Verbally Defusing Violent Confrontations

Why did we start with this topic? It’s because newspaper and TV news editors have a saying: “If it bleeds, it leads.” We are surrounded daily with news and images of violence. A prominent psychiatrist and author wrote that we “live in a trauma-based society.” The F.B.I. reports that there are 2,000,000 acts of physical violence reported to the police from the workplace each year in the U.S. The leading cause of death for women in the workplace is homicide, O.S.H.A. reports. People feel pretty helpless against all of it. When an incident happens, it affects all employees in the company. It becomes harder to recruit and retain talent once it’s happened.

Even for the employee who feels impervious at work—perhaps they work in the accounting department in a nice suburban office building—they know there is risk outside of work, on the street, in a shopping mall…all over. So the company shows it really cares in a principled way by providing training that benefits the employee even outside of work. (* No place is actually free of the possibility of incidents.)

There is something more. Before you learn fine motor coordination—how to play a piano or basketball—you have to learn gross coordination, like a baby reaching for a bottle. Learning how to deal with gross acts of threat or attack, you learn the basics that are refined in our later training dealing with the much more frequent subtle attacks of insults, put-downs, dirty looks, slights, silences, and other dysfunctions of workplace interactions. If you trained in the intensity of violence confrontations you will have the core to master the subtle ones.

Your practice develops new self-confidence, centeredness, and leadership. The trainees learn empathy and a new way to view the aggression of others. This will have great importance when dealing with stress and communications with difficult people and unproductive relations.