by Andra Medea
0-60 escalation. Rants. Parties who are like talking to a wall. Perhaps these exasperating parties are experiencing a brain malfunction—that can be fixed.
Flooding is an adrenaline overload that was first identified by the family researcher, Dr. John Gottman. During flooding, an adrenaline surge disrupts parts of the brain. Symptoms include:
The inability to take in information. You know this feeling: “When he gets like this, it’s like talking to a wall.” But this person may not be ignoring you. During flooding, the part of the brain that takes in new information isn’t working well. He may not be able to register what you’ve just said.
Rigid, unrealistic choices: Flooding people lose the ability to find options. This means trouble with problem solving. It isn’t that they can’t ever find better choices; it’s that they can’t do it while flooding.
0-60 escalation. Flooding is a learned behavior. So if this party flooded the last ten times she saw her husband, she will flood the next time she sees him, even when he’s said nothing and done nothing more than walk into the room.
An inability to explain themselves: The story starts here, goes there, loops back to something that happened in the Reagan administration, and peters out without ever coming to a point. After a while, you don’t even want to know what happened, you just want them to stop.
Interested to hear more? Click here or on the image above to watch a video of Andra Medea explaining some of these concepts.
Want to know even more? Visit Andra Medea’s website for her courses for counsel, mediators and judges ‘Working with Emotional Clients: The Virtual Tranquilizer®’
