Escalation Mitigation: The Exit Strategy No One Is Teaching Armed Citizens

De-escalation is the wrong word. I know that's not what you've been taught. Every CCW instructor, every self-defense course, every podcast that talks about surviving lethal force encounters talks about de-escalations. De-escalate, calm the situation, find resolution. Finding resolution, de-escalation, implies that you stay there until the other person has some kind of tangible outcome, whether that means that he goes home happy, he goes to jail, or goes to get medical attention.

The reality is, your job as an armed protector is to protect yourself and the people with you. It's not to get attached to the outcome of the hostility. It's to prevent harm to yourself and to find an exit. So the distinction between de-escalation and what I call escalation mitigation is less about finding resolution and more about recognizing your exit window and formulating your exit strategy. It's more than just semantics.

These tools differentiate how you act within those situations. Your behavior and how you receive the other person's actions will land differently. Rather than taking things personally and trying to negotiate how to de-escalate the situation and find alignment and try to figure out crisis communication strategies, it's this whole complex strategy that's typically reserved for the armed professionals such as law enforcement. As the defender, whose sole responsibility is to not be in that situation rather than de-escalate the situation, you want to be strategic in what people call verbal judo. That oversimplifies the situation.

What I want you to do is thinking about having tools where you can assess where the other person is in their hostility, and that window from verbal exchange to imminent violence, and the things that you can do to disrupt that behavioral cycle, disrupt the escalation until you can get out and avoid needing to engage in violence. So you really don't need de-escalation tools. Leave de-escalations to the people who's responsible for ensuring the outcome of the hostile party. Your focus is to not get harmed and not have to risk needing to apply violence to the situation. So your primary goal is to not be in that situation.

And to improve your chances, we have the three Cs. What the three Cs are are an escalation assessment tool that you can apply to understand how wide your exit window is with the hostile party. The first C is conflict. This is typically what you see when the other person has a grievance that's typically ego-driven, meaning they need something from you. Either they want your money, they want your respect, there's some kind of misunderstanding, so maybe they want your understanding.

Maybe you looked at their wife funny, maybe you looked at them funny. So there's some level of negotiation that's available here. The logic is online, prefrontal cortex is online. You might be able to find some alignment. What that means for us is that the window of exit is larger.

There's some things you can do with your behavioral intervention to buy you time to leave the situation, not be in it. The next C is crisis. This is typically what we see when we talk about emotional hijack, where the prefrontal cortex isn't online. The person is not responding to logic or rationale. When if you say the words "calm down," it's likely to escalate the situation.

The person is not responding to logic or rationale, they're responding to energy. They're responding to your vocal tone and your behavioral cues, your body positioning. In this situation, your window of escape is smaller, but there's still opportunity to intervene in the escalation cycle. The last C is contamination. Here, your window is very small.

Your primary job is to get out. Contamination means their thought processes are contaminated either by a mental health crisis, alcohol, or narcotics in some way. They are not functioning, their emotions are high, they're acting out of pure impulse, and your presence gives them a target to send that energy. So it's important that you remove their presence and you shift their attention elsewhere. So what does behavioral intervention look like?

In regards to your words, you can find alignment with the conflict, where there's some level of rationale, there's an indication that the other person's prefrontal cortex is online. Their thinking is logical, it's linear. It's still important to retain a slower, steady cadence. Use language that doesn't submit but does express acknowledgement so the other person recognizes that they're being heard. For crisis and communication, that will become even more critical.

We stack our behavior with how we project energy. When you watch these dog videos and the dogs are barking out of control like they're gonna bite somebody, we always hear a trainer talk about energy and reciprocating energy, mirroring energy, versus staying in a calm, cool, steady state, so that way it helps mitigate the escalation of that wild beast. That's the kind of behavioral pattern that we want to apply. We want to be able to keep an open posture, move steadily and non-telegraphically towards our exit. We don't wanna trigger any sense of abandonment, and we don't wanna trigger their predatory instincts by making sudden movements and body or turning away from the hostile party.

And that brings us to the point of assessing ourself for self-regulation purposes. Now, it's important to drive our attention towards a task. This is what we call an external task focus. However, to monitor our own arousal to ensure that we don't mirror hostility, stress, or anything that can perceived as threatening to the other party, we do need to dip into internal attention just enough to recognize what we need to do. We might recognize that our heart rate's increasing, that we're starting to visibly shake.

We can deploy breathing tools such as the cyclic breathing and return to a calm state and project our attention externally. What happens is, if we catch ourselves getting stressed out and our thought processes cascade into, "I'm getting stressed, I need to calm down," I, me, or am I, when our attention is preoccupied with ourselves, we may miss critical furtive movements from the other party. So we need to dip in, deploy the self-regulation tools, and then pay attention to the exit, pay attention to our surroundings, pay attention to what the other person's doing. So de-escalation is the wrong thing to train for unless that's your job. There might be a situation where you actually care about the other party because the person at risk might be a friend or family member having a mental health breakdown, and that's an entirely different set of skills.

For our context, what we care about is not needing to engage in physical conflict. We're not hurt yet, and if we can leave, then we can avoid that. There are different phases that may disrupt your line of thinking. There's common questions, such as the person might start making furtive movements. An, an escalation mitigation strategy we can have is going to the stage position as they reach for their pocket.

Now, that is not brandishing. That is going to a preparatory position because you detected a movement that indicated an imminent threat that could mitigate the escalation if the person was going for the knife. So in review, when we're focused on exit strategy, that is our primary goal. That changes how you think about a conflict. We're not trying to de-escalate.

We're not trying to find resolution. We're buying us time to widen our exit window, and we do that by speaking with a slow, steady, deliberate cadence. Our language use acknowledges without submission. Our behavioral cues remain open and slow and non-telegraphic. If it escalates to furtive movement, you may go to the stage position.

If you recognize a person is in conflict, and you're able to deploy these tools where the person de-escalates, that's incidental. That is not your goal. You may not need to exit the situation, but that is always our primary focus. Because if the person is in crisis, it's critical that we buy ourselves time to exit, because we're not specifically trained for resolution. We are trained to stop the threat, and oftentimes we stop that threat by not being in that situation in the first place.

So shift how you think about conflict. We're not there to find resolution. We're there to prevent harm to ourselves and to our family, and oftentimes that means not being in that situation. The more words we speak, the more we engage with the hostile party, the more likely it is that that window will close and result in an imminent threat. So train for the right solution, train for the right goals.

Identify your exit strategy.