How Dysregulation Affects De-Escalation

When it comes to adopting an appropriate stance for de-escalating a conflict or incident, remember: Bulldogs breed bulldogs.

It’s a slogan that Dr. Jude Bergkamp, a licensed psychologist with experience in detention facilities and hostage negotiation, keeps in mind during contentious situations. It means that meeting a person in a stressed or combative state with a stubborn, commanding, or aggressive response will likely escalate the situation further because the individual will respond in kind.

“When you bulldog up and puff your chest out because you think that’s what will control or decrease that threat, I think that’s highly faulty thinking,” says Bergkamp, who is currently a core faculty member in the Clinical Psychology Department at Antioch University Seattle. “That works in the boxing ring or pro wrestling, or on the battlefield, but that sort of move to base power and defaulting to physical intimidation is not going to get you to your main goal. It’s much more likely that you are playing a role that is probably contributing to the problem that you want to prevent.”

Instead, Bergkamp recommends meeting stressors with a mindful and deliberate sense of calm, which requires security professionals to evaluate their own state of mind before acting.

What is Emotional Dysregulation?

Emotional dysregulation is a cognitive symptom meaning that a person is having trouble managing his or her feelings and emotions. Often, the individual with emotional dysregulation’s reactions to events will seem out of proportion, according to the Cleveland Clinic.

Most people learn how to regulate their emotions as children, eventually outgrowing throwing oversized temper tantrums in response to small inconveniences and developing better coping strategies. But those strategies sometimes fail.

Emotional dysregulation in adults can result in persistent irritability, losing one’s temper more often, impulsive behavior, being easily frustrated by small inconveniences, and aggressive or violent behavior. The symptom can be linked to a variety of mental health conditions, neurodivergence, head injuries, or substance use disorders, but it is also a result of being under chronic stress.

The Role of Chronic Stress

When emotionally dysregulated, “you’ve got these physical, biological, cascading reactions that occur, usually due to the release of cortisol—the stress hormone,” Bergkamp says. “The stress of your environment, your role, work pressure, societal divisiveness, and all sorts of different things go into that kind of chronic release of cortisol and stress hormones throughout the body that can really result in things like both cognitive and physical fatigue.

“But it can also interfere with our executive function, like our frontal lobe’s ability to accurately perceive things and then rationally interpret what those are without resorting to a lot of cognitive shortcuts.”

Chronic stress degrades cognitive and executive functions in a variety of ways, Bergkamp says, but three are particularly important for crisis intervention and de-escalation.

The house of empathy. Chronic stress impacts the vagus nerve, which Bergkamp refers to as the “house of empathy” for humans.

The vagus nerve forms the basis of the parasympathetic nervous system, which controls bodily functions like digestion, heart rate, and immune system. The vagus nerve helps communicate information to the brain about how a person is feeling—whether safe or in danger. The vagus nerve can counterbalance humans’ fight-or-flight response if the person isn’t too stressed to slow down, breathe, and notice the nuances of his or her environment.

That ability to parse through nuances and small details of one’s surroundings is what makes the vagus nerve an empathy powerhouse. Adopting a state of mind that enables the person to evaluate situations, see another person’s perspective, find commonalities and patterns, and be more situationally aware results in more agile de-escalation and conflict management.

But chronic stress shuts off many of the executive functions (like mindful breathing) that enable people to leverage these responses.

Cognitive shortcuts. When stressed, people are more likely to rely on cognitive shortcuts like implicit biases to make faster decisions, often skipping over slower or more nuanced decision-making processes.

When studying custody officers working in prisons, Bergkamp found that use-of-force decisions are made quite a bit quicker when the officer is under chronic stress. The officer will issue fewer requests or commands for inmate compliance before taking physical action, and the amount of time between the initial engagement and use of force is reduced, he says.

Hypervigilance. When the brain resorts to biased thinking, it often results in hypervigilance, where a person is constantly looking for threats.

Bergkamp cites a classic example: A hypervigilant person will mistake a rope for a snake. Once that perception hits, the individual is likely to skip the cognitive steps of assessment and impulse control, instead assuming the worst-case scenario and acting accordingly.

Crisis is a Two-Way Street

“A dysregulated person is inevitably going to dysregulate you,” Bergkamp says.

Confronting an individual in distress is uncomfortable, stressful, and often unusual, which makes it more challenging for responders to address the situation rationally and calmly. But if an incident responder is feeding off a subject’s stress or is also in a stressed state from the start, he or she can mistake a lot of signs for pre-attack indicators.

“Your empathy goes down, your concern for folks goes down, you’re hypervigilant, and your brain is going to fill in the blanks erroneously,” Bergkamp says. “It’s kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

This is where the bulldog metaphor comes in—if both parties in a conflict are puffed up, fighting for control over the situation, then it will likely continue to escalate.

Instead, a security official in a position of authority can best regain control by exuding calm, trying to communicate with the person in crisis, and remaining situationally aware of different possibilities and factors.

Just as another person’s stressed state can impact a responder, that responder’s calm, empathy, and self-awareness can be contagious, Bergkamp says. Humans innately seek to mirror the behavior of people around them, so demonstrating what behavior you want the individual to perform can guide them to a more stable position.

Regulate Yourself

So, how can security personnel and incident responders model that appropriate behavior? It starts with self-regulation.

“You need to cultivate an internal discipline of regulating first your biological reactions: What’s my heartbeat? Where’s my breathing? Where do I notice my attention going? What’s the rate and volume of my speech? How am I carrying my body? What am I doing with my hands? Where am I looking?” Bergkamp says.

“Ultimately, it comes down to the regulation of breathing and getting back into the present moment in the body,” he continues.

In times of stress, people often hold their breath, depriving the vagus nerve of stimulation, which pushes people more toward that fight-or-flight instinct. Taking just a few deep, slow breaths—in through the nose for a count of six and out through the mouth for the count of eight—can help boost its function.

“Those sorts of mindful internal interventions will, in a way, short-circuit the inevitable cascading, hypervigilant, cognitive bias, and literally get your frontal lobe back online and your vagus nerve pumping again,” Bergkamp says. “Then you’re not only focusing on the potential threat, but you’re able to attend to the whole context of things.”

That context includes understanding your role in the situation, who else is around, and what resources you have available, making the response much more flexible and agile. But it also includes the responder’s own state of mind and emotion in the moment, which itself can be an effective tool for de-escalation.

“There’s this misconception about vulnerability, and I have challenged threat assessment folks—mostly custody officers and law enforcement officers—to consider what would happen if they said an ‘I’ statement like ‘I’m feeling a little stressed right now’ or ‘This feels kind of stressful; how can I help decrease this?’” Bergkamp says. “Our ability to acknowledge what’s going on with us, that self-awareness, can be contagious as well.”

Self-awareness helps the person in crisis inspect his or her own feelings and state of mind, opening a window for further conversation and de-escalation.

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