Breaking Through to Better Communication During De-Escalation

What do shouting, sighing, smiling, throwing things, and crying all have in common? These are all forms of communication. Understanding that all behaviors are a form of communication is the essential first step in learning how to intervene in crises and other incidents, says AlGene Caraulia, vice president of integration and sustainability for the Crisis Prevention Institute (CPI).

“As the intervener, I may not know what really is precipitating a particular event,” Caraulia says. “What I can do, however, as the intervener, is recognize that the behavior may actually be subconsciously communicating an unmet need or a trauma. It might even be communicating confusion. For us as interveners, our opportunity here is to recognize that the behavior is communicating something…. It’s an opportunity for someone to communicate that something’s going on here.”

Human beings are dynamic—our moods, behaviors, and states of mind can shift rapidly depending on a myriad of factors. So, responding to humans in crisis requires agility and flexibility, as well as a healthy dose of self-awareness.

At CPI, the focus is on the identification and management of aggressive behaviors and empowering employees to respond to those behaviors in a way that minimizes the risk of injury—whether psychological, social, or physical—to the person in crisis or the staff, Caraulia says.

“In healthcare, it’s creating a healthy environment for care. In retail, it’s a customer experience and one in which you feel like you’re not being hung out to dry. In education, it’s ensuring I’m taking care of this student and being able to prepare him or her for a productive life. I don’t want to impede their growth,” he adds.

Accomplishing those essential goals amid tension, crises, and personal strife requires mindful communication, both verbally and nonverbally.

“Our understanding that behavior is communication is critical,” Caraulia says. “Regardless of whether it’s positive or otherwise, it’s still a form of communication.”

This underpins all de-escalation and crisis intervention efforts. An angry customer, panicked hospital patient, security officer experiencing post-traumatic stress, or a student having an anxiety attack are all communicating about their needs through their behavior, although those messages are sometimes difficult to translate into an effective response. The communication might take the form of shouting or an outburst, or it could look like a typically outgoing student suddenly shutting down and not speaking in class. Evaluating behavior against a baseline—whether for that individual or for standard behavior in a particular setting, like an airport—helps to determine when someone needs extra attention or assistance.

“It’s an opportunity for someone unknowingly or maybe intentionally to communicate that something’s going on here and I need help,” Caraulia says. “You may even look at it in that light, that we’re asking for help in those situations.”

In these moments, the intervener’s goal is to be able to form a connection and communicate with the person in crisis.

Context Matters

Confronting someone who is overly emotional or experiencing a crisis is uncomfortable, whether it’s a colleague in the office or a stranger in a retail store. In the rush to get the uncomfortable experience over with quickly, responders will often try to hustle the situation along and fail to observe key context clues that could either resolve the situation more positively or put them at risk when they miss pre-attack indicators, says Anne-Maartje Oud, behavioral and communication expert and owner/founder of The Behaviour Company, which offers training worldwide about behavior, body language, and conversational techniques.

“When we are under stress… emotions have primacy in that moment,” Oud says. “So, what you see with security people is that they try to influence others with content—‘Don’t do this,’ or ‘I want you to do this’—but it’s difficult for the person to pick up on it because they are so under the influence of emotion. Then, it’s helpful to use our body language to connect in a different way.”

The context for de-escalation and crisis response can be incredibly diverse, which is why behavioral experts are often hesitant to offer hard-and-fast rules and scripts for interventions, Oud says. Doctors are facing demands from patients who have spent the days before their appointment looking up their symptoms online and planning their own course of treatment. Retail shoppers may be flustered by high prices, locked up merchandise, or a thousand other personal factors that happened outside the store.

For us as interveners, our opportunity here is to recognize that the behavior is communicating something…. It’s an opportunity for someone to communicate that something’s going on here and they need help.

Although it’s easy to assign a nefarious or targeted intent to people acting out or in distress, the underlying cause is often unrelated to the setting or target of the outburst, Caraulia says. However, the uncomfortable situation must be dealt with, and security professionals can use their emotional intelligence and crisis intervention tools to de-escalate the situation.

It often helps to take a breath, take a step back, and evaluate context along three different lines to determine a better path toward valuable communication.

Content. What’s being said, both by the individual and the intervener? The content of the interaction—whether responding to a person shoplifting or hearing that the individual’s loved one has died—should shape the rest of the response.

Procedure. When is the event occurring, and how much time does the intervener have to handle the event? What is the duration of the event? Where is the conversation happening—a public space or a private one—and how could that setting affect the subject’s emotional state or the need to resolve the situation quickly?

Interaction. Consider how the interaction will affect the responder and others in the space. “How you interact is crucial on how things escalate or de-escalate,” Oud says. “Because if you’re tired and you’ve had a bad day, or if it’s the tenth person who is caught shoplifting today, you will have a different way of acting, and that translates to the other person as well. It doesn’t mean you always have to be like a saint. That’s not possible. But we have to be aware of our own influence in the setting.”

Although these interactions are often uncomfortable for the intervener and for bystanders, the intervener’s preferences are not the most important factor during de-escalation, Oud says. Even if it feels uncomfortable to sit with a coworker who is having an emotional breakdown, it’s important to ask the person what they need rather than assuming they want space or a glass of water and leaving the room, which could make the individual feel abandoned.

“It’s not always easy, and if you feel connected with that person, maybe your emotions will intensify,” she adds. “But I think it’s easier to get that comfort level going by asking them, ‘What is it that you need at this moment? How can I help you?’ If there’s an escalation going on, and that is not how this person normally responds, you can say, ‘Hey, Carl, what is happening? You don’t normally do this. This must be really intense for you. Tell me about it.’”

Managers who are very familiar with their employees can apply these tools quickly because they already know their workers’ preferences and baselines. So, if it’s normal for an employee to cry and work through a stressor, the manager knows to give him or her the space to do so. If the intervener feels he or she missed the mark in the first interaction, checking in and ensuring the individual has the support he or she needs offers a second chance at connection.

In any context, the core element to connection is going to be validation. “Even if you’re emotional, even if you’re fired… if you feel validated, like I’m listening to you, like I see you, like you’re not just a number, then de-escalation will happen much, much sooner than in other situations,” Oud says. “Acknowledging that person is key, whatever the context is.”

Behavior Influences Behavior

Interveners have an outsized influence on the individuals around them, and their actions often speak louder than their words.

“The things I do as the professional, as the intervener, are going to have an impact on this person in crisis, regardless of whether it’s what I say or how I say things, how I manage my space, or my body language,” Caraulia says. “These are all going to be ways in which we are communicating back to the person in crisis. That’s why it’s so critical for us to be mindful and aware of how the crisis impacts me, what are my behaviors, and how and what am I communicating in these moments.”

If an intervener starts yelling directions at a person who is also yelling, it immediately masks which individual is in charge and escalates the situation. “The moment a teacher starts yelling and screaming at a student, they’ve lost the opportunity to really help and guide a student,” Caraulia says. “The students are looking for guidance—they’re looking for people who are going to tell them what needs to happen in that moment.”

Despite some preconceptions, this is not an instinctive process, he adds. De-escalation and crisis intervention can be learned, but some practices will need to be unlearned.

“People try to convince others with content, but the way we say that is very essential,” Oud says. Sharply instructing someone to “calm down” is unlikely to be effective. But making a humming sound, with a nod of the head, is more likely to catch the individual’s focus and convince them that you want to hear their perspective, which is usually validating and calming.

Overall, three non-content elements are most helpful when it comes to creating comfort in a stressful situation, she explains.

Tone of voice. If what you say doesn’t match how you say it, trust is lost. Using a loud, forceful tone to tell someone that you understand they are feeling stressed is unlikely to soothe them. Adopting a softer, quieter tone of voice is more useful, since individuals will often also quiet down to ensure they can hear the intervener, Caraulia says.

Proximity. During de-escalation, responders tend to come closer to the individual in distress to try and influence them, Oud says. But it is often more effective to give the individual in crisis the space they need to feel safe. In general, this puts the intervener out of easy reach—which is safer for them anyway—but for someone who is crying or feeling sad or hurt, coming a little closer can be comforting, she adds. Sometimes even miming touching the person on the upper arm can signal support and safety.

Space to vent. Although safety must always come first, “the best conversations take place with comfort for both parties, and if someone is not comfortable, it is important that we give them some room to get that discomfort out of the way,” Oud says. “That means letting them have the emotion for a while.”

Prepare for the de-escalation process to take time. Interveners can signal to the individual that they are not rushed through nonverbal communication. Slower movements and slower speech patterns demonstrate that the intervener has time to work through the issue, and the reduced pace often helps de-escalate anxiety on its own when people want to mimic the responder’s rate or volume of speech, Oud says. Conversely, fidgeting, checking a smartphone or other device regularly, adopting a furrowed glabella or furrowed brow facial expression, or demonstrating fast or erratic movements can make the individual feel that the responder is rushed or anxious, exacerbating their own stressed state.

If verbal de-escalation does not work and restrictive practices or physical interventions are needed, that doesn’t mean de-escalation has ended, Caraulia says.

“Everywhere from the early stages of someone displaying that anxiety all the way through to the moment when they’ve reached a place of tension reduction, we want to make sure that we are continuing those de-escalation efforts,” he adds. That means using restrictive practices that are designed to minimize risk of injury or harm to the staff and the individual, as well as listening closely to the person in crisis and adjusting accordingly.

Even if that individual is never going to be a customer of an establishment again, he or she is still likely to talk to other people about the experience and the brand—making every effort to de-escalate and smooth the interaction pays off in workplace safety and long-term reputation management, Caraulia says.

Strategic Training

Just as not every employee needs the same depth of cybersecurity technical skill as the IT team, not every employee needs the full roster of crisis response training, from greeting to assessment to physical intervention, say Caraulia. However, all employees need to be trained in some intervention fundamentals to help keep them safe and to represent the organization.

“If we are, at the very least, providing some baseline understanding of what crisis behavior looks like and how to identify it in its early stages, if we are able to provide some fundamental frameworks about how we respond to crisis behavior, what that does is it lays a foundation for an experience—a customer, education, or healthcare experience—so that everyone has a common knowledge, understanding, and language that they’re working from,” he says.

This helps to undercut a “break glass in case of emergency” mindset, where employees do not feel empowered to handle uncomfortable situations and are always calling in outside assistance.

That doesn’t mean that every employee would get the full slate of training, which would likely be too expensive and a waste of time. Staff in critical areas, security teams, or customer-facing individuals would likely receive more specialized and in-depth training than behind-the-scenes employees, and Caraulia recommends a systematic, risk-based approach to de-escalation and intervention training based on expectations of staff members.

When CPI partners with an organization, it will map out the entire organization, evaluating job titles, departments, and work assignments to create an organizational profile. CPI then uses that profile to recommend different levels of training based on job needs. Some individuals just need awareness training, others would get verbal intervention training, and others might also get disengagement skills training, such as how to release yourself from a hair pull or chokehold.

It's important to remember that responding to a person in crisis can trigger trauma for the responder, as well, so building processes and resources to help care for interveners is essential, Caraulia says. Many responders will leave the encounter ruminating over what went wrong, how they could have helped the individual more, or what will happen to that individual next. So, during after-action reviews and debriefs, he recommends that managers, trainers, and security personnel focus first and foremost on what went right.

He recommends that employees work through positive questions first, such as what worked, where did you feel successful, how did the outcomes benefit the person in crisis, how did they benefit you, and how did your actions benefit the organization. After that, then examine just one or two aspects that could be improved to help interveners during the next situation. Reframing the conversation helps to keep responders feeling empowered and willing to try de-escalation again.

“I think that the greatest opportunity is for us to reframe our thinking and out behavior as professionals,” Caraulia says. “There’s a bit of a misnomer there in that I’m not saying that what we’re doing is wrong. All of the intervening professionals are doing amazing work. I would argue that 98 percent of the time they are extremely successful in de-escalating and defusing situations before they become violent. They’re creating good relationships with the people in their charge, whether it’s in a school or retail or hospital environment. I think that we need to be able to focus on—hey, we’re doing good things. How do I do more of those good things? By reframing out behaviors, reframing our thinking around crisis, it gives us the opportunity to understand and recognize that and enforce it.”

Claire Meyer is editor-in-chief for Security Management. Connect with her on LinkedIn or email her directly at [email protected].