back a few steps to regain a smooth, repetitious delivery. It makes sense to
follow their lead.
Eventually, after a second try, I got the panicky woman to tense and
relax her muscles. If it hadn’t worked that time, I would have dropped it
and just stuck with the breathing.
DISCONNECT THE ALARM. So far, we’ve paid attention to rhythm and
cadence more than verbal content, because how you say things is critical
to the calming process.
What you say is also important. Words are powerful; they are not only
vehicles of communication from one person to another, they also convey
thoughts from one part of the mind to another. Many of the brain structures
involved in emotional explosions are prelinguistic; they evolved before
people could talk. Nevertheless, we use words to communicate, and some-
times this makes us think that the whole process is considerably more ratio-
nal than it really is.
The sympathetic system is one huge neurological and biochemical
alarm, but the way it insinuates itself into people’s consciousness is subtle.
It doesn’t shout “DANGER, WILL ROBINSON.” Instead, it sends out
impulses that are translated by the verbal cortex into reasonable sounding
words like: Your chest is tight. That’s a symptom of heart attack. You’re going
to die if you don’t get out of here!The words are mistaken for reality, because
reality, and everything else we know, is also made of words inside the head.
Many of the problems in dealing with emotional explosions arise
from paying too much attention to the words the sympathetic impulses
are translated into, and too little to the impulses themselves. Somehow,
you need to get it across to the panicky people that their alarm systems are
malfunctioning, warning them of danger where there is none. You can get
badly sidetracked by discussing the specific dangers they imagine, because
as soon as you’ve talked them out of one, they think of another. Focus
instead on the alarm system itself.
Calming Techniques
Allow me to demonstrate, using you as an example. Would you actually
use the techniques I’m describing to calm someone who’s having a panic
attack?
Basic Calming Technique ❧ 59