#230： How to Deal With Aggressive People
Episode Stats
Summary
Sean Smith is a psychologist and the author of the book Surviving Aggressive People: Practical Violence Prevention Skills for the Workplace and the Street. In this episode, he talks about why you need to worry more about aggressive attacks from people you know, rather than strangers, the difference between desperate aggression and expert aggression, and tactics you can use to prevent tense social situations from escalating to violence.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. So I've had
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guests on the show to talk about how to defend yourself from violent attacks, but what can
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you do to deescalate what are potentially violent confrontations so things don't come
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to fist blows? And how do you deal with people who get in your face and act in verbally belligerent
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ways? Well, my guest today has spent his career studying the psychology of aggressive people and
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how to handle them. His name is Sean Smith and he's a psychologist and the author of the book
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Surviving Aggressive People, Practical Violence Prevention Skills for the Workplace and the
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Street. And today on the show, Sean and I discuss why you need to worry more about aggressive attacks
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from people you know rather than from strangers, the difference between desperate aggression and
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expert aggression and tactics you can use to prevent tense social situations from escalating
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to violence. Really great show with a lot of practical takeaways. After the show, check out
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the show notes at aom.is slash aggressive for links to resources where you can delve deeper
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into this topic. All right, Sean Smith, welcome to the show. Well, thank you for having me. I'm a big
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fan of your site and what you do. Well, I appreciate that. So you're the author of the book Surviving
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Aggressive People and we're going to get in the details of how to do that, what that means. But
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before we do, let's talk a bit about your background. You're a psychologist with a private
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practice now, but you've also done work in detox centers and places where you probably dealt with
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a lot of aggressive people. How did your work there influence your ideas about how to handle people
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when they start showing aggression? Well, all the way through this, in developing and writing this
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book, I was looking for some kind of organized way of thinking about handling aggression.
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And long before I ever got to the detox centers and the residential treatment facilities and so
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forth, I, and my father, when I was a kid, he bought a, I was nine years old. He bought a bar
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in Commerce City, Colorado, which is an industrial area in the north of Denver. And, um, I got to watch
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my dad who was, he was a little rough around the edges, but he was a brilliant street psychologist.
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He knew how to handle people. He knew what motivated people and how to calm people down
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and how to make situations resolved peacefully. And watching him do this when I spent my nights
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and weekends at that bar really got me curious about people and how they work and how he was
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doing what he was doing, because it seemed like a, seemed like a superpower to me to be able to manage
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people. And so, uh, as I grew older, I started looking for, uh, an organized way to think about
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aggression and how to deescalate people. And it just wasn't much out there. So I went into
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martial arts and, um, there's a lot of great psychology there and a lot of great tidbits
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and information, but no real organized way of thinking about deescalating people. And I went
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to college and same thing, a lot of great information, but no organized way of thinking
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about it. So really in answer to your question, what, before I got to the detox facilities and so
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forth, about the time that I was getting frustrated and searching and trying to find people who knew
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how to do this, uh, a bunch of businesses in Denver got together and invited the guardian angels to
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come to Denver to, uh, clean up the streets so that their businesses could do a little better.
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Denver wasn't the thriving area that it was back now, back then. And when I heard that they were
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coming to town, I started looking into them and I really, I learned that this is a group of people
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who will intervene when they see a problem, but they don't carry weapons. They don't beat people up.
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They relied on their, their wits and their skills and the radios that they carried. And I thought
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maybe this would be a group of people who has some systematic way of thinking about deescalating
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people. And it turned out that I met a lot of really like my father, brilliant street psychologists
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who knew how to do this. So that kind of got me on the path of organizing this information. So really
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all this information in the book, I know nothing. I'm just giving you what smarter people than me have
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taught me. Okay. So let's get in the details of, of handling aggressive people. Uh, where are most
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folks going to encounter aggressive people? And why is this such a vital skill to have, even if you
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live, you know, in a relatively safe place, like an affluent suburb or a middle-class area of town?
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Well, you know how you've heard that you're likeliest to have a car accident within a few miles of your
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house. And most of us heard that, that statistic thrown around that. And it makes sense. You know,
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I live in Denver, so that's where I spend my time. And I spend most of my time around my house,
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around my business. So of course, that's where I'm going to have an accident. The chances of me
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having a fender bender today in Tulsa are slim to none because I'm not there. And the same thing,
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the same kind of reasoning applies to learning how to manage aggressive people. It's the people
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around you. Those are the people that you see every, the people that you see every day. Those are the
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people that you could potentially have a problem with. And the crime statistics from the Department
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of Justice from 2012, a pretty recent statistic, 73% of violent crimes are committed by somebody
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that the victim knows. That's why it's important to know how to handle folks.
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Okay. Yeah. I mean, this, I mean, this is not just like family members or friends. It could be
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at the job is a place where a lot of aggression takes place. Disgruntled employees or disgruntled
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clients. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. And most of the feedback I get on this book, I've written other
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books and I don't, they get Amazon reviews and so forth, but I get a lot of personal feedback on
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this book. And the personal feedback that I get is people not saying that they thwarted a mugging or
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that they saved a burning school bus full of children. It's that they calm down a client or they
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calm down their boss or they handled some sort of mundane incident well, because they learned how
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aggression works and they learned how to head it off quickly. Right. And I think maybe this is a
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skill that is sort of degraded in people because since we don't, our interactions with other people
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are very transactional, like you just sort of, I don't know, you don't deal with people as people
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anymore. I think maybe we've lost that skill, like that street smart that your dad had.
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Yeah. I think one of the things that we've lost in recent years is I walk around downtown and I see
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people walking around staring into their cell phones and listening to their, their earbuds and
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so forth. And they're very tuned out to the environment. And, you know, it's a good way to
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get hit by a bus. But more than that, people I've noticed more recently, I don't know if it's
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happening more recently or if I'm just noticing it more recently that I can go to a party or I can
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have an interaction with somebody and talk to somebody for 10 or 15 minutes and I can walk away
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knowing quite a bit about that person and realizing that sometimes they don't even know my name
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because they haven't bothered to find out about the person that they're talking about.
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And I think that that's kind of an unwise way to go through life because if, if you're walking down
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the street, staring into your cell phone, obviously you're opening yourself up to, to dangers and you're
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not going to see things coming. But if you're operating that way socially and you're not taking the
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temperature of the room that you're in, you're not taking the temperature, the psychological temper of
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the street that you're walking down, you're not paying attention to the people around you.
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And that's kind of a social equivalent of walking around with blinders on it. It strikes me as
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unnecessary and really nothing to gain, but potentially a lot to lose.
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Right. All right. So you classify aggression into two types. There's desperate aggression and
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expert aggression. What are the differences between the two types?
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This is one of the first things that I learned from folks is that I learned to think about
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aggression in terms of what is it trying to accomplish. And these two broad categories of
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behavior, they really haven't let me down. They seem to be pretty steady. And the, what I'm calling
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desperate aggression is really somebody who's trying to solve a problem and they're running out of
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options. And so they're getting cornered, they're getting upset, they're getting worked up and their
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mind is slowly closing down and turning into a, turning more to the emotional side of the mind
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rather than the rational side of the mind. Whereas what I'm calling expert aggression, you can just
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call that predatory behavior. This is somebody who's using aggression for profit, basically.
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Okay. So expert aggression would be something like a con man or a bully or something like that.
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Yeah, exactly. Somebody who's trying to gain socially, somebody who's trying to gain materially.
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Okay. So let's talk about these two types of aggression in detail. What are the signs that a
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desperate, aggressive person gives off? And can you walk us through a scenario of, of desperate and
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Yeah, I saw one just the other day and it did turn out well. So I'll put this out there as a good
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scenario because it turned out okay. But when somebody is becoming desperate, you probably,
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you know, one of the things I say early in the book is that there's really nothing in this book
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that you don't already know. We just need to put some words to it. And you could probably guess that
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when somebody is becoming desperate, they're going to show signs of distress. They're going to show
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physical agitation. Their voice is going to change. Their posture is going to change.
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Their movements are going to change. The things that they're talking about are going to change and
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narrow. And sometimes people go in an opposite direction. They don't become more expansive and
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more agitated. Sometimes people become more subdued and more cornered and more quiet until they lash
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out. So again, things that probably we all know, and these are the things that characterize somebody
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who's losing a sense of control. They feel like they have a problem to solve. They're feeling frightened
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and scared. And so they get that adrenal response. And that scenario that I saw just last week
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was I went to a Chinese restaurant by my house. It's one of my favorite places. And one of the
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waitresses there was getting kind of harassed by a customer. And it had to do with soup. And I'll
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spare you the details. But he was pushing her into a corner about soup. And what was happening is
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the reason this is a brilliant showcase is because this took place over probably, it seemed like a long
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time. But it was probably about 45 to 60 seconds. During that 45 to 60 seconds, I could see her
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systematically closing off her options. He was saying that he wanted something. She would propose
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a solution. He would meet that solution with rejection. And he was pretty rude about it. And so
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each time he did that, you could see her physically becoming more agitating. She was starting to become
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loud. She was starting to act like somebody who felt like she was trying to solve a problem. And
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she just had no options. Everything she was doing, she was caught between her boss who wanted one
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thing and the customer who wanted something else. And she didn't know which way to go. Finally,
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she just threw her hands up and walked away, which was the right thing to do. But I loved that it was
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such a clear demonstration of him systematically closing down her options and her systematically
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Right. So the, the, the mammal, like the human part of her, where the prefrontal cortex started
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shutting down and started going back to the sort of mammalian brain reptile.
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Well, let's talk about expert aggression. Um, how do you, how do you know you're dealing with
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an expert aggressor? Um, and what's the difference between the signs they give off from a person
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Right. It was one of my favorite topics. I was, I was bullied horribly as a kid, which
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was one of the reasons I idealized my father because I saw him handling bullies and I, you
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know, it changed my world to know that somebody could actually handle bullies and have things
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turn out peacefully. But I love the topic of predatory behavior, expert aggression. And
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I think the easiest way to think about the way people behave when they're being predatory
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is to look at the way animals behave when they're being predatory. And again, this is nothing
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that we don't already know. We could all sit down and describe the way a big cat on the
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savannah approaches a herd. There's two things that that, that predator has to account for.
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Number one, it can't expend too much energy because the energy is expensive. If it wastes
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his energy or that, that animal wastes his energy, uh, trying to take down one animal and
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it shows poorly, it might not have enough energy to take down the next animal, watch another
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attack. So it has to be very mindful of energy, which means number two, it has to pick the
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target very carefully. And so that's why we don't see, um, lions jumping out of trees,
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shouting Geronimo on the way down with a knife in their teeth because they can get hurt and
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it's expensive to scare everybody. It'd just be chaos. What they do is they approach things
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very methodically. You see the cat circling the herd, sizing up the herd, looking for the
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one that's, that's going to be the good target. It's all very methodical, all very logical.
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And humans do the same thing. Now, since we're, we're predators, or since we're, um, you know,
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where we are predators, but since we're verbal creatures, we have, uh, all of these rituals
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that we follow that are more complex, but it's basically the same thing as the ritual of circling
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the herd. We use, uh, verbal distractions to, to kind of test and poke and prod. We will test
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boundaries and see if we can, uh, get past a little boundary. And then we find, we learn a little
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more about the target. We breach a boundary. Um, and if you want a scenario, there's, there's one
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in the book, uh, there's a lady here in Denver named Christina who was assaulted one time. And
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she tells her story because she, she wants to, she wants other people to know that how this stuff
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works and how to avoid it. And her story is that she was working in an office building. She had a man
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coming around the office building that she'd seen a couple of times. He looked like he sort of
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long there, sort of not, like he kind of had the right clothes to be working around the building,
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but kind of not. And one day she was leaving the office a little bit later than she usually does.
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And this guy was there and he insisted on, uh, giving her a ride to this party that she knew
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that or this picnic that he knew that she was going to be going to. And the way he approached her
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was to, uh, act like her savior. He was going to give her a ride. He knew that she was headed up to
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the mountains. And so he talked about headed up to the mountains where this picnic was going to be.
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And he insisted that she didn't want to be on the highway by herself. And she had this little voice
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in her head as this conversation was unfolding that I really shouldn't be trusting this guy,
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but she ignored that voice. And every time she ignored that voice and he breached a little
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boundary, like for instance, getting her closer to his car, um, he knew that he was succeeding and
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he got a little better at getting her to the next step. And eventually he got her in her car and took
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her up to the mountains and assaulted her and it turned out kind of poorly. But the, the, the good
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thing that she tries to bring out of this is the lesson, listening to your intuition and understanding
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how predators circle in ever narrowing circles. They try to breeze those little boundaries.
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Gotcha. So yeah, so yeah, what the expert aggressor does is they test boundaries,
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get your trust and see if they can cross those boundaries. And once they see they can cross
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boundaries, they'll actually go in for the big time kill, I guess you can say.
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Yeah, a lot do. Yeah. And it can happen. It can unfold very quickly. That one happened to unfold
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pretty slowly, but it doesn't take very long for a lot of these things to occur. Like for example,
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one, one scenario in the book is about a guy who was closing down in a small Midwestern town. He was
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closing down the convenience store that he worked at for the night and somebody showed up at his
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door. I was just asking for a glass of water. I need a glass of water. Can I please do a glass of
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water? I've been walking all night and I just need, that's all I want. I promise all I need is a glass
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of water. This short conversation about water. And so finally he unlocks the door that he had had
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locked. This guy comes in and robs him and the whole thing probably didn't take very long, but
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it was that initial breaching of the boundary was even having the conversation with the guy.
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All right. So let's talk about the five ground rules of dealing with aggressive people you talk
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about in your book. What are these five ground rules and do they change whether you're dealing
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with a desperate aggressor or an expert aggressor? They really don't. What I noticed in
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these two very different ways of using aggression, there are some ground rules, some ways of carrying
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yourself through the world is really what the ground rules are, is how you present yourself in the
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world. And they really don't change depending on what kind of aggressor you're dealing with,
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but for different reasons. Like for the first one, for example, is establishing common ground.
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It's one of the most important things you can do. And this is what I was talking about. This was
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complaining about earlier when I was talking about people not getting to know each other.
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Establishing common ground means creating some commonality with the people around you. And it can be
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as simple as saying hello to somebody and making some eye contact as you're going down the street,
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particularly people that you're a little bit worried about. Make the eye contact, say hello,
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be confident, carry yourself well, but also create some connection between you two. And one of my
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teachers in this regard was a cop who worked in Denver here. And he would sometimes work the intake
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counter at one of the local jails. And one of his techniques with everybody who came through that
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door, so prisoners have, you know, people have just been arrested by the police. They're coming to the
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jail. He's the first person they deal with. And so automatically these people are hostile toward
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him. They don't like him. And one of his techniques was before he did anything was to do something to
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establish common ground. Maybe he would notice a shirt that they were wearing that had a team logo
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on or something. He would make some comment about that shirt or he would notice a tattoo and just ask
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about it. Some little thing that says, Hey, you and I are both people here. You and I are both
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on the same level. So even though we're not, but don't view me as an enemy, view me as somebody
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who's a little bit interested in emails and messages that he was sending. And more often than not,
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it worked. Of course, sometimes it didn't, but there's nothing to lose. It only took him a second
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All right. So there's established common ground. What are some of the other ground rules?
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Some of the ground rules are not shaming the aggressor, like particularly with somebody who's
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feeling desperate, not telling them that they're being ridiculous or not being dismissive
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for their concerns and not shaming yourself, which is very easy to do when you're behaving as if
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you're powerless. So if you're dealing with somebody who's desperate and they're looking
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for a solution and you're sending the message that you don't have the solutions and you're
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kind of helpless, that's not going to help them get back on track. And if you're dealing with a
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predator, being somebody who shows yourself as powerless and overly self-deprecating, again,
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if they're looking to breach boundaries, well, you've given them something that they can breach.
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So being too self-deprecating, although self-deprecating can show power, sacrificing boundaries,
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behaving powerless, those are all examples of shaming yourself. Another important ground rule is
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knowing what you want to accomplish in a situation. It's really easy to just get caught into
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arguing with someone because that lizard brain that you're talking about, that reptilian mind,
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that's contagious. And so when somebody's arguing with you and they're at a very low emotional level,
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they're operating out of emotion, it's really easy for me or you to shut off our intellectual
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brains and just start arguing emotional. So it's really important that you keep in mind,
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what am I actually trying to accomplish here? And then being flexible about how you get there.
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And I think one of the biggest one is just listening to your intuition. We have these giant brains that
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are processing tons of information and it's not all verbal. Some of it just shows up as a feeling
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and being practicing, listening to that, knowing how it speaks to you. And like my friend Christina would
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say, being able to listen to it when it's trying to talk to you. Yeah. I mean, that idea of intuition,
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I think it's a lot of, it's a hard thing to grasp for people, particularly, you know, us, we think
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we should be rational and intuition seems so irrational. I mean, how do you, how do you train
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your intuition? How do you figure out whether you're being overly paranoid or whether like,
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yeah, this is actual, like you're, this, something's a problem. You should follow this
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hunch that you're having. Well, I got two things on it. And the first one is that for different
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reasons, men and women experience exactly what you said. It's tough to listen to your intuition.
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Women are taught traditionally not to be emotional. They're taught to be polite. And this is what
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happened with Christina when she, she was the one who was assaulted in the mountains. Her intuition
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was telling her not to follow this guy, but her training, her social training was, well, you have
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to be polite. You can't make people feel bad. And so it was that motivation that led her to deny her
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intuition. And then I think the second part of it is just recognizing your intuition for what it is.
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If it's, well, I didn't finish the male part. You know, the male part is that I think men are often
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taught to ignore intuition because it's emotional and we're supposed to be stoic and rational. So men
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and women both have similar difficulty for different reasons. But I think ways to start listening to
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your intuition is number one, to know, recognize what it is that's stopping you from listening to it. If,
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if you're having trouble listening to it and recognizing how it shows up in your body,
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because this isn't, it's just information that your body is processing and knowing, being able to
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identify what kind of thoughts show up when your intuition is speaking to you. They might be indirect
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thoughts about what's going on, what kind of emotions are showing up. Maybe you're just feeling
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uneasy, or maybe you're feeling like retreating, being able to identify that as something that says
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your intuition is talking to you, like a little dashboard, like a red light dashboard on your,
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red light on your dashboard that comes out and says there's a problem. Sometimes it's not clear
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what the problem is. There's just a problem. And then physically knowing how it shows up for you.
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Do you feel a tightness in your chest? Do you feel a, you know, you start getting a headache or a
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throbbing or do things become distant? So really keying in on the cognitive, the emotional, and the
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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
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
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.
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
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,
00:28:12.220
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.
00:28:23.520
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
00:29:31.140
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
00:34:02.780
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
00:34:12.540
All right. Well, Sean Smith, thank you so much for your time. It's been a pleasure.
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