the time. The downside to this is that it is often the case that the pilots don't actually have the proper information or a way to know if they have the proper information in order to make the correct decisions. In using the benefit of hindsight, it would appear that many such decisions are stupid because they helped result in the crash, but in reality, the decisions were appropriate given what the pilots thought they knew at the time and given the other parameters of the situations.
Ask yourself, "Is what I'm about to do actually NECESSARY? What are the potential consequences?"
This can be good if you have enough time to really sit down and think about what is going on, but a lot of self defense and disaster situations don't allow for much luxury of time in this requard or to have the time and resources to determine all of the things that need to be known before one can make this decision correctly.
One of the things that studying crashes has revealed to me about making decisions in a crisis is that a person can make a lot of very good decisions given the information they have at the time and the parameters of the situation that is developing and still end up in disaster. Why? Because it can be very difficult to actually have all of the correct information to make such decisions or know whether or not you have all the correct information to make such decisions. In many cases, pilots did things that turned out very well without actually knowing what needed to be known in order to make a proper decision concerning the problem.
I have been bothered by many of the NTSB reviews that determine an air disaster to be pilot error. Even when the pilots did everything right to bring the plane down, the NTSB looks at if they did everything right to result in the least amount of damage or injury. For example with the Miracle on the Hudson, after striking the geese that resulted in loss of thrust in both engines, the pilot took command of the plane while the co-pilot followed procedures to restart the engines. Attempting to restart the engines was a fool's errand. Given the low altitude, there was no way to get through all the steps of an engine restart before crashing, but this was not information that the pilots had and was not stated in their quick reference manual. Given the information they had, it was the correct decision, but they did not have the correct information to know whether or not the decision to attempt to restart was correct until running out of time. So the decision to restart was wrong. Fortunately, that wrong decision did not result in making the decision worse.
So how do you recognize when you are in such a cycle? Good question. Given the time parameters of crisis situations, people often don't have the time or mental accumen to recognize being in such a cycle because recognizing the cycle is not something that seems relevant given the negative parameters of the situation (blood, noise, fire, scream, pain, etc.).
Several years ago I was reading about fighter pilot training and it was noted that when your plane came under attack that you could do the right thing, the wrong thing, and do nothing. In that sort of situation, it was determined that doing nothing resulted in the greatest loss of aircraft and pilots because it essentially made the aircraft a "sitting duck" so to speak. Doing the right thing, given the type of attack, produced the greatest amount of success, but was never 100%. Doing the wrong thing often produced failure resulting in the loss of the aircraft, but surprisingly, doing the wrong thing actually was beneficial something like 10-20% of the time. So doing either the right thing or the wrong thing were both better than doing nothing. We have seen this with several of the attack and gun fight videos. On occasion, the good guy does the wrong thing and ends up being successful.
"Nobody ever rises to the occasion, they just fall back to their level of training."
Sorry, but this is another one of those nonsensical mantras we keep spouting over and over again. Time and time again, people have risen to the occasion during emergency disaster and self defense situations and have done very well...which is really amazing because in many of these situations, the person has no actual training for handling that type of situation. While you may not be able to count on people rising to the occasion beyond their level of training, it most certainly does happen.