D.E.F.U.S.E. DISRUPTIVE STUDENTS SAFELY AND QUICKLY.  PART I.

 

A Truism.  Ninety-seven to ninety-eight percent of all confrontations with disruptive or even violent students can be resolved quickly, safely and effectively with the use of professional communications, or Pro Com, emblematic of the Advanced De-Escalation Techniques Program or paradigm I offer teachers, security staff, Human Services and Health Care Professionals, law enforcement officers and others.

 

Take a peek at the next couple posts and maybe –if you think my Primary Principles of Defusing Others makes sense – consider trying these techniques, principles and skills the next time you are confronted by one or more aggressive students in seemingly untenable situations and I believe you will find – like I have in soooo many confrontational and potentially dangerous situations – that they will work just as well for you.

 

THE DEFUSE FORMULA

Don’t Lose Your Cool.  Depersonalize.  Deflect instead of Absorb Verbal Attacks.  Depreciate the Verbal Icon.

 

Encourage the student to vent.  Ego Suspension.

Find out the Facts.

Understand Feelings.

Slow Everything Down.

End on a Positive Note.

 

THE “D” IN “DEFUSE.”

 

Likely, I could write a book on how adhering to my “D” tenets could aide in any campaign to minimize Student/Workplace Violence.  Let’s take a look at each separate “D.”

 

Don’t Lose Your Cool.  This is so simple and obvious that I can almost hear the “No Duh’s” as I type.  And I can’t really count how many times people have commented to me, “Hammer, this is just Common Sense—“ but, here’s a fact:  The rarest commodity in a crisis is Common Sense.  And, so it is with Keeping Your Cool.  Losing one’s cool in a critical situation is far more common than the crucial skills of staying cool when everyone else is “hot.”  Here are a few salient Tips On Keeping Your Cool:

• Slow Everything Down.  Take the time to consciously think of what is happening.  Rushing triggers the Primitive Brain, which is dominant when we make critical and stupid statements that trigger violence.  Slow everything down and allow your Neo Cortex, or Intelligent Brain. To go to work.  Slow down your speech, the way you walk, your approach.  Everything.
• Breathe.  Try Tactical or Cycle Breathing to slow down your heart rate and eliminate or reduce the (survival) stress hormones flooding your system.  Without oxygenated blood flowing to your brain you can’t possibly think and act in such a way and in such a manner as to de-escalate a out of control student.  Inhale through your nose to a count of 2.  Hold your breath for another count of 2 and then exhale through your mouth for a count of 2.  Repeat this drill until you can feel the calm moving in.  The more you do this, the less you have to repeat or cycle this pattern.  Cycle Breathing mot only employs your Parasympathetic Nervous System to maximize calm, but uses the Synpathetic NS to maximize tactical arousal.
• Mirror Calm.  Yep.  I am asking you to fake, or act calm irrespective of how uncalm you might feel.  Your body, Central Nervous System and Heart rate can be fooled just as easily as the student to whom your are modeling calm.  Calm, like anger and fear, is communicable. 

 

DEPERSONALIZE.  Simple.  Do not take anything the student says or does personally.  This principle lies at the very heart of your ability to de-escalate a person and/or a scene.  Keep your ego out of the interaction.  Stay professional at all times.  De-escalation, you see, is more an attitude, maybe even a belief system, than a cluster of esoteric techniques.  Identify and untrigger all those buttons or triggers the student can push to get you upset.

 

DEFELECT.  Don’t, by all means, absorb (take it personally and allow it to influence how you respond) VAPS (Verbal Attack Patterns).  Instead deflect them.  Think like a power hitter and knock each one of them out of the park.  In order to do that the attitude you need to bring with you into every confrontational scenario is that your are going to absolutely and unemotionally —

 

DEPRECIATE THE VERBAL ICON.  Which is an esoteric way of saying simply that you are going to strip the student’s words of all power to affect you in any way.  Think of it.  What the student wants you to do is to value or “worship” his/her verbal attack. To give each profane and personally insulting word significance or weight.  And to do this, he/she is going to string together a series of words in order to elicit a prescribed response on your part (in other words, to influence you to abandon your professionalism, to lose your cool).  Instead, you are going to disempower (another “D”) the (attacking) words and the attacker him or herself through the Art of Depreciation.

 

In the Next Post:  The “E” and “F” of DEFUSE.  Until then, please Stay Safe.

Hammer

 

 

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