What does self-defense mean? How Military and DoD Communities benefit from empowerment-focused self-defense
- Nicole Snell
- Dec 15, 2025
- 2 min read
Lately I've been doing a lot of thinking about what self-defense means for different people. Empowerment focused self-defense is about more than physical skills and because of that, it's application is highly versatile. Its benefits far exceed the primary goal of prevention, including confidence building, anxiety reduction, and a decrease in PTSD symptoms.
Self-defense can be used to educate and empower many different industries, groups, and organizations with life skills that can be applied anywhere.
In November, I started a new campaign on my Girls Fight Back IG page called “Self-Defense For…”. I've been sharing my take on what self-defense looks like for different groups. I started with colleges, and personal trainers and will discuss what it looks like for many other demographics to highlight how crucial and universal these safety skills are.
What is Empowerment-Focused Self-Defense For Military & DoD Communities?
They are strategies to strengthen resilience, morale, safety, and readiness for your military organization and their families. I've had the honor of training every branch of the US Military and the Coast Guard at hundreds of installations around the world with these techniques.
Military communities usually learn "self-defense" in the context of dealing with an enemy in a combat situation using lethal force. Combatives and self-defense are not the same. Both are needed for mission readiness, mental health, and safety for military communities because they serve completely different purposes.
First of all we have to remember that self-defense is about more than physical skills. So how do you protect yourself in daily interpersonal exchanges with people in a non-lethal way?
I'm here to teach you realistic and effective everyday empowerment-focused self-defense strategies for how to address boundaries, discomfort, and threats in our regular interpersonal encounters and relationships. This helps service members of all ranks develop emotional intelligence, learn how to interact and communicate with each other, assert boundaries, and preserve relationships. Not only that, but this type of training prevents violence, increases confidence, and helps survivors heal from trauma.
Empowerment-Based Self-Defense trainings are practical tools for the vast majority of daily encounters in military and DoD communities. They'll be equipped with realistic, research-backed, and trauma-informed verbal, mental and physical skills to address interpersonal relationships, workplace encounters, and problematic interactions.
✨Ready to bring me in to empower your installation? Email me today!
