Left Of Greg 031 FREEZE

Everyone, thanks for tuning in. I'm Brian, I'm the host of The Human Behavior Podcast. You're going to be watching the video version of our audio podcast. Please, guys, if you like the video, like it, subscribe to the channel. There's going to be more content down there if you're already a subscriber, and it's a better way for us to get you guys some more stuff. If you have any questions or comments, go ahead and visit below. Check out our links down below to get ahold of us and to actually find out more places where you can get more information about this. Please like and subscribe. Follow us on Facebook at HBPRNA (Human Behavior Pattern Recognition and Analysis).

Remember all these cases that we discuss and all these discussions that we have are through the lenses of what we call human behavior pattern recognition and analysis. So please like it, share it, tell your friends about it, and we hope you enjoy the show. Thanks. Sorry, that's probably a good thing. All right, ready to get started? Ready to go.

All right, everyone. So today it's just going to be myself and Greg again, and we're going to be talking about the four Fs to start off. But we're going to talk about what's known as fight-or-flight and a little-known other F that's in there that a lot of people don't really talk about, which is freeze. We've probably heard of the fight-or-flight response to different stressful situations and autonomic nervous system response, but a lot of people forget to mention the freeze. So I think, Greg, to start off, we should go over a 30,000-foot view of the four Fs. The four Fs being: fornicate, fight, feed, flee.

This is how my limbic system – remember that, the very primal system that we have that's still inside of every human being, that we've gotten from adaptation over time, hundreds of thousands or millions of years actually, of keeping us, the human race, alive. It's kept us alive this long. That limbic system, now we don't really use it as much, which gets into our skillset, what we teach. It's a little rusty, it's got a little bit of dust on it, but it's still there. So that limbic system will give us autonomic reactions to certain situations or stimuli in our environment. I can't really control that; that's going to happen. But it's also predicated on the four Fs.

For anyone who's listening or going, "Well, that's not how humans are," we're talking about a very biological level. We're talking about our limbic system, of how I process my environment based on, at a primitive level. Remember that our primitive wiring still exists; it did not go away. It clearly has an influence on how we deal with a situation.

So, out of those four Fs, there's obviously fornicate. Fornicate, remember, is for the purposes of procreation: I need to recreate and continue the human species. Feed, obviously, for survival: I need to eat for survival. So when we get into fight or flight, that is once again for survival purposes. Ideally, if there's a threat in my environment, I want to flee, I want to get out of there at a very primal level. I only want to fight if I have to, to give me time or give me the situation to flee. Because once again, this is all about human survival at a very basic primal level. So all those little file folders are still in there. One of the ones that we talk about is freeze. We talk about that fight-or-flight response, but there's also a freeze response, and that's going to be the overarching topic today that we're really going to deep dive out of the four Fs. This is specifically out of the fight-or-flight system. Anything we want to add to that so far, Greg?

First of all, you're right on, right on point as usual. My thing for the listeners at home, for the people that are watching the podcast, do your homework. What we're doing is we're taking one of the four Fs, and we're going to flip the script and look at both sides of that same coin. We're going to look at it from a science standpoint and from the standpoint of, "So what? How is this going to help me avoid a dangerous situation? How is this going to help me avoid an incident of violence or a threat or workplace violence, which is so prevalent in society today?" And we don't want to scare you, because almost nobody wants to kill you, but we want you to understand that there's a lot of crap out there.

I have an example. I'm so new to this whole podcast and video and everything else, and I'm still the old school, taking notes with the yellow pad. So while I was looking at one of our podcasts, to poke holes in it to make sure that we're coming across well, there was one there and it showed something about reading body language, and that's one of my things. Everybody goes, "Oh, you've got to read body language." We have a kinesics component, we have that. It's one of six. In order to be good at that, in order to understand that, there is a whole lot of information you've got to go big to small first.

Exactly.

And in this one, they were talking about the person with their arms crossed that you were encountering, and like everybody else, they fall into the trap and they're going, "Oh, this person is hiding something, they're being protective." Listen, you have certain basic primitives, comfort signals. Maybe you got it from being in the embryo when you were not born yet, and the way that your twin brother's leg was up against your face, so you like to self-soothe. You can't assign this overall importance to a situation by throwing a dart at the map and saying it's just one thing. So that's why I wanted to make sure that we look today at, and we want to take a look at, some of the cogs and some of the mesh that goes together with flee.

I'll give you an example that people don't like to talk about. We talk about training all the time, and people don't want to go to training, and they don't want to pay for training, or they're doing, "No, let's go to the gym, or let's go to the range, or let's go shoot." They want to do the laser plasma cutting, charging, door-booting in the car. Nobody wants to sit for a lecture, but you've got to do both. You have to train the whole brain.

What I would do is I would say, "Look up Rick Rescorla." Go back into your computer when we're done with the show and look up who he is and what he's done. The reason I'm saying that is that there was a situation a couple of years back, and Rick predicted the situation very well. He was a security manager, security chief, from Morgan Stanley at that time. What he did is he, every couple of months, hosted a rehearsal to get everybody as quickly out of the South Tower as they could at a place called the World Trade Center. When an incident did actually occur, he was able to lead 2,700 of his fellow employees out of the building in time that they didn't die.

So why is that important? One, training changes behaviors. Two, if you don't repeat a process, you're not going to have muscle memory. Three, muscle memory is so little important compared to training the brain for advanced critical thinking: "What is this event? What do I do?" So the brain is predisposed to look out for your survival, but it's been (dulled) over the years because we can order a number three from a clown's mouth.

I want you to think, just for a minute, everybody, about the climbing deaths in Colorado, the rafting deaths in Colorado. It happens every year. How many times have you seen, Brian, on social media, these deaths due to a selfie? Mischief where the person (is) trying to...

Yes, that's only increasing.

Oh my gosh, okay. So what that is, Brian, is that in certain situations, we don't predict likely danger. And when we don't predict likely danger of a situation, what we end up doing is we skip phases, like sequencing, channel capacity. We skip key predictive factors of danger and violence, and we completely go to the stage of hyperarousal. Hyperarousal, or the acute stress response, is the situation that leads us to perform poorly or to get PTSD.

Now, I'll give you an example of that.

So real quick, before you get to that, just to relate it to everyone listening, the lighting is terrible.

It's, well, it's not so much the lighting on you, Greg, it's just a gigantic problem.

No, but it goes to just those autonomic reactions. So if anyone ever had a startle response, your hands go up, or you jump back, or you may hit that person. There are hilarious videos on YouTube of people, someone jumps out to scare them and they punch them in the face, all that stuff. So just as a reference point for everyone, if I haven't trained for that situation, I'm going to go instinctively, and my limbic system takes over, and it's going to do whatever it's going to do.

Precisely. And remember, violent, our primitive instincts include violent encounters. So when we are faced with an unknown situation, we're more likely to go to violence, meaning that that rage response was completely something I understand, because I know that when that person ends up on a blank file folder, all of a sudden things are pretty even. A situation where somebody makes fun of you, somebody bumps you, somebody says, "I'm a wide load, B peepers I'm," and all of a sudden you go to median anger. The reason is that we have a very weak ego system now, because we're not tested anymore. We don't have practicality, we didn't have to fight a cougar on the way home. The more that those are pushed towards the back, and the more we think we can think ourselves out of it, the more we fool ourselves.

So those selfie deaths are from people not predicting the danger in the situation that they're in. By not doing that, and by talking about the situation with the World Trade Center, what prompted me to this is fire drills are a perfect example of a thing that can save your life. Either we don't do them, or we don't do them frequently enough. Flee is a good thing; flee is a genetic, a primitive trigger that is designed to get us out of harm's way.

I read a great thing in an American Medical Journal, an AMA Journal. Somebody asked a question, it was about, "Hey, listen, with the sympathetic and the parasympathetic systems, why is it that people say that you're going to poop yourself or urinate yourself in a stressful situation, when in fact that's a parasympathetic?" You're what you're doing is mixing metaphors, you're throwing junk science together.

Look, when your body ramps up for fight-or-flight, one of the things that happens is sphincter control. Sphincters slam shut to contain areas, just like the hold of the Lusitania. But the idea is that you've got to understand that they're trying to compartmentalize. Now there's another part of your brain that is intrinsically trying to separate you from that threat, and that's the one that's saying, "I need to jettison ballast." So the urine and the defecation have to happen, and I might also not appeal to this person, animal, beast, or anything else if I smell bad enough and I'm covered in my own feces, maybe they don't want to eat me. And those type of things are the things that we don't think about.

Listen, when you think "fight," okay, that's a normal reflexive action. Of course that's going to happen. And the way humans are triggered, "flee," totally understand that. But what if you freeze? There are a couple of types of freeze. If you're thinking at home about, "Well, what do you mean by a couple of types of freeze?" there are three that I've identified, and I bet that there are probably more, and you actually brought up one that seems like one that could fall into that, too.

The idea is that, first of all, nobody talks about the freeze response. If you try to go online, they may do a passing thing. If you have your immediate danger and sympathetic and parasympathetic, then all of a sudden you get the idea that freeze is one of the things that you're going to choose. So you've got a Tyrannosaurus – I call it the Jurassic Park one. "Okay, maybe if I don't move, you're going to lose interest, and you're going to walk by." You remember that again? And that's a primal reaction. You see that in animals.

Yeah, deer, I've never had a stop.

Right, precisely. And so they're going to think, "Hey." Do you remember our good friend, an advisory board member and our Sergeant-at-Arms, Erik Hoyer, is a fellow scout sniper? Do you remember where he does the freeze, and he drops down to the melting?

Yeah, yeah, totally melting.

It makes sense, though, because it's one of the types of freeze. For your eye, your eye being attracted to light, motion, edges, and it only has a six-degree functional field. So now you understand Tyrannosaurus Rex at Jurassic Park.

Second one is the ostrich freeze. "Okay, listen, I can't make you disappear, so I'm going to disappear." You've seen people in horror movies do that. You've also got to understand that that's almost the last thing that you're going to do before you flee.

And then you've got the autonomic freeze, and that's the, "Holy, I am paralyzed by fear and I can't move." If you think about that one, there's no file folder that comes up. You don't resort to violence, and what your body gets flooded with is the endorphins. Now you've got the chemical cocktail, the catecholamine group that's coming in, and what it's trying to do is it's trying to issue painkillers to you, preparing for that strike, preparing for that stab, preparing for that shot. People that are watching have probably, and they're horrible, don't see violent stuff, it's not worth it, but you've probably seen a videotape of a beheading, or somebody that's led into a place and then they shoot him or do something, and you go, "Why didn't that person fight, fight?" That's why.

And that's all three of the ones that I discuss, and the fourth, the melting. All of those, training can overcome those biases. Those psychological and physiological biases can be overcome with training. So if we rehearse for an event, and if we have realistic training, and we don't go to hyperarousal, we can actually fight back. We can choose which one that we want in a situation. We can have a couple ready for likely situations. Does that make sense? And yes, I want our viewers to get out of this one today, Brian.

Yeah, and so, if I'm understanding what you're saying, that the freeze one, fight or flight is going to be at least I'm doing something, I'm trying to fight my way out of the situation, I'm getting out of there. But that freeze, which can happen, is obviously, it sounds like the most dangerous because I'm doing nothing.

Exactly. Doing nothing during a situation. Is that when I just described three or four ways of doing nothing that can get you dead right now? So, let's talk about physiologically, let's talk about why this happens, and then some people have certain reactions and some people have others, which goes into training, experience. But then, how does this actually happen? Nature and nurture? You're right, you're on the right track. It's experience. It's different with the distinction, and scientifically.

So, let's talk about kids. Kids haven't formed their amygdala yet. They have an amygdala, and it's fully formed, don't get me wrong. What I'm trying to say, though, is that its trigger emotions and its release of chemicals are completely internal and have nothing to do with the kid's experience because he has none. So therefore, a child and a young person, a young human, their first refined response on the scale that you talked about is not fornicate because that doesn't make sense; not old enough yet. So what they'll do is they'll freeze. So a kid, when a kid is petrified, will freeze, and they will stand still. I don't know if you just saw that yellow jacket or whatever that just went by my head, so if I go fleeing a little later, it's for the EpiPen.

But the idea is that if you think about that for a minute, Brian, because they don't know how to sense fear or predict likely outcomes, because they don't have spirals, they don't have that wiring, even though they do have the trial for bad and good. That's why, have you ever seen a kid – Halloween's coming up – Halloween masks on Dad or Mom, somebody that they know? They're screaming. Tip the mask up, it stops. The mask down, okay, that's what you don't like. We're right at first.

Right, you've got it.

Yeah, they need to see that mask, and they'd rather wear it up on their head. You'll see some little kids do that, and they're like, "No, I'm okay with it up here, but not down on my face. I'm not sure what happens. I don't know what that means, but I know that it's like climbing the rope in gym class, I get a funny feeling." So the idea behind that funny feeling is, in a kid, the kid doesn't know what it is, so the kid will freeze.

Now I'll give you the example: once an amygdala starts to form, domestic violence at home. The kid now knows what (to do), or not, so they're going to run and they're going to hide. Which right back to our fire example, what if it's a fire and the kid now is at the point where they're going to freeze or they're going to flee and hide in the bathroom? Now they're in the bathtub and the fireman can't get him out.

I was in a Safeway the other day. Our CEO of the company, Shelly Williams, and I were shopping in the morning; nobody else around. So it's at six, it's still dark outside, 13 degrees (Fahrenheit), like the polar icecaps. And I'm walking through the store, and there's a woman that has her daughter, and I'm like, "Wow, that's very unusual, that much alone camping or hunting or something." So the daughter was the free spirit. The daughter was dancing around by the vegetable aisle and over here and there. The funniest thing in the world is she got too far from Mom. Now the legs got stiff, the back got a little bit arched, and she's walking down and looking down each row, walking down, looking. Now the petrification starts, and you could see that she's going internal. "Oh my God, what do I do?" She gets almost to the end of the aisle that's parallel to the food aisles, and Mom says, "Alicia," or whatever her name was. Oh my God, you could see she completely relaxed, turned around, and skipped all the way back to Mom. That kid can't explain to you and me what just happened, but what just happened is all of a sudden, now my tunnel vision, now my auditory exclusion, "Oh my gosh, I might be a victim." That's fear, buddy.

And so, if we can manage fear, we can manage rage. If we can manage fear, we can manage our freeze response. So you're not going to be able to get away from a startle response. Things surprise us, but things surprise us to what, Greg? To protect us.

Right, and we're talking about here, how can I channel this and use it as a protection? So I think that that's a perfect way of putting it, that people will think about it, it's to protect you. So now your file folders, experiences, might be different. So this is because you alluded to it earlier when you started talking about PTSD and how that can form in different ways, and through different life experiences that someone has. But that's just it, if that system kicks in where we've all felt that, where we get that fear. The catecholamines start kicking. So I get a little bit of that cortisol in my stomach, that feeling in the pit of my stomach. My heart rate, my respiration might increase a little bit. My body starts sending that blood to major muscle groups. All of a sudden, I get laser-focused on what I'm doing. My attention goes to the immediate area or what I see as a potential threat. So that can happen based on my limbic system picking up and going, "There's some type of danger in your environment. There's arousal in here that I'm not..."

Your warning, Will Robinson, it's screaming at you.

And now that arousal can come from whatever that warning may be, what we like to refer to as a "corrupt file folder." Meaning I'm getting it out of a situation where I shouldn't, or isn't normal, or hasn't met that threshold where I'm in a survival situation, because of my past experiences in life. Maybe I'm hypervigilant or I'm more prone to this because of some experience I've had before.

So, you with that girl, right there, that is likely an encounter of, she's young, she's definitely within eyesight of Mom, especially if they're in a place that they're not comfortable. She's not at school, she's in a zoo. And remember, this is an austere environment, very antiseptic, no people are around. You get what I'm trying (to say)? It was just her and Mom. Now the echoes start building, it's still dark outside. You see how that consumes her mind, how that conforms (to her fear). So that observation of her starting, that fear starting to kick in, and then once she sees Mom, it's okay, that's explained.

Now that's different if she's having that same behavior and she's with Mom, or something, and then Dad or someone else comes in the picture, and you start to get that same response. That's completely (different).

Okay, so now Uncle Paul walks in the room, it's a family reunion, and you see one of the kids, Little Jimmy, the cousin. Do you get what I'm trying to say? He immediately starts to stiffen and you see the fear that's going on. Okay, it could be something as benign and simple as that uncle always squeezes that kid's cheek when they see (him). Or it could be pedophilia and sexual assault. You've got to have context and relevance and measure the notes against the notes, but it's a starting point, Brian, that's what I'm trying to say here.

One of the things that you've seen, one of the things that I've seen, and many of our viewers will have this experience, is hopelessness. I remember seeing it in Iraq, I remember seeing it in Afghanistan. We were in a situation that I won't mention the place, but we both certainly saw it at the same time, and you knew what that feeling was. That abject hopeless feeling is what can lead to PTSD and these type of incidents. Because what happened is you thought you had a plan, you thought you were going to go through with something, and all of a sudden the emergency occurred, and now your friend is dead or your friend is in the hospital. Something has occurred in your brain. Your brain tries to give you snippets through chemical and electrochemical transmitters. You're getting these flashbulbs that are going off, and they're giving you a bit, a piece of the rewinded video over and over and over. And when you smell that, and when you hear that scream again, you go, "Oh my God, my buddy turned into ballistic gelatin, and I did nothing."

Yeah, so you think, "Hey, listen, I was hopeless." I wasn't helpless because I could have done something, but hopeless. I did not come up with a conclusion. So part of PTSD is you fighting to get you back. What you're trying to do is say, "What if I had a successful resolution? What if I would have done these?" By getting professional help or at least going through training, what you're going to find out is you can, there are certain things you can't control, but you have to understand, you have to name them. As you start aging through the process, and now you start having this palette of choices, let's call it, you have unconscious choices and conscious choices. If your autonomic register doesn't have enough depth, then what's going to happen in an emergency situation is you're going to respond.

Everybody in the audience, have you ever seen anybody just dancing around like a chicken during an emergency? And you're going, "What's this guy doing?" He's doing the "lead, follow, or get the hell out of the window." He's doing, "I don't know what to do, so my body is going to respond with this nervous energy." You can't let yourself go there. And I can guarantee you, when shots are fired, when somebody pops yellow smoke, when those two cars ram you and now all of a sudden they're grabbing your daughter out of the back seat, that's where you're going to be if you don't have an appropriate level of training.

Shelly (Williams) said it the other day about mental rehearsal: "Hey, how many times do we rehearse for these off-duty situations?" Brian, you added, and rightly so, "Listen, we prepare for the deployment, we prepare for the combat, but we never prepare for the 'uncombat,' the coming back, the flight home." Do you get what I'm saying? And that's where PTSD starts to lamprey in and attach to your unconscious mind.

Yeah, and there's, I mean, we can go through countless examples from personal life and how that works. But the idea is that I think it's important to note that these are autonomic reactions, meaning I can't control them. So you can't control them. If you're that person that you froze, you didn't have a file folder for what was happening, or you became so overwhelmed that you couldn't control that. And it took maybe someone in that situation just slapping you on the back of the head and going, "Hey, man, what's going on here? Get in the fight! I need you to do this!" Whatever.

It doesn't have to be something that chaotic. Because then what happens is you go, "Man," they look back, "Oh man, I didn't do anything. I didn't know what to do." And that PTSD can come from that, where you're now mentally beating themselves up, so to speak, to go, "Oh, wait a minute, I did nothing," or, "I sat there while this happened. I came back and watched. I should have intervened. I should have done..." And the guilt.

Yep.

And so it can, it's one of those things that can happen. And like you said, if you don't have a plan or if you haven't been through those experiences before, that freeze part is huge. So not just, there are other issues that lead to what people call PTSD, and those are, almost everyone has it in some form or fashion. Anyone who gets in a bad car crash and then they're scared to drive, that's, you have PTSD from that experience. Welcome to the club, come on in, the water's warm. But you can work through that. You can deconstruct that event, separate the emotion from the event, and learn what's autonomic reactions and what your body did versus what you might not have had a conscious choice in the matter.

And then you go, "You're making it sound so simple." And yes, some of our friends would drink a bottle of NyQuil because that's automatic. Did make it sound simple because it's personal and I know how to deal with it. It took years and years to learn that, to go, "Oh, I'm trying to deconstruct it every time we're together." But I think that goes into what you're getting back with the four Fs and having it being part of our system.

So let's talk about that for a minute. And you're right on again, but people sometimes don't understand, the autonomic nervous system is unconscious. You remember the fight that we had that one day out on the West Coast, where somebody says, "Unconscious means asleep." Do me a favor, get back in school, break open that book. Generally it's from left to right, and up to down. But the idea is that that autonomic nervous system is doing this stuff, the maintenance stuff that you don't do on your own. So it's regulating your heart rate, your digestion, your respiration, your pupils, all forms of external arousal that are happening: the blinking, the swallowing. Those are things that if you consciously paid attention to that background program that was going, it would drive you insane. Would you agree?

Yeah.

You wouldn't be. So then if you have the autonomic reflexes that are handling those, those are broken up into two very different sides of the coin, and that's why I always try to put it into the same coin. You've got sympathetic and parasympathetic. So for example, if you've ever hit anybody in the common peroneal and you saw him collapse because you hit them in the right leg and their left leg collapsed, doing the wrestling and messing around where you're trying to knock them out. Well, what happens is that sometimes the brain reads those signals and goes, "Oh, I understand what you want me to do," and sends it parasympathetically or sympathetically to another part of the body.

So if you want to liken it to good and evil, sympathetic is the fight-or-flight side, and then parasympathetic is the, "Okay, now it's time to go back home and rest and relax and digest what just happened," side. If you're in a corrupt file folder, that means that you don't have control of the blend of yin and yang. Does that make sense? And that's also going to lead to PTSD.

So your fight response is built-in, but if you're a little kid, you're not going to fight, you're just going to go numb. Painkillers are going to hit; the endorphins are specifically designed with the catecholamine groups and stuff like dopamine. That's why we're smoking the dope to make you desensitized and drift away. You don't want to see that horrific incident. People go, "Why couldn't they remember it?" Because guess what, there was so much of the coma cocktail in the brain at the time. It was designed so they couldn't see their daughter die or their kid go up in flames. Does that make sense?

So if fight is a natural response, but we don't go there, then we still have flee. But if you're not thinking about fleeing, or you're not a track star, or maybe you've got an injury that precludes you from running, then if freeze is your only option, I'm trying to tell you, I don't think that's enough. I think for freeze, for a little kid, it might be enough. He might have psychological damage and need help later on, but kids normally have protectors. But what about an adult? If you don't rehearse for an event, and the event gets to OBE (Overcome By Events) right that day, I think freeze is a challenge.

And I think that that's a good thing to maybe clarify what you mean, or not clarify, but you said if I don't train for an event, but you're like, it's great, I might not. How do I train for everybody? But what you mean is just if I'm not, if I don't become, if I become overwhelmed by the situation, so just a lack of awareness.

Stereoids, always something.

Yes, that's what can lead to it. Even if you are that trained opponent, if you're not paying attention, and all of a sudden a situation presents itself, you might not be able to handle it. You might go into that freeze.

And so that kind of gets into, "All right, well, how do I self-regulate this?" Or how do I, I guess you would call, front-load my response? How would I have those, like we have different responses? Like I've talked about in one of the other podcasts, if a guy, I can tell he's going to walk up and ask for money, I've got seven or ten things that I'm already ready to go with.

Right, our smart, our most of them.

But I've also seen serious Brian a couple (of times).

Well, because you've got to, no offense, don't. That person immediately before they get to me, he knows, "Hey, I'm not the guy." That's because I'm usually dealing with some situation where I can feel that that scale is creeping up on myself, and I'm starting to get a little overwhelmed by what I'm dealing with, and I know that one more thing on my plate is going to send me over. So it's very simple: "Nope, can't do it."

So it's self-soothing. Yes, and offered in protection of the general public.

Yeah, because the overreaction is my bad, guys, that was a huge overreaction. But no, that's what it comes up to, is, how do I self-regulate that? How do I get myself prepared to not become OBE (Overcome By Events)?

That's a daily thing. Here's the thing, the best people in the world at this still need training. So take a look at your law enforcement professionals, take a look at your firefighters, take a look at your emergency medical personnel or your emergency personnel. Your instinct, let's go back to that, and you see a person that gets injured in a horrific situation. I'll give you one, it seems like every year in Michigan or someplace in the Midwest, where they have silage and they store like manure for different things. Methane gas builds up in some of these containers, and somebody's there cleaning them out, and confined space entry occurs, and all of a sudden they're overcome by the fumes. A loved one sees that person who's now deceased, by the way, because there's no oxygen in the (container), the heavy gases have taken the place of the oxygen. There's no chance at getting them out of there alive at this point. What does that person do? Do they stop, look, and listen? Do they stop, drop, and roll? Do they think? No, they go down to help save that person.

So if the smartest of us, and family members and farmers that know this, are going to ever know that stuff, how do we overcome it? We have to overcome it with training. Education is not enough. A sign on the wall saying, "Danger: Confined Space Entry," is not enough. So we have to have a plan. There has to be an architecture for your mind to select. And we provide that in training. Many places provide that.

And that's actually a good explanation of why we do certain training that people forget. They don't even, "Oh, this is just something we've always done." You know how you do a fire drill in school? That was a long time ago. A whole buttload of kids died in school fires. And so, "Hey, we should probably do something about this." And then not only did it get better in terms of training, but how they built materials and how they built this, and costumes for Halloween.

Greg, if you're listening to us and you're a security manager, we've got a varied audience, think prisoners in federal (prisons).

Yeah, well, it's weird because it's like a lot of criminals.

But the idea, think about it, Brian, if you're a professional and you're just trying to listen and have fun, but learn something. What would your first fire drill look like? Your first fire drill is getting everybody out without hurting themselves or killing themselves. And showing up at a rally point and counting heads to make sure everybody got out. Okay, what would your second one look like? Your second one has got to be, "I'm going to build on that time." And then I'm going to build on cooperation and communications. For example, what would your third one look like? Now I'm not worried about time anymore, but this time I'm going to throw in what's called a confound in science. I'm going to block a door. Now that door is blocked, how does that work with your plan? And guess what, I'm going to show them what right looks like. Do you see what I'm trying to say? Because you remember the death house, we talked about those many times, where everybody died in that scenario. A whole training scenario where just everyone goes in there and they just die.

Some things you just can't live through, people. That's real. They're going to go, "This is the one they were talking about." You have to think, "Do you want to be the Donner Party or do you want to be the dinner party?" You have to think about your own survival. What I'm saying (is), man, you've got to get yourself into a position where you say, "What is the most important thing for me and my kids?" Now, Sean's always telling us, "Both objective, experiment." I'm telling you that if you don't get training, what you're going to do is you're going to create a corrupt file folder, Brian, and that means you're going to do nothing. Either you're going to do something wrong, or you're going to do nothing. And we spent a whole podcast on the "what if" game in training and how to do it properly.

But to go back to the fight, flight, freeze aspect, how does that pertain to rage? How does that, these guys that, like your workplace shooters, the people that just, the guy who gets cut off driving and now he's shooting out the window, doing 70 miles an hour? You don't know when and where your cup is going to become full. You don't know where yours or someone you're talking to. I'm saying that, here's my thing: you don't know how full your cup is at any one time. And you don't live in a vacuum. So as you're moving around, you're trying not to spill your cup, and you're bumping into people. Guess what, a little of their spills sometimes, their spills into yours, sometimes your spills into theirs. But there's a point, a trigger point: a smell, a look, a feel, a taste.

I'll give you a perfect example of a physiological trigger point, Brian. I was an expert witness at a use-of-force trial, and I don't want to get so detailed so somebody goes and looks it up. But the idea was one person was choking another. The person that they were choking fought back so (hard) that they hurt a bunch of people. And they go, "Now it's attempted this, and it was this, and it was missing." Now there was a complete physiological response. Yes, they're trying to prove then being choked out. Okay, so there's a whole bunch of case law for that. That's an autonomic reflex, an autonomic response to your survival system being choked.

So now all of a sudden you're in the room and you've got a guy – this is normally a situation with workplace violence – you've got a guy or a female that's at your work that's been promoted, and they've got a tremendous amount of power and authority, but they don't have a lot of acumen and intellect with people in social situations. So they wield that Harry Potter's wand and ordain things to be done. So you've had your cup filled today, over and over, a couple of times. Somebody stole your lunch in the lunchroom. All of these things are happening, and you don't want to fight, you just want to be left alone. And then there's the amazing, "and another thing," you hear that from somebody, "Well, and another thing, Johnson!" And guess what? Now your cup is completely full, and what's the very first level that you get to? You get to rage.

Why do you get to rage? Because I have to fight back, and I've been dealt with it. From my dad smacking me down, and my mom smacking me down, and the kids picking on me in school, and everything else, what you've done is you've painted me into a corner, and I'm going to fight back viciously. And you can avoid that. You can see that happening in another person and (use) de-escalation strategies.

And that's exactly what I was hoping you'd get to, is that identifying this in someone else. You've got to allude to stuff at the field, your story there, I know you are, because it does this. Where I'm going with that is telling this in someone else, because you just got into where people talk, they always ask us, "What's the most powerful thing to teach more about the body language?" We're teaching you that right now. If I can identify someone who's in that fight, flight, freeze spot, that's going to determine how I deal with that individual.

I'm at the gym last Saturday morning. Saturday morning, it gets crazy. We try to get in there early, but we've got the kids, so the kids' club thing where they watch kids. Or there's an open lane. Getting there too late, so that's early for us. So we get in there, it's just busy Saturday morning. Normally I'm there at 0500 during the week, and it's only a few people. I'm like, "Hey, can I get my workout at a different time, Greg?" So I figured that I have (to). But same thing, a guy's in there working out on this, I think he's done. I go to one of the weight stacks, and there's a pull-up bar over it, so I've got to do my weighted pull-ups. And he's over there doing his rope press down things, or whatever. He's got his little step so you can get up to five feet, so if I do a standing, a running jump, I can reach the pull-up bar.

So I'm over there and he walks away, so I think he's done. But I'm not even using what he's using; I'm using the pull-up bar. So I get up there to hit my pull-ups. I set the weight down, and then I see him, he comes walking over to that thing, and I was trying to tell him, I was trying to do the point up like, "Hey, I'm using the pull-up bar," because he's got his headphones on, and he's looking down and he's looking angry. But that's kind of a baseline for a lot of guys in the gym, so I can't really go off that. He looks at me, just (throws his hands) up in the air with his hands and takes the straight metal bar that he's about to attach to it and throws it on the ground.

Still (angry). So these two things going on right now.

Exactly. So he's immediately OBE (Overcome By Events). He's so overwhelmed. So now, I'm thinking, "Is this guy just angry because it's busy and he can't get his workout in, and he's kind of emotionally unstable and that's going to throw him off? Or is this guy's glass full? I don't know anything about him, his life, what's happened. Maybe his wife just left him for the neighbor, he just got fired, and he wants (to fight)." And I heard with the chin-up bar, "You're right, this is it!" And now he goes to his gym bag and he pulls (a gun) out and he starts shooting. "Bang, bang, bang, bang!"

Yeah, exactly.

You don't know. So it's just that sustained observation. I'm not just going to go about my business. I'm certainly not going to escalate the situation because I don't know where this guy's at. And there's another guy next to me who saw it and is laughing at the guy, going, "I can't believe it!" I'm going, "Well, he's the first to go if something bad (happens). You've got a neck, so maybe I've got a chance." But that's the whole point of me dealing with it alone. Where is this likely going to go?

So through sustained observation, he walks out, there's a little outdoor part. You can, because it's Southern California, you can work out outside all year round. So he comes back in, and so I continue with my thing, but I'm keeping an eye on him. I'm still doing my workout, but I'm going, "What's happening, Grandma Kaylee? Are we getting out of here? Is this guy amping up or is he coming back down?" And I see him (later) in the gym.

So then I see him shake his head and take his headphones off and walk over with his head down, and he's got the, "Bum, oh," (look). Before he's even there, he's, "Sorry, I overreacted." Exactly what he did. He said, "Hey, man, it's not you, I'm just pissed it's so effing busy in here, I can't get a workout in." So I gave him the fist bump, "Hey, brother, all good, no worries." He's like, "Yeah, I'm so sorry." And he was at that point now embarrassed for his actions, which most people would be.

Right, of course. Talk to that range of emotions. So my thing is, don't have definitive lines: "This goes to this, this goes to those." So your fire drill must be one to three minutes, or you fail to get your certification. That's not what this is about. This is about measuring everything based on the context and the relevance of what you're seeing.

Here's the thing, if a person has poor coping skills, and a person is getting there much too soon, your human instinctual response is going to be to close with that person and use logic. I would tell you to shut up, because what you're going to do is your logic is going to sound just like their dad or their mom, and your finger in their face trying to explain it is going to get you punched in your face. The idea is you have to be able to read that person. If that person's emotional register is off the chart for the baseline of what experiences you should expect, then it's an incongruent signal. And anytime you get an incongruence, don't give yourself the gift of time and distance.

Now you can be at this distance over here going, "Sorry, pal, I thought you were done." That's a beautiful de-escalation. Now I'll give you the worst possible de-escalation: "What did you say, terrific dude? Chill." What you've just done is you just polarized somebody to the point that you're going to get your car rammed or keyed, or somebody's going to spit (on you).

Yeah, it's the s-u-r-r-o-u-n-d Francis, to get along.

Exactly. But what I'm trying to say is don't put me in that gosh darn box, don't paint me into that corner. So most people want the "say" rather than their "way," so let him rant, let him blow off a little bit of steam. Here's my thing: be prepared to kneecap him and take him out of the game if he escalates past a point that you think. And people ask me that all the time, "So what's the point?" I go, "Well, if I was sitting in a restaurant or a bar with my family, and you came up and you did something that was so egregious that I had to leave my meal or family to step up, that's the line." Do you hear what I'm trying to say? Maybe, Brian, the line is different for you because you've been homeless for so long. Maybe the line, what I'm trying to say, unloved, Brian, that's what we call it in a business.

But the idea of hopelessness, the idea is that if you start thinking about this, it's not that hard. One, balled-up fists are never a good sign. That Wirthlin ethic ridge coming down, and corrugator muscles are activated. The other thing is red or pale; red or pale means something, because that blood is kicking, and those chemical cocktails are going. So you've got electrochemical neurotransmitters that are now functioning in the background. Dropping the stuff in my hand, blade in your body towards the person, doing what I'm doing with my head. Those fidgeting things mean you got way to my danger warning, and an OBE (Overcome By Events) is coming. So distance yourself from that person. Your instinct, if I'm going to go and hug it out with this person, that's not the time, always. As a matter of fact, start distancing yourself and getting things in between you. Now you can find foreign objects to bring into the ring, or you can try to de-escalate with your lips, but language.

Okay, I'll give you a great indicator: when somebody starts going, "B-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-but." As my old man, right there, when you lose the function of speech, that means you've gone primitive from anger. And you're going to start doing the Clarice Starling and "Silence of the Lambs." You've got to look out for those kids.

And a great allegory, because your guy showed all of those. He showed de-escalation, so he was able to come back to advanced critical thinking, "Hey, I overreacted. I was hyper-alert to this," which takes a lot for that to happen, to come to co-opt it like that.

That's what I'm saying. So now if you're watching, dude from the gym, and you recognize "meerkat," don't show up at his house tonight like a prowler with it. Let's eat this tomorrow, the news.

And a lot of this is, don't get me wrong, for me, this is 100% self-preservation. I have someone who I care for all the time, I guess, terrified. So I have this guy now who's, I'm more like, I can now co-opt if I'm in that situation. Now I can go, "This guy feels like..."

Yeah, totally. So here's the thing, if you have someone a co-opt, I go back to the four (Fs). Anytime you're dealing with any folks like that, I go back to that Adam Sandler movie, Billy Madison, where he calls up Steve Buscemi and he's like, "Hey, remember that time when I made fun of you, and I'm really bad about that? Sorry about that, man." And he takes the, he looks up with his "people to kill" list, and he crosses his name off and sits down on the couch like, "Hey, I'm glad that guy called." Because you don't know what you're running into.

So when you get, I can identify if you, if you already know what we're talking about with the four Fs, and you're talking about fight or flight or freeze, and you've seen that or you've experienced that yourself, guess what? You can identify it in other people, and now you can take that proper measured approach, rather than, "Hey, how do I de-escalate the situation?" So, to hit on that one more time, the de-escalate, Brian, you're right on, you're circling the rim.

Oh, I don't, I mean, but the idea here is, what's the best and easiest de-escalation strategy? The gift of time and distance.

Yep. Get thee to some distance. You can send a card or a memo. "Sam, sorry." Tell the concierge or the maitre d', those are the places I go to, or, "Tell the towel boy at the Y for you." But the idea is you can get that message (to) that person. You're the damn towel boy at the Y! Yes, you are!

But if you willingly, knowingly, capriciously, arbitrarily stay in that moment, and then draw a weapon, and you have to go through all this other stuff, you don't need to do that. For the love of God, if you punched everybody that needs punching, your hands would look like clubs. Do you understand? So you don't need to do that. And this is speaking out to the cops, your FTOs (Field Training Officers). This is speaking out to the road guy that thinks you've got to prove yourself, or the female that says, "Well, I'm in a male-dominated environment, so I'm going to exert my pressure by either sleeping with everybody or beating everybody." That happens when we're broken humans. I really don't think it's out (of the question).

So my thing is, training also gives us the gift of time and distance, but advanced critical thinking. So understand more about ourselves, and once I can look in the mirror and I know me better, I generally deal with you better.

Well, yeah, not me specifically, but other humans.

No, I'm talking about humans, yes. So that's not this meat puppet that I'm dealing with on the show every week. So I think that's a good spot to kind of bring it out, understanding of what we mean when we're talking about the four Fs, and specifically that freeze when you identify someone in there.

It's also, so folks, Brian is drawing two different parallels. If you're on a PowerPoint, there are two different columns. So the four Fs are over here, some of the oldest, most primitive motivations for humans. And he's talking about the fight, flight, or freeze that's over here, which is a subset of those. And both of those are hugely important, but you can overcome the urge or the autonomic reflex to freeze with training. You can reduce your limit to fight or flight by training for the event before it occurs, and that's going to give you a fighting chance when it occurs.

Yeah, I think that's a good point to wrap it up on. So I mean, that kind of, we covered a lot, and we had a couple good spirals there that went into, "Sorry, the Y anymore, I'm still going, they still want their towels." So I think we did a couple, that freeze part of the four Fs is obviously big, because that's huge.

And you don't want your spin-the-bottle to land on that.

Yes, hey, that's a good analogy, right? So it could land on one of those things, and if I'm not prepared or I'm overwhelmed by events, I may go into that freeze, which is the worst one out of all (of them).

Right, because you do nothing.

And then handling something with identifying people who are in that moment themselves, and how to handle that a little bit better, so you don't then become a contributing, you don't turn the robbery into a homicide.

Exactly. Give up the cheese. And sometimes you're dealing with damaged humans that have debilitating mental illness, maybe in this situation, and you don't want to overreact because they're just being them. So don't pour your bucket into theirs. Just walk away almost always.

All right, well, that's a good spot to end on. So everyone, thanks for tuning in, and don't forget, training changes behavior. Thank you.