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Wilderness Drum, Inc.
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Steve Beyer Controlling Your Own Stress For you to act as a peacemaker when dealing with disruptive, violent, and out-of-control behavior, you must maintain your own stress within manageable limits. This can be difficult. You may be challenged, verbally abused, threatened, intimidated, spit on, pushed, punched, grabbed, and bitten. Through all this, the peacemaker must stay calm, in control, and aware at all times of the welfare and safety of the person in crisis. There are a number of steps you can take in preparation for this challenge. First , you must avoid succumbing to the same stressors that may cause disruptive behavior in others. A wilderness group leader can easily be put in a situation of great stress. An unplanned survival situation, a medical emergency, an avalanche, an unexpected snowstorm can place great strain on the leader’s ability to cope effectively with multiple demands. There is no magic formula for dealing with the stress in such a situation. But the following are some thoughts that might be useful when you start to feel overwhelmed, either when the situation first begins or when the situation seems to have persisted beyond endurance. - Take a deep breath. Move your shoulders to relieve tension. Calm down. Center.
- Face facts. Honestly assess the situation without blaming anyone or wishing you were somewhere else. Sometimes the only way out is through. Sometimes you have to go through unpleasant and demanding experiences. Accept it.
- Acknowledge your own competence, training, and experience. You have thought about just such a situation, read about how to deal with it, trained for it. Remember that you are capable of doing what the situation demands. Say, “OK, I can do this.”
- Recognize that you can control your feelings and reactions. You don’t have to be angry or upset.
- Accept that you have limited ability to determine how everything turns out. You can only control inputs; you can’t control outcomes. Your responsibility is to do the very best job you can under the circumstances. What happens then is not in your hands.
- Do something useful. Organize your medical kit. Start water for coffee.7
- Make a plan. Break down what you need to do into small, manageable steps. Prioritize. Do the first thing on your list.
- Change your perspective. Reframe the situation. Think about it as an unfolding story you will be able to tell your grandchildren. Think about it as a challenge to your people management skills. Think about it as a potential article for Outside Magazine. Focus on what you are learning about your equipment, about the team, about your training – and consider the ways you can improve things when the situation is resolved and you are back home.
Second, you must not let someone else’s disruptive or out-of-control response to stress cause you to lose your own centeredness and control. There are several ways to achieve a sense of objectivity when helping a person get through a behavioral crisis. - It is helpful to bear in mind that crisis behavior is due to causes over which you have little or no control. This is a way of depersonalizing the behavior, of realizing that the behavior is, ultimately, not directed at you personally, however personal it may seem at the time.
- Breathe evenly and regularly. Relax your extremities. Pull your shoulders down and back. Unclench your fists.
- Know what makes you afraid, and practice ahead of time to deal with it. This is especially true of facing a physical attack. Practicing how to deal with a physical attack before it occurs can give you confidence that you are able to keep both yourself and the assaultive person safe and under physical control. Be in the habit of noting where your escape routes are as you deal with a potentially violent person.
- Similarly, know what makes you angry, what your sensitive areas are, what sorts of threats can push you over the edge. Believe me, a verbally aggressive person will figure these things out pretty quickly, and you have to be prepared to control yourself or call for assistance.
- Have help available. Train another group leader in your methods of dealing with disruptive or assaultive behavior, so that the other leader can be available to step in when you start losing perspective.
Notes 7 Wilderness survival expert Ron Hood once told me that, in a crisis situation, the first thing to do is to take a shit. This has three benefits. First, it is useful. You will have to do it sooner or later anyway, so you are accomplishing a needed task. Second, it provides perspective. There you are, in the middle of a crisis, squatting down with your pants around your ankles. This lends a sense of self-deprecating humor to the situation. Third, it puts you into problem-solving mode, since you now have to remember where you put the toilet paper. < Previous Next > |
