emotional first aid - give them HOPE

• Safety is about removing people from a threat.

• Calming happens when you want to lower the state of arousal so people can function, concentrate and take concrete steps towards what they need to do to protect themselves.

• Connection: People's basic need to connect with others and not be isolated needs to be attended to.

• Efficacy occurs when someone is capable of taking action on their own. When they do so as a member of a group, that's collective efficacy.

• Hope: The idea that the world is predicable and we will get through it, that's hope.

When talking to someone who's acting stressed, scared, frustrated, sad, suicidal, or depressed, try giving the conversation some HOPE! Start with H and take your time getting to E. Take as long as they need on each step before moving on to the next one. As a general rule, the first three steps are each likely to take hours, or days even. Also, before you begin, make sure you are both physically safe and comfortable, with both of you having your basic physical needs for health and safety taken care of (food, water, air, warmth, and light, as well as the ability to eliminate any excess stuff from the body). People need to be at least temporarily physically healthy and safe before they can begin to be emotionally healthy and safe. Once everyone is physically ok for the moment, go ahead and:

HELP - let them know you are here to help: say, "I'm here for you." and maybe "We'll figure this out together." Make sure they believe you really are there to help, or find someone else who they can believe will help them to help them.

OBSERVE - find out what's going in inside their head: "What are you worried about?" and "What do you think you need now?" Really listen to the answer calmly, quietly, and with an open mind. No, I mean REALLY LISTEN. For as long as it takes for them to get it all out and feel fully heard. Seriously, stay at this step until they are completely done expressing their concerns and start to ask you questions or look at you for advice.

PERSPECTIVES - Understand their perspective. Having listened to what they said, frame it in a POSITIVE way, and check if it seems reasonable to them. And then offer your own, or an objective third-person perspective, too, again in a positive frame, for a realistic "big picture" view of what might happen next: "It sounds like you are looking for... This kind of thing happened to a friend of mine, and they found (something positive)..."

ENERGY - empower them to be more successful in the future by offering resources to them (physical, emotional, and/or intellectual) to make things easier for everyone: "I'm willing to give you some... if that would make things easier." Or point them in the direction of someone else who might be able to give them what they are seeking.

When we are looking at risks that are high in outrage and low in hazard, people are very likely to get upset and not very likely to get hurt. This calls for “outrage management.” Your goal is to decrease the outrage. It’s the flip side of precaution advocacy. If the paradigm there is “Watch out,” here it is “Calm down.”

But what happens to outraged people when you say “Calm down”? Where does the outrage go? It goes up, right?

So you don’t actually say “Calm down,” but that is your goal.

Instead of an eight-second sound bite, you have an eight-hour meeting. It’s a very different situation and there’s no need to keep it short...

Outrage management is done largely with the ears; precaution advocacy is done exclusively with the mouth. Outrage management involves a lot of listening, and a very weird thing happens when you listen to people’s concerns—they become calmer. I’m not saying the outrage disappears. It’s not magic, but they get calmer. The other thing that happens is they start wanting to hear from you.