May – Tool of the Month – Reorienting When Startled

In this second edition of the “tool of the month,” I’m addressing the need to reorient to our bodies and surroundings when we are caught off guard, surprised, by the behavior of one of our fellow humans. Being startled does particular things to our attention and connection to, and groundedness in, our selves, so it’s important to reconnect and reorient as soon as we can, in order to have a clearer sense of how to deal with the situation.

“Reorienting When Startled”

I was walking with my wife through an art exhibit when a random man said to her, without prelude, “This isn’t a very good show, is it? Oh, crossed arms, eh, that’s a sign of an unhappy person.” There’s many, ahem, colloquial ways of naming such behavior, with socially clueless being a mild one, but regardless of nomenclature, it caught both of us off guard. Not that such out of the blue statements are that uncommon, but nonetheless, they are still startling, and were to us.

So, what to do in such situations, when it is likely that either a threat or shame response will get triggered? Remind yourself of the last time such a thing happened, when you were startled by a stranger’s engagement of you, and remember what your initial visceral response was. It was likely one of these: “Danger: punch them in the face, or run,” or, “Danger: be compliant,” or, “What the hell? What did I do wrong here?” In any case, we are not prepared, and thus any response is going to be from an unbalanced position.

So, the first response, after the initial reaction (which just happens—we can’t control it), is to reorient ourselves and get our bearings. Two down and dirty ways to do this are to reconnect to our bodies, and to expand our awareness around the experience.

The first, reconnecting to our bodies, is a response to what happens when startled, being either a hyperfocusing of our attention onto the “novel” experience, or a quick dissociation from our experience as a way to deal with a surprising threat (i.e., going blank or checking out). In either case, we lose clear track of our bodies, so as soon as we realize that’s happening, we need to intentionally bring out attention back to our bodies. To do that, just feel the sensations in the body—the hands are a good place because there’s a lot of nerve endings, making for a lot of sensation. Or the feet, which can often convey a sense of grounding. But pretty much anything that reminds us that we have a body that is separate from the engagement will help us re-own our attention when it has been hijacked by another person.

The other way to reorient (best in tandem with finding our body again) is to expand our attention around the, ahem, problematic person. Here we have the reaction (again, it just happens), and then realizing we’re reacting, we intentionally take in what is around the person—the other people in the space, what’s happening outside, the music or noises happening in the space, or even the sense of space itself. The intention is the same here, to get our attention to not hyperfocus on the startling/surprising input, or to bring our attention back online from the shutdown.

So this is the tool, “reorienting when startled.” Obviously, it applies to situations which are not actually directly threatening. In those, it’s different tools, essentially about survival, which recruit the “animal defenses” of fight, flight, freeze, and submit. Deploying those skillfully is a whole big issue, often requiring training in some kind of high conflict practice (martial arts being among the best). But for this tool’s sake, “reorienting” is about getting your bearings again in such a situation as our art sojourn, so that a non-threat based response can be taken. Whether that’s confrontation or not (we chose not, nodding non-committally and walking on), it will be a choice rather than a reaction, and therefore more effective.