Podcast: Play in new window | Download (5.9MB)
A minister told me about one of his early crisis experiences. A very upset and frightened lady in her middle forties came to his home one evening in real desperation. Her husband was a successful physician in the community; his gambling had started innocently enough with a Tuesday night poker game and an occasional trip to the racetrack. He had gradually started gambling in amounts that far exceeded what he and his family could afford to lose, and the squeeze had come. He had borrowed against his house and everything else he had of value. Over a period of a year or so, his surgical practice had deteriorated because of his preoccupation with gambling and the resulting debts. That afternoon, he and his wife had had a terrible argument over the situation, and she was terrified about what might become of him and the family. “Will you please go talk with him,” was her plea to the minister. “I can’t help him unless he wants help,” was the stock reply. I’ve said the same thing, haven’t you? One of our employees or co-workers, one of our friends or neighbors, a member of our family, or even someone we don’t know very well, wants us to try to help. They want us to become involved in their problem and they ask us to try to talk with someone for them. It is my hope that this book will help you get to the place where you can tell the “dogfights” from the real crisis situations, and that you will be able to intervene effectively when intervention is justified. You will still get a little too involved once in a while, but you will rarely refrain from getting involved when you really should.
I was recently talking with a deputy sheriff and a city policewoman after one of a series of crisis intervention training classes that were part of a more broadly oriented police training school. It surprised me a little to learn how frequently police are called in to respond to emotional and social crises. For many people, the police are their first resource when they are involved in or observe severe arguments or blowups within families, apparent drug reactions by teenagers and young adults, heightened social tension within schools and community groups, and when things are generally getting out of hand and people cannot think of anyone else to call. It is very important for the police not to increase tension, to avoid making people more angry and agitated, to refrain from exceeding their authority, and, above all, to avoid overreacting. Nonetheless, both the deputy and the policewoman expressed a sincere desire to help people who really need help. With their improved understanding of the social interaction nature of conflict and crisis, they felt that “crisis communication” was a tool that would make them more effective in their efforts to get people to slow down, calm down, think things through, and plan ahead. For the police, as with the rest of us, there is nothing they can do about what has already happened. But being able to see the potential cumulative effects—that is, the snowballing effects of a situation—and being able to respond in a way that gets people to slow down and calm down will take the crisis potential out of the situation and effectively keep matters from getting worse. Interestingly, the police officers indicated that in these kinds of situation a crime usually has not been committed. With that in mind, the officers see crisis intervention and crisis communication as improving their skills in crime prevention. Their real enthusiasm, though, stemmed from the fact that they have acquired a new and felt ability to help people in extreme social and emotional difficulties.
School principals and family physicians tell me about a problem they have in common. An unexpectedly high proportion of their time with parents, students, and patients relates to social and emotional conflict and crisis. The school principals talk about irate parents who feel that school has mistreated or mishandled their children, students who feel that they have been treated unfairly or who are reacting in a depressed or angry way to something that has happened with their friends or family, and teachers who are sure that they can run the school better than the principal or who are at their wit’s end with a particular student or group of students. While we are talking about school people, superintendents of school districts have all of this plus the added burden of citizens and citizen groups who know that education isn’t like it used to be and want to know why. Teachers, principals, superintendents, school counselors, and anyone else who deals with kids a lot in an education setting—as a Scout master, 4H leader, or anything else—it seems are seen as experts on all aspects of children and their adjustment. They talk about parents and kids who have come to them to complain about or express concern about one another. Kids think parents are unfair, unreasonable, and that the best solution is to run away from home, quit trying, get into trouble, or do something else equally drastic. Physicians tell me that much of their practice consists of people who are expressing physical symptoms that are caused by or related to emotional and social upheavals. Some of those people are spontaneously able to relate their difficulty to marital problems, depression, social situations, or other things in their life that are causing stress and tension. Quite often, though, the family doctor is called no matter what goes wrong. People are not experiencing any real medical emergency but are experiencing social and emotional crisis.
School people and physicians alike, then, are asked to deal with and help people in all kinds of social and emotional crises. They do not have time for either short- or long-term counseling or therapy, and even if they did, they usually do not have time to develop the skills of a psychiatrist, psychologist, or psychiatric social worker. Had they wanted to do that, they would not have gotten their degrees in education or medicine. What they want and what this book has to offer is a well-grounded, common-sense, person-to-person approach to conflict, crisis, intense emotional and social difficulties, and deteriorating interpersonal relationships. Students in mental health disciplines and volunteers training for service with hot lines and drop-in centers, a wide range of professionals and others daily involved with people in stress and in tension-laden situations should find it helpful in their efforts to understand real people with real problems.