The Art of Manliness - #230： How to Deal With Aggressive People

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. So I've had

00:00:18.960 guests on the show to talk about how to defend yourself from violent attacks, but what can

00:00:22.380 you do to deescalate what are potentially violent confrontations so things don't come

00:00:26.880 to fist blows? And how do you deal with people who get in your face and act in verbally belligerent

00:00:31.320 ways? Well, my guest today has spent his career studying the psychology of aggressive people and

00:00:35.460 how to handle them. His name is Sean Smith and he's a psychologist and the author of the book

00:00:39.480 Surviving Aggressive People, Practical Violence Prevention Skills for the Workplace and the

00:00:43.680 Street. And today on the show, Sean and I discuss why you need to worry more about aggressive attacks

00:00:48.380 from people you know rather than from strangers, the difference between desperate aggression and

00:00:52.980 expert aggression and tactics you can use to prevent tense social situations from escalating

00:00:57.640 to violence. Really great show with a lot of practical takeaways. After the show, check out

00:01:01.920 the show notes at aom.is slash aggressive for links to resources where you can delve deeper

00:01:06.880 into this topic. All right, Sean Smith, welcome to the show. Well, thank you for having me. I'm a big

00:01:17.620 fan of your site and what you do. Well, I appreciate that. So you're the author of the book Surviving

00:01:22.960 Aggressive People and we're going to get in the details of how to do that, what that means. But

00:01:27.880 before we do, let's talk a bit about your background. You're a psychologist with a private

00:01:31.700 practice now, but you've also done work in detox centers and places where you probably dealt with

00:01:37.900 a lot of aggressive people. How did your work there influence your ideas about how to handle people

00:01:44.160 when they start showing aggression? Well, all the way through this, in developing and writing this

00:01:51.260 book, I was looking for some kind of organized way of thinking about handling aggression.

00:01:56.180 And long before I ever got to the detox centers and the residential treatment facilities and so

00:02:00.840 forth, I, and my father, when I was a kid, he bought a, I was nine years old. He bought a bar

00:02:05.160 in Commerce City, Colorado, which is an industrial area in the north of Denver. And, um, I got to watch

00:02:11.380 my dad who was, he was a little rough around the edges, but he was a brilliant street psychologist.

00:02:17.320 He knew how to handle people. He knew what motivated people and how to calm people down

00:02:21.340 and how to make situations resolved peacefully. And watching him do this when I spent my nights

00:02:27.580 and weekends at that bar really got me curious about people and how they work and how he was

00:02:32.160 doing what he was doing, because it seemed like a, seemed like a superpower to me to be able to manage

00:02:37.240 people. And so, uh, as I grew older, I started looking for, uh, an organized way to think about

00:02:44.920 aggression and how to deescalate people. And it just wasn't much out there. So I went into

00:02:49.080 martial arts and, um, there's a lot of great psychology there and a lot of great tidbits

00:02:54.480 and information, but no real organized way of thinking about deescalating people. And I went

00:02:58.620 to college and same thing, a lot of great information, but no organized way of thinking

00:03:02.580 about it. So really in answer to your question, what, before I got to the detox facilities and so

00:03:08.440 forth, about the time that I was getting frustrated and searching and trying to find people who knew

00:03:12.360 how to do this, uh, a bunch of businesses in Denver got together and invited the guardian angels to

00:03:17.500 come to Denver to, uh, clean up the streets so that their businesses could do a little better.

00:03:22.480 Denver wasn't the thriving area that it was back now, back then. And when I heard that they were

00:03:28.920 coming to town, I started looking into them and I really, I learned that this is a group of people

00:03:32.420 who will intervene when they see a problem, but they don't carry weapons. They don't beat people up.

00:03:36.600 They relied on their, their wits and their skills and the radios that they carried. And I thought

00:03:42.500 maybe this would be a group of people who has some systematic way of thinking about deescalating

00:03:48.360 people. And it turned out that I met a lot of really like my father, brilliant street psychologists

00:03:52.620 who knew how to do this. So that kind of got me on the path of organizing this information. So really

00:03:57.740 all this information in the book, I know nothing. I'm just giving you what smarter people than me have

00:04:03.460 taught me. Okay. So let's get in the details of, of handling aggressive people. Uh, where are most

00:04:11.000 folks going to encounter aggressive people? And why is this such a vital skill to have, even if you

00:04:16.720 live, you know, in a relatively safe place, like an affluent suburb or a middle-class area of town?

00:04:23.120 Well, you know how you've heard that you're likeliest to have a car accident within a few miles of your

00:04:28.660 house. And most of us heard that, that statistic thrown around that. And it makes sense. You know,

00:04:34.180 I live in Denver, so that's where I spend my time. And I spend most of my time around my house,

00:04:38.220 around my business. So of course, that's where I'm going to have an accident. The chances of me

00:04:41.940 having a fender bender today in Tulsa are slim to none because I'm not there. And the same thing,

00:04:47.020 the same kind of reasoning applies to learning how to manage aggressive people. It's the people

00:04:51.600 around you. Those are the people that you see every, the people that you see every day. Those are the

00:04:56.060 people that you could potentially have a problem with. And the crime statistics from the Department

00:05:02.720 of Justice from 2012, a pretty recent statistic, 73% of violent crimes are committed by somebody

00:05:09.560 that the victim knows. That's why it's important to know how to handle folks.

00:05:14.240 Okay. Yeah. I mean, this, I mean, this is not just like family members or friends. It could be

00:05:18.220 at the job is a place where a lot of aggression takes place. Disgruntled employees or disgruntled

00:05:24.880 clients. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. And most of the feedback I get on this book, I've written other

00:05:29.660 books and I don't, they get Amazon reviews and so forth, but I get a lot of personal feedback on

00:05:33.900 this book. And the personal feedback that I get is people not saying that they thwarted a mugging or

00:05:39.000 that they saved a burning school bus full of children. It's that they calm down a client or they

00:05:45.000 calm down their boss or they handled some sort of mundane incident well, because they learned how

00:05:51.960 aggression works and they learned how to head it off quickly. Right. And I think maybe this is a

00:05:56.020 skill that is sort of degraded in people because since we don't, our interactions with other people

00:06:01.100 are very transactional, like you just sort of, I don't know, you don't deal with people as people

00:06:06.100 anymore. I think maybe we've lost that skill, like that street smart that your dad had.

00:06:10.760 Yeah. I think one of the things that we've lost in recent years is I walk around downtown and I see

00:06:18.820 people walking around staring into their cell phones and listening to their, their earbuds and

00:06:24.300 so forth. And they're very tuned out to the environment. And, you know, it's a good way to

00:06:28.280 get hit by a bus. But more than that, people I've noticed more recently, I don't know if it's

00:06:34.620 happening more recently or if I'm just noticing it more recently that I can go to a party or I can

00:06:38.180 have an interaction with somebody and talk to somebody for 10 or 15 minutes and I can walk away

00:06:41.900 knowing quite a bit about that person and realizing that sometimes they don't even know my name

00:06:47.340 because they haven't bothered to find out about the person that they're talking about.

00:06:52.060 And I think that that's kind of an unwise way to go through life because if, if you're walking down

00:06:57.560 the street, staring into your cell phone, obviously you're opening yourself up to, to dangers and you're

00:07:03.120 not going to see things coming. But if you're operating that way socially and you're not taking the

00:07:08.100 temperature of the room that you're in, you're not taking the temperature, the psychological temper of

00:07:12.800 the street that you're walking down, you're not paying attention to the people around you.

00:07:16.260 And that's kind of a social equivalent of walking around with blinders on it. It strikes me as

00:07:20.520 unnecessary and really nothing to gain, but potentially a lot to lose.

00:07:24.840 Right. All right. So you classify aggression into two types. There's desperate aggression and

00:07:30.220 expert aggression. What are the differences between the two types?

00:07:35.740 This is one of the first things that I learned from folks is that I learned to think about

00:07:42.040 aggression in terms of what is it trying to accomplish. And these two broad categories of

00:07:49.020 behavior, they really haven't let me down. They seem to be pretty steady. And the, what I'm calling

00:07:53.860 desperate aggression is really somebody who's trying to solve a problem and they're running out of

00:08:00.000 options. And so they're getting cornered, they're getting upset, they're getting worked up and their

00:08:05.100 mind is slowly closing down and turning into a, turning more to the emotional side of the mind

00:08:12.140 rather than the rational side of the mind. Whereas what I'm calling expert aggression, you can just

00:08:16.520 call that predatory behavior. This is somebody who's using aggression for profit, basically.

00:08:23.360 Okay. So expert aggression would be something like a con man or a bully or something like that.

00:08:28.340 Yeah, exactly. Somebody who's trying to gain socially, somebody who's trying to gain materially.

00:08:33.460 Okay. So let's talk about these two types of aggression in detail. What are the signs that a

00:08:39.380 desperate, aggressive person gives off? And can you walk us through a scenario of, of desperate and

00:08:45.680 desperate aggression in action?

00:08:48.840 Yeah, I saw one just the other day and it did turn out well. So I'll put this out there as a good

00:08:53.600 scenario because it turned out okay. But when somebody is becoming desperate, you probably,

00:08:59.320 you know, one of the things I say early in the book is that there's really nothing in this book

00:09:02.280 that you don't already know. We just need to put some words to it. And you could probably guess that

00:09:06.820 when somebody is becoming desperate, they're going to show signs of distress. They're going to show

00:09:10.900 physical agitation. Their voice is going to change. Their posture is going to change.

00:09:14.560 Their movements are going to change. The things that they're talking about are going to change and

00:09:19.100 narrow. And sometimes people go in an opposite direction. They don't become more expansive and

00:09:24.580 more agitated. Sometimes people become more subdued and more cornered and more quiet until they lash

00:09:31.660 out. So again, things that probably we all know, and these are the things that characterize somebody

00:09:38.180 who's losing a sense of control. They feel like they have a problem to solve. They're feeling frightened

00:09:42.980 and scared. And so they get that adrenal response. And that scenario that I saw just last week

00:09:49.020 was I went to a Chinese restaurant by my house. It's one of my favorite places. And one of the

00:09:53.740 waitresses there was getting kind of harassed by a customer. And it had to do with soup. And I'll

00:10:01.320 spare you the details. But he was pushing her into a corner about soup. And what was happening is

00:10:10.260 the reason this is a brilliant showcase is because this took place over probably, it seemed like a long

00:10:17.760 time. But it was probably about 45 to 60 seconds. During that 45 to 60 seconds, I could see her

00:10:23.100 systematically closing off her options. He was saying that he wanted something. She would propose

00:10:28.280 a solution. He would meet that solution with rejection. And he was pretty rude about it. And so

00:10:34.620 each time he did that, you could see her physically becoming more agitating. She was starting to become 0.53

00:10:41.440 loud. She was starting to act like somebody who felt like she was trying to solve a problem. And 0.64

00:10:46.480 she just had no options. Everything she was doing, she was caught between her boss who wanted one

00:10:50.800 thing and the customer who wanted something else. And she didn't know which way to go. Finally,

00:10:55.220 she just threw her hands up and walked away, which was the right thing to do. But I loved that it was

00:11:00.160 such a clear demonstration of him systematically closing down her options and her systematically

00:11:05.820 becoming more emotionally driven.

00:11:08.040 Right. So the, the, the mammal, like the human part of her, where the prefrontal cortex started 0.92

00:11:12.700 shutting down and started going back to the sort of mammalian brain reptile.

00:11:17.700 Yeah, exactly.

00:11:18.820 Right.

00:11:19.340 Yeah.

00:11:19.800 Well, let's talk about expert aggression. Um, how do you, how do you know you're dealing with

00:11:24.280 an expert aggressor? Um, and what's the difference between the signs they give off from a person

00:11:30.480 who's showing desperate aggression?

00:11:32.160 Right. It was one of my favorite topics. I was, I was bullied horribly as a kid, which

00:11:36.760 was one of the reasons I idealized my father because I saw him handling bullies and I, you

00:11:40.460 know, it changed my world to know that somebody could actually handle bullies and have things

00:11:43.920 turn out peacefully. But I love the topic of predatory behavior, expert aggression. And

00:11:49.440 I think the easiest way to think about the way people behave when they're being predatory

00:11:54.560 is to look at the way animals behave when they're being predatory. And again, this is nothing

00:11:59.460 that we don't already know. We could all sit down and describe the way a big cat on the

00:12:04.120 savannah approaches a herd. There's two things that that, that predator has to account for.

00:12:08.260 Number one, it can't expend too much energy because the energy is expensive. If it wastes

00:12:13.360 his energy or that, that animal wastes his energy, uh, trying to take down one animal and

00:12:17.940 it shows poorly, it might not have enough energy to take down the next animal, watch another

00:12:22.380 attack. So it has to be very mindful of energy, which means number two, it has to pick the

00:12:27.000 target very carefully. And so that's why we don't see, um, lions jumping out of trees,

00:12:33.400 shouting Geronimo on the way down with a knife in their teeth because they can get hurt and

00:12:36.780 it's expensive to scare everybody. It'd just be chaos. What they do is they approach things

00:12:40.320 very methodically. You see the cat circling the herd, sizing up the herd, looking for the

00:12:45.640 one that's, that's going to be the good target. It's all very methodical, all very logical.

00:12:51.300 And humans do the same thing. Now, since we're, we're predators, or since we're, um, you know,

00:12:57.420 where we are predators, but since we're verbal creatures, we have, uh, all of these rituals

00:13:02.440 that we follow that are more complex, but it's basically the same thing as the ritual of circling

00:13:07.240 the herd. We use, uh, verbal distractions to, to kind of test and poke and prod. We will test

00:13:13.120 boundaries and see if we can, uh, get past a little boundary. And then we find, we learn a little

00:13:18.160 more about the target. We breach a boundary. Um, and if you want a scenario, there's, there's one

00:13:24.600 in the book, uh, there's a lady here in Denver named Christina who was assaulted one time. And 0.99

00:13:30.860 she tells her story because she, she wants to, she wants other people to know that how this stuff

00:13:36.220 works and how to avoid it. And her story is that she was working in an office building. She had a man 0.93

00:13:42.900 coming around the office building that she'd seen a couple of times. He looked like he sort of

00:13:47.340 long there, sort of not, like he kind of had the right clothes to be working around the building,

00:13:52.300 but kind of not. And one day she was leaving the office a little bit later than she usually does.

00:13:59.920 And this guy was there and he insisted on, uh, giving her a ride to this party that she knew

00:14:06.700 that or this picnic that he knew that she was going to be going to. And the way he approached her

00:14:12.440 was to, uh, act like her savior. He was going to give her a ride. He knew that she was headed up to

00:14:19.440 the mountains. And so he talked about headed up to the mountains where this picnic was going to be.

00:14:23.260 And he insisted that she didn't want to be on the highway by herself. And she had this little voice

00:14:28.380 in her head as this conversation was unfolding that I really shouldn't be trusting this guy,

00:14:32.480 but she ignored that voice. And every time she ignored that voice and he breached a little

00:14:37.500 boundary, like for instance, getting her closer to his car, um, he knew that he was succeeding and

00:14:43.120 he got a little better at getting her to the next step. And eventually he got her in her car and took

00:14:47.340 her up to the mountains and assaulted her and it turned out kind of poorly. But the, the, the good

00:14:54.160 thing that she tries to bring out of this is the lesson, listening to your intuition and understanding

00:14:58.360 how predators circle in ever narrowing circles. They try to breeze those little boundaries.

00:15:04.120 Gotcha. So yeah, so yeah, what the expert aggressor does is they test boundaries,

00:15:08.520 get your trust and see if they can cross those boundaries. And once they see they can cross

00:15:11.560 boundaries, they'll actually go in for the big time kill, I guess you can say.

00:15:17.200 Yeah, a lot do. Yeah. And it can happen. It can unfold very quickly. That one happened to unfold

00:15:21.420 pretty slowly, but it doesn't take very long for a lot of these things to occur. Like for example,

00:15:26.200 one, one scenario in the book is about a guy who was closing down in a small Midwestern town. He was

00:15:31.760 closing down the convenience store that he worked at for the night and somebody showed up at his

00:15:35.600 door. I was just asking for a glass of water. I need a glass of water. Can I please do a glass of

00:15:39.680 water? I've been walking all night and I just need, that's all I want. I promise all I need is a glass

00:15:43.960 of water. This short conversation about water. And so finally he unlocks the door that he had had

00:15:48.860 locked. This guy comes in and robs him and the whole thing probably didn't take very long, but

00:15:53.620 it was that initial breaching of the boundary was even having the conversation with the guy.

00:15:58.440 All right. So let's talk about the five ground rules of dealing with aggressive people you talk

00:16:03.060 about in your book. What are these five ground rules and do they change whether you're dealing

00:16:07.140 with a desperate aggressor or an expert aggressor? They really don't. What I noticed in

00:16:12.820 these two very different ways of using aggression, there are some ground rules, some ways of carrying

00:16:19.200 yourself through the world is really what the ground rules are, is how you present yourself in the

00:16:24.440 world. And they really don't change depending on what kind of aggressor you're dealing with,

00:16:29.060 but for different reasons. Like for the first one, for example, is establishing common ground.

00:16:32.780 It's one of the most important things you can do. And this is what I was talking about. This was

00:16:35.600 complaining about earlier when I was talking about people not getting to know each other.

00:16:41.900 Establishing common ground means creating some commonality with the people around you. And it can be

00:16:48.000 as simple as saying hello to somebody and making some eye contact as you're going down the street,

00:16:53.000 particularly people that you're a little bit worried about. Make the eye contact, say hello,

00:16:58.260 be confident, carry yourself well, but also create some connection between you two. And one of my

00:17:04.060 teachers in this regard was a cop who worked in Denver here. And he would sometimes work the intake

00:17:10.760 counter at one of the local jails. And one of his techniques with everybody who came through that

00:17:15.880 door, so prisoners have, you know, people have just been arrested by the police. They're coming to the

00:17:20.420 jail. He's the first person they deal with. And so automatically these people are hostile toward

00:17:26.400 him. They don't like him. And one of his techniques was before he did anything was to do something to

00:17:32.480 establish common ground. Maybe he would notice a shirt that they were wearing that had a team logo

00:17:36.400 on or something. He would make some comment about that shirt or he would notice a tattoo and just ask

00:17:40.420 about it. Some little thing that says, Hey, you and I are both people here. You and I are both

00:17:45.660 on the same level. So even though we're not, but don't view me as an enemy, view me as somebody

00:17:52.300 who's a little bit interested in emails and messages that he was sending. And more often than not,

00:17:56.200 it worked. Of course, sometimes it didn't, but there's nothing to lose. It only took him a second

00:17:59.940 to do it. So why not do it?

00:18:01.740 All right. So there's established common ground. What are some of the other ground rules?

00:18:05.640 Some of the ground rules are not shaming the aggressor, like particularly with somebody who's

00:18:10.900 feeling desperate, not telling them that they're being ridiculous or not being dismissive

00:18:15.640 for their concerns and not shaming yourself, which is very easy to do when you're behaving as if 0.67

00:18:21.900 you're powerless. So if you're dealing with somebody who's desperate and they're looking

00:18:25.800 for a solution and you're sending the message that you don't have the solutions and you're

00:18:30.100 kind of helpless, that's not going to help them get back on track. And if you're dealing with a

00:18:35.160 predator, being somebody who shows yourself as powerless and overly self-deprecating, again,

00:18:42.020 if they're looking to breach boundaries, well, you've given them something that they can breach.

00:18:46.420 So being too self-deprecating, although self-deprecating can show power, sacrificing boundaries,

00:18:52.420 behaving powerless, those are all examples of shaming yourself. Another important ground rule is

00:18:58.300 knowing what you want to accomplish in a situation. It's really easy to just get caught into

00:19:06.000 arguing with someone because that lizard brain that you're talking about, that reptilian mind, 0.93

00:19:12.200 that's contagious. And so when somebody's arguing with you and they're at a very low emotional level,

00:19:17.040 they're operating out of emotion, it's really easy for me or you to shut off our intellectual

00:19:24.240 brains and just start arguing emotional. So it's really important that you keep in mind,

00:19:27.920 what am I actually trying to accomplish here? And then being flexible about how you get there.

00:19:33.540 And I think one of the biggest one is just listening to your intuition. We have these giant brains that

00:19:41.780 are processing tons of information and it's not all verbal. Some of it just shows up as a feeling

00:19:48.220 and being practicing, listening to that, knowing how it speaks to you. And like my friend Christina would

00:19:55.660 say, being able to listen to it when it's trying to talk to you. Yeah. I mean, that idea of intuition,

00:20:01.940 I think it's a lot of, it's a hard thing to grasp for people, particularly, you know, us, we think

00:20:05.980 we should be rational and intuition seems so irrational. I mean, how do you, how do you train

00:20:10.260 your intuition? How do you figure out whether you're being overly paranoid or whether like,

00:20:15.380 yeah, this is actual, like you're, this, something's a problem. You should follow this

00:20:19.900 hunch that you're having. Well, I got two things on it. And the first one is that for different

00:20:25.780 reasons, men and women experience exactly what you said. It's tough to listen to your intuition.

00:20:30.500 Women are taught traditionally not to be emotional. They're taught to be polite. And this is what 1.00

00:20:37.440 happened with Christina when she, she was the one who was assaulted in the mountains. Her intuition

00:20:41.780 was telling her not to follow this guy, but her training, her social training was, well, you have

00:20:46.000 to be polite. You can't make people feel bad. And so it was that motivation that led her to deny her

00:20:51.000 intuition. And then I think the second part of it is just recognizing your intuition for what it is.

00:20:57.020 If it's, well, I didn't finish the male part. You know, the male part is that I think men are often

00:21:03.280 taught to ignore intuition because it's emotional and we're supposed to be stoic and rational. So men

00:21:10.920 and women both have similar difficulty for different reasons. But I think ways to start listening to

00:21:17.740 your intuition is number one, to know, recognize what it is that's stopping you from listening to it. If,

00:21:23.700 if you're having trouble listening to it and recognizing how it shows up in your body,

00:21:28.120 because this isn't, it's just information that your body is processing and knowing, being able to

00:21:32.560 identify what kind of thoughts show up when your intuition is speaking to you. They might be indirect

00:21:36.880 thoughts about what's going on, what kind of emotions are showing up. Maybe you're just feeling

00:21:41.280 uneasy, or maybe you're feeling like retreating, being able to identify that as something that says

00:21:47.160 your intuition is talking to you, like a little dashboard, like a red light dashboard on your,

00:21:51.140 red light on your dashboard that comes out and says there's a problem. Sometimes it's not clear

00:21:54.820 what the problem is. There's just a problem. And then physically knowing how it shows up for you.

00:21:59.940 Do you feel a tightness in your chest? Do you feel a, you know, you start getting a headache or a

00:22:04.020 throbbing or do things become distant? So really keying in on the cognitive, the emotional, and the

00:22:09.420 physical warning signs that your intuition is trying to tell you something. And then being willing to stop

00:22:15.340 and step aside and ask yourself, right, what's going on here?

00:22:20.740 Right. And like, don't be afraid to act on it. Cause like, what's the harm? Like what's the worst

00:22:24.940 that, I mean, at best, like you prevent yourself from getting attacked at worst, you kind of embarrass

00:22:30.620 yourself a little bit, maybe. Yeah. I tend to look at everything as like a Vegas bet. Is this a sucker's

00:22:36.940 bet where the best thing that can happen is I break even and likelier that I lose, or is this a good bet 0.77

00:22:41.620 where I can break even or win? And in Christina's case, she was the one who was assaulted in the 0.97

00:22:46.800 mountains. I think what she would say is it would have been uncomfortable for her to say no to this

00:22:52.680 guy, but beyond that, it would have cost her nothing. And so it would have been the safe bet to just

00:22:57.960 listen to her intuition. When you talk about dealing with a desperate, aggressive people, you talk about

00:23:04.060 using listening, empathizing, and creating options. The acronym is LEO, you use in the book. Where do most

00:23:13.840 people mess up when implementing LEO with a desperate aggressor?

00:23:18.260 All the time that I spent in detox facilities and residential treatment facilities and brain injury units,

00:23:24.500 and even out on the street of the Guardian Angels, the place that I saw people struggling the most

00:23:29.740 was the listening phase. It's not because we're bad people. It's because most of us have this urge

00:23:36.420 to fix the problem. And so when somebody's trying to explain what's going on, why they're frustrated,

00:23:44.160 I think the impulse in a lot of people is to calm them down and to get them to stop making us tense.

00:23:51.100 But really the opposite thing is what you want to do. Somebody's talking to you about what's bothering

00:23:55.140 them. Let them go. You don't want to talk over them. They're going to run themselves out eventually. 0.79

00:24:00.520 Nobody can stay upset and agitated forever. So as long as somebody is talking and complaining,

00:24:06.820 it's uncomfortable to listen to, but it's an important thing to do. And that's where most

00:24:11.900 people, I think, struggle. What are some things people can do to overcome that tendency to want to

00:24:17.680 jump right away to trying to solve this person's problem? How do you listen with a desperate aggressor?

00:24:23.300 I think that you retrain yourself. And I'm very big on scenario training. I know the scenario

00:24:30.200 training is not practical for most people, but a part of the section of the book is about dealing

00:24:34.780 with agitated patients in health facilities. And I'm very big on nurses and healthcare workers and

00:24:44.100 doctors doing scenario trains where they can practice these interventions where you have somebody

00:24:49.940 pretending to be an agitated person. And you learn to sit with that agitation and sit with the

00:24:55.800 discomfort of it and ask them questions that are guiding them toward a solution, but not try to shut

00:25:01.260 them down and immediately fix the situation. Gotcha. And what do you do if LEO doesn't

00:25:07.600 deescalate the situation? Say you've listened, you empathize with them, you've helped create some

00:25:12.760 options for them, but that still doesn't work. They're still agitated and aggressive.

00:25:18.080 Yeah, it's, I should preface that, this answer by saying, anytime you're dealing with any of these

00:25:26.520 people, your first impulse should be to get out of there. And the assumption is that you already

00:25:31.680 considered escape and it's not really practical. And so now you're trying to rely on these

00:25:37.380 verbal deescalations. But if it doesn't work, you know, you have to start thinking about escape,

00:25:43.560 really. And you can go back and you can, if somebody's continuing to be agitated, you can go

00:25:49.140 back and recognize that agitation doesn't last forever. Typically, there's some drug-induced

00:25:56.160 agitation sometimes last a really long time. And if you're trapped with somebody, typically,

00:26:01.860 the agitation is not going to last forever. So if you're trying to listen to somebody and you're

00:26:06.520 trying to empathize and understand what it is that they're trying to solve,

00:26:10.240 and you're trying to provide options and none of it's working and you can't escape,

00:26:14.600 you can always go back to keeping them talking. Because as long as somebody is talking,

00:26:18.780 they're usually not attacking. They may be amping themselves up a little bit, but talking is good.

00:26:25.840 Yeah, keep them talking. All right. So let's talk about expert aggressors. So what expert aggressors do 0.90

00:26:33.080 is they test boundaries. And if they show that you'll give in to a boundary, they'll escalate until

00:26:38.360 they'll finally do the thing that will get them what they want. So how do you nip

00:26:44.180 expert aggressors in the bud so this boundary testing doesn't even happen?

00:26:48.860 You nip them in the bud by reacting or responding as quickly as you can when you start to notice that

00:26:55.400 something doesn't feel right. And I outlined six or seven examples of predators testing boundaries

00:27:02.440 and grooming people for attacks. So somebody who's being over-accommodating, for example,

00:27:07.200 in Christina's example, this guy was being way too nice to a total stranger. He was

00:27:12.120 apparently trying to help her. So that's one example of somebody who's just trying to

00:27:17.080 get a foot in the door. So they're ignoring your protestations when you say that you don't need

00:27:21.980 help or you don't want them around, but they just keep pushing and trying to get their nose under the

00:27:27.620 tent, their camels under the tent, get their foot in the door, trying to just wheedle their way in a little bit.

00:27:32.440 Or somebody who's just testing personal boundaries, like somebody who's standing too

00:27:38.280 close almost as if they're trying to see how you're going to react or just violating little

00:27:42.540 social conventions, seeing how people respond or exploiting sympathy or guilt. I outlined several

00:27:48.320 of these to look for. And as soon as you notice them, that's the time to react at the very earliest

00:27:54.920 phase because the harder, the longer it goes, the harder it becomes to respond to them. And if you

00:28:00.420 respond early, typically you can do so pretty politely and you can do so with some finesse and

00:28:05.980 you can send the signal, I'm not the target that you're looking for. And things can end early,

00:28:11.400 hopefully.

00:28:12.220 All right. So yeah, expert aggressors are predators of opportunity. So if they see there's not an,

00:28:15.760 it's going to require a lot of energy or effort or time, they're not going to waste their time.

00:28:21.200 Exactly.

00:28:23.520 Okay. I mean, what are some things that people can do? I mean, I guess as expert aggressors,

00:28:29.100 they look for victims, easy victims. What are some things that people can do to look less like

00:28:35.280 a victim so they're less likely to be targeted by an expert aggressor?

00:28:39.260 I think that as people study this kind of thing, and anytime you start putting some energy in this

00:28:48.080 area, learning how to not be a victim, you start carrying yourself differently. And that's really

00:28:52.620 what this is dealing with expert aggressors is all about is the nonverbal signals that you send to

00:28:58.720 them. So you want to send the signal that you're somebody who's capable and resourceful and confident

00:29:03.960 and happy and somebody who's not going to be easily isolated, somebody who's not going to be

00:29:10.440 easily profited from, somebody who's not, who's very attuned to these testing rituals.

00:29:16.060 The whole point of the testing ritual is that they're looking, a predator is looking for

00:29:20.660 the bad target. If you show them that they're the bad target, then there's almost kind of an

00:29:25.340 agreement there that takes place where, all right, I get it. I'm not going to mess with you or the

00:29:29.940 next person.

00:29:31.140 Okay. Well, Sean, I have a question here that just popped up to my mind.

00:29:33.960 Um, how does this change in the world of, of the online world? Right. I think, you know,

00:29:40.300 with cyberbullying or, you know, trolls and these, these seem like these are expert aggressors. I mean,

00:29:46.480 how does the, these tactics change when you're online?

00:29:52.620 They are expert aggressors, but they're, it's such a small and petty game that they're getting

00:29:59.000 the people who go on a website and troll, try to get people agitated. They're not profiting

00:30:03.420 materially from it. They're just getting a little bit of juice, I guess. It makes them,

00:30:07.140 I don't know what they get from it, but it's, it's small. It's not really costing anybody anything

00:30:11.160 other than making people angry and keeping them up at night. And I came across a story recently

00:30:16.820 that, uh, who was it? It was NPR. I think it's closing down their comment section and they're

00:30:24.240 doing it partly in response to this, that you've got this very small group of people who are just

00:30:28.880 kind of ruining for everybody and it's expensive for them to maintain this comment section. So why

00:30:33.820 do it? And I recently made, you know, I saw that and I thought, well, that's a brilliant idea. Why

00:30:37.180 haven't I done that? So I have my own blog and it's the comments are, they range from kind of

00:30:44.040 interesting to just nauseatingly hostile. And I decided to do the same thing. I'm just not going to deal

00:30:50.220 with it anymore. So I think that online, it's very easy to just turn away from the trolls and

00:30:57.080 let them go by to someone else. Right. Okay. Well, let's talk about this. So we talked about,

00:31:02.540 um, expert and, uh, desperate aggression. These are sort of the normal types of aggression you see,

00:31:08.520 but you also talk in your book about handling aggression caused by neurobehavioral problems.

00:31:13.720 There might be a few people who are listening to this that are dealing with this. Say they have,

00:31:17.300 um, a family member or a friend who had a traumatic brain injury, which one of the

00:31:22.580 symptoms sometimes is increased aggression, or there have a child who has, you know, a severe

00:31:27.540 form of autism that, you know, causes aggression as well, because there's like, you know, misunderstanding

00:31:32.560 between the parent and the child. How does your approach change to handling aggression in these

00:31:38.600 sorts of scenarios? It changes pretty dramatically. And the reason I put that it's an appendix in the

00:31:44.780 book is, it's a couple of chapters at the end. And the reason I put it in there is I, I did my

00:31:48.620 dissertation, this type of work in a brain injury unit, helping, helping staff members deescalate,

00:31:55.600 keep things calm. And what happens, like you said, there's, there does tend to be, uh,

00:32:01.660 periods of aggression that people go through after head injuries, for example, or aggression that is

00:32:06.080 induced by medication. And what's happening there typically is, is a disconnect between

00:32:10.780 between our frontal cortex that tells us how to be calm and cool and that lower reptilian brain,

00:32:17.380 that limbic system that is very emotion driven. And so basically the brakes are taken off of the

00:32:22.500 aggressions, not that they become more aggressive, it's like the brakes are broken. And a couple of

00:32:28.540 dramatic differences is number one, if you're, if you're in a home, your own home, or if you're,

00:32:33.600 and you have somebody like this living with you, or if you're in a facility, number one is that

00:32:37.740 you have teamwork and you can practice scenarios and you can prepare and you can construct the

00:32:43.400 environment such that a person has a place to retreat when they're trying to solve a problem.

00:32:49.060 And that's huge. And the other big part of that is the scenario training and you being prepared and

00:32:54.700 you knowing how this person works, which you don't know with a stranger, but if you're dealing with

00:32:59.820 somebody that you deal with every day, you can quickly get a sense of where their triggers are,

00:33:03.940 how to get them to take a break so that they can start solving their own problem. And usually in

00:33:11.040 these cases, almost always a sense of desperation that the person is feeling. So if you can create a

00:33:16.200 time element where they can cool off a little bit and then build in a structure where you're helping

00:33:22.680 them figure out how to meet, create solutions, then the violence can decrease dramatically. And then

00:33:29.900 there's just the basic techniques of how do you respond? How do you speak to somebody? Like somebody

00:33:35.880 in a room is becoming agitated. How do you approach that room? Do you approach as a team, you present

00:33:41.080 this great big front that's coming toward them, or do you take a softer approach? I'm real big on the

00:33:46.240 softer approach because most people in those situations are trying to get themselves under control.

00:33:51.580 So the task of the people around them is to be as supportive of that as possible.

00:33:55.800 Great. Well, hey, Sean, this has been a great conversation. Where can people learn more about

00:34:00.240 the book and your work?

00:34:02.780 Well, I have a blog called ironshrink.com and that's, it's the word iron and the word shrink

00:34:08.020 all run together. And anything you want to know about me is up there and the book is up there as

00:34:11.940 well.

00:34:12.540 All right. Well, Sean Smith, thank you so much for your time. It's been a pleasure.

00:34:15.520 Thank you, Brett.

00:34:16.420 My guest today was Sean Smith. He's the author of the book, Surviving Aggressive People. It's

00:34:20.080 available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. Also check out his website, ironshrink.com,

00:34:25.460 where you can find more content from Sean on dealing with aggressive people, as well as

00:34:29.020 some other topics in psychology. Also check out the show notes at aom.is slash aggressive

00:34:33.660 for links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic.

00:34:46.120 Well, that wraps up another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. For more manly tips and advice,

00:34:50.520 make sure to check out the Art of Manliness website at artofmanliness.com. And if you enjoy the show,

00:34:54.660 I'd appreciate it if you give us a review on iTunes or Stitcher. Helps us out a lot. As always,

00:34:58.800 thank you for your continued support. And until next time, this is Brett McKay telling you to stay

00:35:02.340 manly.

The Art of Manliness - August 30, 2016

#230： How to Deal With Aggressive People

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