Calming Upset People with EAR: How Statements Showing Empathy, Attention and Respect Can Quickly Defuse a

By Bill Eddy

The level of stress and conflict in today's world is higher than seen in decades. We all can use tools for managing the emotions this has caused. At the same time, there also appear to be more "high conflict" people who are preoccupied with blaming others and verbally venting or attacking those around them. Yet, these upset emotions and conflicts can often be calmed immediately through the use of a simple EAR Statement™, a method developed and refined by Bill Eddy over the past fifteen years and taught to hundreds of thousands of professionals and individuals.

Following on the success of his widely-known BIFF Response® method and books for written communication, this new book on EAR Statements for verbal communication will come in handy in all kinds of upset situations: family conflicts, workplace disputes, neighbor controversies, and any other setting. A simple statement communicating empathy, attention and/or respect to an angry, sad, mentally ill or any upset person at any time can work wonders in minutes. Yet it's not as easy as it looks. It takes practice and this book gives over twenty examples of applying this method in families, communities, customer relations, workplace, political discussions, business, police encounters, racial conflicts, schools, mental health settings, and others.

Empathy, attention and respect are what all people are looking for, especially when upset or in a conflict. This book will give you the details of how to calm upset people with EAR every day.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Aug 24, 2021
• ISBN: 9781950057627

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

How the EAR Statement™ Was Born

In 2004, I was doing a divorce mediation for a husband and wife, both of whom were heads of departments in a large organization. Because of their positions of responsibility, I figured that our 3-4 mediation sessions together would be like business meetings and that it would be a pretty easy case. I was wrong.

When they came in for their second session, the husband immediately laid out several spreadsheets covering my round mediation table. Then he leaned over toward me and pointed his finger aggressively at my nose saying: Today, Mr. Mediator, you are going to tell her (who no longer had a name from his perspective, since she initiated the divorce which he didn’t want) that I am going to prevail on this issue. So, step up to the plate and do your job! I suddenly realized that this must have been his management style.

Well, that was not my job at all as a mediator. I was supposed to be neutral on the issues with the goal of helping them communicate and negotiate respectfully. Instead, I had several reactions. The first came from the amygdala in my brain (I had been studying about that recently) and it said: Strangle this man! But I was a trained mediator and had been doing mediations for over twenty years, first as a therapist and then as a lawyer, so I haven’t strangled any clients. I quickly over-rode my amygdala.

My second thought was to admonish him in no uncertain terms. I thought to myself: In mediation we treat each other with respect and you, sir, are not treating me with respect at all right now! But I didn’t say that. I had already figured out that he had a narcissistic personality, and I knew that they could give admonishments to everyone around them, but they can’t take it themselves. If I had said that he easily would have felt insulted and possibly would have gotten up and stormed out of the mediation. I already had a reputation for managing high conflict divorces, so I did not want that to happen.

My third reaction was to remember what I had learned as a therapist working at the psychiatric hospital years earlier. I ran a weekly group therapy for people with schizophrenia for peer support and to check in on how they were doing. Their main treatment was medications, but they also needed group counseling in dealing with life’s ordinary daily living struggles, such as getting along with others at the board and care facilities where many of them lived.

In one of my first group sessions, I asked how everyone was doing and went around the group giving each person a turn. One young woman spoke up and said: I’m doing terrible. The voices are telling me that I’ll never amount to anything, my life is going to be miserable, and I feel hopeless. The voices have been really mean to me this week.

I said: Oh, don’t worry about those voices. They’re not real. That’s why you take medication.

She interrupted: No, Bill, those voices ARE REAL! And the rest of the group agreed with…her!

Then I remembered what my supervisor had told me: Don’t argue about reality with people with schizophrenia. Empathize with their pain.

So, I quickly told her sincerely: That sounds so hard. What a difficult week you’ve had. I recall that she burst into tears and was relieved that I cared and that the whole group understood how awful it could be. Empathy was what she needed, not an argument, and all of us felt supportive of her.

Back to the manager with his finger pointing at my nose. I decided to try giving him empathy instead of anger. I said, "Wow! I can see how important this issue is. These are big decisions in your life. Don’t worry, in this mediation we will take as much time as you need to thoroughly address all of these issues." I looked at his financial spreadsheets on my table, then added: I have a lot of respect for the preparation that you’ve done for today’s mediation session.

He immediately withdrew his finger and silently leaned back in his chair. I don’t think he knew what to make of this. I hadn’t argued with him; hadn’t criticized him; and hadn’t agreed with him. I looked over at his wife and she looked quite relieved that I had disarmed him rather than agreeing with him or escalating him. It seemed that she had been dealing with this type of aggressive behavior for years and was no longer giving in to him. I figured she did not need to say anything at that point, so I shifted the focus to setting the agenda for the mediation session. He was much less aggressive, and I recall he was a bit sarcastic but cooperative in discussing their issues for the rest of the meeting.

Afterwards, I realized that I had given him my empathy, my attention, and my respect. Since I had started training mediators and other professionals by then, I added those three words to my high conflict presentations, put them in a PowerPoint slide, and told people my story as an example.

By 2005, I was regularly mentioning that we should make sure to give potentially high conflict clients some empathy, some attention, and some respect. But people would ask me how you do that. They wondered if it meant just listening with your ear. It finally came together for me when I gave a presentation at a conference for an international ombudsperson organization. Afterwards, at a lunch table, a young woman told me that she got a lot out of the ear technique part of my talk. I did not realize at first what she meant. You know, EAR—giving people your empathy, attention and respect. At that moment I realized that calling this concept a technique could be a simple, memorable way to teach these three complicated interpersonal qualities. This wrapped empathy, attention, and respect into one simple technique that would become easy to teach. I decided to call the technique an EAR Statement, since a statement is essentially what I had given the man with his finger in my nose.

Two thousand fiv was also the year that I met Megan Hunter while she was the Family Law Specialist for the Arizona Supreme Court. She asked me to give Arizona’s family court judges a training on managing high conflict families. Soon after that we decided to work together, and we formed the High Conflict Institute to train professionals around the United States and beyond in managing high conflict cases. The EAR Statement became our first regular technique and has been taught to approximately half a million people, as well as our BIFF Response® technique which was developed in 2007 (see BIFF for CoParent Communication for the story of how the BIFF Response was born). Since then, EAR and BIFF have been our two most popular techniques that we teach mediators, lawyers, judges, counselors, human resources, managers, employees, separated parents, and others over the past decade and a half, all over the world.

But we tended to just teach professionals EAR Statements, because they are harder than BIFF Responses (which give you time to think about them since they are in writing). EAR Statements take thinking on the spot in a conversation with someone else, whether in person, over the phone, or by Zoom or another virtual platform. This can become automatic for helping professionals, who often need to calm down upset clients in their work. However, we didn’t want non-professionals to feel that they needed to calm down the other person—that’s not their job.

But with COVID, I was getting requests for any tips that anyone could use to calm down the people around them. Also, with increasing tension and polarization in the public in recent years, we decided it was time to teach EAR Statements to everyone! Therefore, I have included 28 examples throughout this book to make it easy for you to find words you can use in almost any situation (see list near the back of the book). Some of the examples used are totally made up, some are based on real stories but altered for confidentiality, and some are totally true stories as indicated.

That is how the EAR Statement was born. It is my hope that by sharing this technique with you it will make your life easier when dealing with upset people anywhere. It can also help your group, workplace, and community get along better. Someday perhaps it will calm down the world. We have to start somewhere!

CHAPTER 1

Emotions Are Contagious

This book teaches you a method of calming people who are upset, whether they are angry, afraid, sad, or any other type of upset feeling. It is a way of defusing an unnecessary conflict or a way of showing caring for another person, and everything in between. You could be dealing with a family member, friend, co-worker, stranger, or someone on the other side of a heated issue.

We call this method an EAR Statement™, which you can use in person, on the phone, or on live calls on your computer, such as Zoom or some other virtual platform. It is a simple verbal calming method that anyone can learn, although it does take practice. It’s a way of connecting with another person’s experience and giving something of yourself, whether it’s your empathy, your attention, or your respect.

The fundamental principle of an EAR Statement is that emotions are contagious—both positive and negative emotions. Therefore, this first chapter will explain how emotions are contagious, so that the rest of the book can explain what you can do to turn negative emotions into positive ones for yourself and those around you.

We All Get Upset Sometimes

We all get upset sometimes. It’s part of what makes us human. The beauty of our emotions (all of them, positive and negative) is that they help us survive and thrive together. This is largely because we can influence each other with our emotions. Emotions help us work together. Emotions get us help from others when we are in distress. With emotions, we can calm each other down or stir each other