In today’s polarized society, maintaining civil discourse is an ever-increasing challenge.
We are a people on edge.
Simmering in the background are worries about existential issues that cumulatively can become a source of traumatic stress. By traumatic stress we mean situations that are perceived as life threatening whether or not that fear is real. Seemingly insignificant matters can explode into furious arguments or anxious avoidance.
When it comes to civility, too many people are “losing it” and the question has become how to help this country’s agitated, angry, anxious people (including ourselves) regain our capacity for civil discourse.
Few are more impacted by our national volatility than our frontline workers.
The Journey toward Discovering eSCAPe
Beginning in 2016, the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy and the LaGuardia Community College Pre-Hospital Training Program undertook a joint project. Our immediate goal was to learn how emergency medical workers respond to the psychological needs of emergency patients and their families.
We had four questions:
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How do emergency medical personnel interact with severely injured or sick individuals and their families?
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Using our neuroscience knowledge as a template, we asked what emergency workers do to calm and reassure people in a state of traumatic stress?
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Using neuroscience language, we asked if emergency personnel help traumatized people turn off their survivor brain and turn on their social engagement brain?
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When emergency workers succeed in guiding traumatically stressed people away from the control of their survival neural system into control by their social engagement system, how are patients, families, bystanders and emergency workers themselves affected?
We took a qualitative research approach. Over the course of five years, a team composed of trauma-informed psychotherapists and seasoned emergency medical responders interviewed EMT instructors, trainees and former patients. From these interviews, the team distilled four interventions that can facilitate ascendency of the social engagement brain and form the basis of the eSCAPe Protocol.
We learned that the eSCAPe Protocol can benefit not just emergency personnel, but ALL front line workers.
The eSCAPe Protocol is for All of Us
Learning eSCAPe is not difficult and trainees who have used the protocol report enhanced self-esteem and self-efficacy.
We believe that the eSCAPe protocol can help front line workers—and people in general—in situations where their task is to give people what they need, whether goods, services or information. We think about workers on call lines responding to someone with a complaint. We think about home health aide caring for frightened elderly people. We think about workers on the frontline of programs for immigrants who are terrified that they will be deported. We think about you.
We can’t prove it yet, but we believe consistent use of the eSCAPe Protocol might go far enough to calm our traumatically stressed society. We Invite you to take part in a great social experiment. We invite you, the person reading our website, to learn it and try using it yourself.
