Deëscalation tip #55

Left to our own casual devices, human-to-human responses tend to obey the laws of inertia. If I am escalating, your human senses are perceiving possible threat and you can naturally escalate. We build on each other's behavior, sometimes with dire consequences.

But with intention and even minimal skills, you can meet my escalation with calm and compassionate curiosity, making it harder and harder for me to maintain my rise in anger. 

The neurobiology of conflict helps explain this, as neuroscientists describe how our brains have evolved to almost constantly seek to identify both threats and rewards.

So when I escalate you must overcome your own escalatory response, one that might well happen normally because you now perceive me as a threat. But with your intention to deëscalate, and some rudimentary competencies, you can neutralize your own amygdala hijack and keep your brain operating in the prefrontal cortex, consciously meeting my escalating behaviors with your disciplined calm. 

When you engage your compassionate curiosity, my brain begins to pick up a potential reward instead of a compounded threat. It may be tentative at first, but you are working through your sympathetic gestures and reflective listening to convince me that you are actually interested in what is bugging me so much. 

Someone wants to listen to me? Yeah, that's a reward I wasn't expecting at this point, but if you can continue to convince me, I will gladly switch out my fear of threat for my appreciation of reward. My own prefrontal cortex can take control from my amygdala. You have reversed the direction of the inertia and my deëscalation is now following yours.

Thanks, I needed that.