How to Diagnose a Verbal Encounter
YOU’LL FIND I’M big on acronyms, anything that will help me remember what to do and when and how to do it. Another one that can help you diagnose a verbal encounter and thus skillfully deal with people under pressure is PACE: Problem (situation you’re in), Audience (to whom are you speaking), Constraints (obstacles to effective communication), and Ethical presence (your professional face).
PROBLEM
How do you size up what’s facing you?
I answered a call one night that a man was holding his son hostage with a knife. His apartment was surrounded by the SWAT team, and the man was in a corner about twenty feet from the door, holding a knife to the throat of his son, who appeared to be about six or seven years old.
As I approached the door, which was partially barricaded, the man shouted, “Stay where you are, pig! I’ll kill you and the boy!”
I stopped and held up my hands. “Whoa!” I said, “I’m not coming any closer. What’s the matter, sir?”
He said, “I have to kill my boy.”
I said, “What do you mean you have to kill your boy? You don’t have to kill him. There are many things you can do besides kill him, aren’t there?”
“No, I’ve gotta kill my boy.”
“Well, tell me about it.”
He said, “My boy’s possessed of the devil. My ex-wife was a she-devil and she poisoned his soul, poisoned his blood, and I’ve gotta blood-let him. I’ve gotta cleanse him, cut his throat and cleanse him or the devil will take him forever.”
Here I am, a professional at the door, thinking, This guy’s crazy.
Clearly, I had a problem, and it wasn’t hard to define. The crazy man was the problem, and my job was to take the knife away, save the boy’s life, and arrest the man. The thing is, there are always two kinds of problems in any difficult encounter: your problem, as you define it as a professional, and the problem from the other person’s point of view.
If I had stopped at my problem and begun my discourse there, I’d have yet a third problem, bigger than either of the two I had already. I saw the man as the problem; he saw the boy as the problem. If I had approached him as if he were the problem, he would have merely disagreed and resisted, and at worse killed the boy and maybe some of us cops in the process.
This is the epitome of what I call the rhetorical problem: how the other person sees it. And he will never see it the way you do, especially if he’s crazy (or under any other influence or delusion). I’ve learned the hard way that the only way to succeed in these situations is to define the problem from the other person’s point of view first.
Frankly, the first thing I said to the man was wholly ineffective. I said, “But, sir, wait a minute. The blood that runs in the boy’s veins runs in yours. If you cut his throat, that’s your identity going into the floorboards as well as his. Think about it.”
He wasn’t buying. He screamed, “No! I said the blood was poisoned. It’s poisoned!”
So I came at him a different way, with a new kind of appeal. “But wait a minute! Why would you give your ex-wife power? She’d love to see you kill the thing you love the most in order to save it. That only makes her look good and feel good. But it takes from you the very thing you love.”
I thought that was a pretty powerful argument because I was looking at it from only my point of view. I certainly wouldn’t kill someone I loved in order to save him.
But my approach angered the man. He zoomed from a seven to a nine on the emotional scale of one to ten. Good work, Thompson. He jiggled the knife at his son’s throat and said, “She’s a dead woman anyway. I’m going to kill her later.”
Finally I came to my senses and began to try to work with instead of against the man. I said, “Whoa! Wait a minute! What if I told you, sir, that I know a priest, who by just passing his hands over your boy can get the evil spirits out? That way, you keep the thing you love the most, and your ex-wife loses.”
He looked at me for a minute, clearly stunned. “Do you really know somebody like that?”
And I said, “You bet I do! He owes me some favors. Listen, let me talk to him and see if we can get him here.”
“But I can’t trust you, you’re a cop!”
I candidly didn’t know what to do with that at the moment, so I deflected it with a strip phrase. “Sir, I ’preciate that, but trust is not an issue at this point. [Imagine the absurdity of that! But it worked.] I can’t help you. I stand before you unarmed for good reason. Only the priest can help you.” To make a long story short, he put the knife down.
If I had dwelt on my perspective (that the man was the problem), even though I was right, I couldn’t have helped. I had to see the problem as he did so I could seem to be working with him to get it solved. That also saved the boy’s life, so mission accomplished. While it may have seemed absurd for me to buy into his craziness of seeing the boy as the problem, I did it for the greater benefit.
AUDIENCE
The question in this context is how your audience differs from you. What made that man different from me? How did he see the event differently? What were his values and beliefs? Of course, he was crazy, but that didn’t help me analyze the situation. The big difference between us was his belief system. He was highly superstitious. I have my superstitions, and with my history of an Indian influencing my childhood, attending a Quaker high school, and assimilating Eastern influences through the martial arts, I have my own views of spirituality. But superstitious I’m not. I had to keep that in mind when I negotiated with the man.
CONSTRAINTS
Just about anything can be considered a constraint, but in this case, clearly this man’s rage, his brain damage, his influence, his belief systems, all were obstacles. There is only one of three things you can do with a restraint: step around it, ignore it, or use it. I ignored his hatred and distrust of cops. I let his threat to kill me fly by (Remember, “Man throws spear at head, move head . . .”).
I stepped around his mistrust with a strip phrase and got to the heart of the matter. Had he been thinking rationally, he would have known that trust was the whole point here. Was I going to help him or thwart him? You know what my goal was.
No, the major constraint was his superstition, and when I finally tapped into that, I had found the answer. I appealed to and used the very thing that had made him difficult to talk to in the first place. In other words, if he believed blood-letting would take care of poisoned blood, he’d certainly go for a religious ceremony that would do the same without hurting his son.
Knowing what makes your audience different from you allows you to adapt, show empathy, and work with them. If they’re in left field, you’ve got to use left-field language.
ETHICAL PRESENCE
Notice that throughout my dealings with the man, I tried to exude ethical presence, a concern. I was saying, in effect, “I’m working with you, sir. Listen to me.” If I couldn’t convince him of that, I was going to fail for sure.
That is why it is so important to keep your professional face in front. Show concern at all times. Again, sometimes you’re bluffing, and frankly, I don’t apologize for misleading an easily misled crazy person who is a threat to someone else’s life. If you consider yourself a scrupulously honest person and think I’m advocating situational ethics here, you’re right. But ask yourself: If a crazed man with a butcher knife broke into your house and asked you where your baby was, would you feel obligated to tell the truth? I hope not.
The fact was, I didn’t know a priest. We did get the man the psychiatric help he needed, but I had said whatever I needed to to get that boy out of that traumatic situation.
In spite of that, remember that in its everyday application Verbal Judo is not about conning people. Con men use words to raise your expectations, and then they use those expectations to cheat you for their own profit.
The goal of Verbal Judo, on the other hand, is to benefit both parties in a confrontation. Use PACE with your spouse and with your children. Use it in the workplace. The next time you have an argument, before you start snapping back and using your words to address your own feelings, why not stop and analyze. What is the problem? How does my opponent see it? How is my opponent different from me? What constraints make it so difficult to deal with him today? And remember to keep a concerned and caring face. That in itself is often enough to deflect abuse.