Deëscalation tip #33

Creating new neural pathways can change our "natural" responses. 

Meeting an escalated person's unreasonable demands, accusations, and hostility with respectful listening may feel quite unnatural, even as our default reactions might be internally escalated and burning to meet aggression with aggression. The focus on deëscalation, as unnatural as it may feel, can help us overcome that default wiring. 

But only by practice can we slowly make that new neural pathway as well used and ultimately more easily taken than the old reactionary pathway. This is how we incrementally develop a new natural response, a new default pathway to manage escalated behavior--ours and theirs. We can speed up that adaptive process by much more practice.