RAPID De-escalation techniques

Through my years as a first responder, I encountered numerous situations, I was on scene one time of a man with a knife. The police department was there and it was a very tense situation, very traumatic in a sense for a lot of us because we knew within a split second if that man did something with that knife perhaps, he would be shot in front of us. It was just not a good situation so I asked because there was not the hostage negotiator available at the time I asked the police, I said Hey, will you have my back? If something happens, let me just try to talk to this guy and let’s try to calm this whole situation down right now.

Instead of camping things up, so what I did as a paramedic. I just started talking to him. I said: why you have a knife? What is your goal with the knife? You know that this is not going to go well for anybody here. You don’t want to hurt anybody. You just told me that so when can you drop the knife then when can we get you to help, when can we get you to a counselor and get you some help right now to help you feel better and eventually he dropped a knife and all went well that is the escalation the number one thing you need to do in a situation like that with workplace fines is you need to ensure your safety, your safety comes before everything all right so you need to ensure your safety and if you have the ability to establish trust and rapport with that person you want to have the ability to establish trust and rapport and you don’t break that you remain calm, you do not get into deep problem-solving.

I’m not there to analyze anything. I’m there to calm the situation down that is it I’m not there to solve everything and solve that person’s life story. I’m there to get the person to calm down. I’m there to let them talk until they are exhausted people when they are going through heightened states of anxiety. Their body is being flooded by hormones, remember we talked about that early so their body is literally being flooded by hormones and then perhaps this person might be having a way that they cope with their addiction where they’re using drugs perhaps or something like that so they’re amped up even more. So, if you let them keep talking and talking and talking and talking and talking and talking eventually, they’re going to get tired and you in the end will be tired as well.

So, self-care is very important after situations like this use supportive words to let them know that you care. People often don’t feel that they’re cared about and when they hear supportive words, they feel that okay, you know what there is somebody in this world, who is kind and you know all this pain. I want this pain to go away so from that point you can remain in control and negotiate towards an optimal outcome for now. You’re not trying to solve the problem. You’re just trying to solve the situation for now.

What’s the optimal outcome? The optimal outcome is hey, we have some people that are here, perhaps you call 9-1-1, perhaps you called the paramedics and the police and the mental health team. If the police department has a mental health team different, people can come out and you can make them aware on the call so that way. It’s not even tenser. When they get there that the right people are there, that the right trained staff are there as well to have the better outcome and to allow plenty of time for decisions and de-escalation.

So, this process, I hope this works. There are a lot of different de-escalation techniques that are out there. This is one that I use numerous times throughout my career as a first responder and it seemed to work fairly well.