A note before you read on: this week's email discusses a real suicide-attempt rescue.
Please, if you or someone you know is struggling, call or text 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. You do not have to face this alone. There are people who will help if you give them the chance.
Let's begin.
When a moment turns tense, most people's instinct is to take control of it. To push for the outcome you want, right now. To move faster, talk more, close the gap before it slips away.
It's almost always the wrong move.
There's a discipline called verbal judo, made popular by the late Dr. George Thompson — a man with a doctorate in English who taught at the college level for years, then decided what he really wanted was to be a big-city cop. He earned a black belt in karate along the way. He built his communication system by watching veteran officers defuse situations that should have ended badly and didn't. His 1993 book, Verbal Judo: The Gentle Art of Persuasion, has been training police and executives ever since.
The whole thing rests on one idea, and Thompson reduced it to three letters: EAT. Empathy Absorbs Tension.
Like the martial art, verbal judo doesn't meet energy head-on. It redirects it. You don't overpower the other person. You break the negative pattern they're locked into and steer it somewhere productive.
I watched this play out in a harrowing video from Brooklyn at the beginning of May. A young woman in tremendous distress had moved past the glass partition on a high-rise building, and officers had been called to help her. The first officer on the roof — his name was Officer Aban — didn't lunge, didn't bark orders, and didn't rush.
The first thing he did was ask her name.
And he gave her his. He started with "Officer Aban," then softened it to "my name's Nicholas." Notice something — he led with the name, and traded first names to flatten the distance between them. Using someone's name says I see you as a person, not a problem, and that lowers the threat in the air before anything has been solved.
Then he asked, "Can I come a little closer?" He did not say "I'm coming closer." He made it a question. That's what Chris Voss, the former FBI hostage negotiator, calls a calibrated question in Never Split the Difference. It works because it hands her control — or at least the feeling of it.
When someone who feels cornered gets even a sliver of control back, the temperature starts to drop.
There was a slot in the glass partition. He reached his hand through, and she took it. That wasn't about physical strength — he could never have held her that way. It was about contact. This is what we call a pattern interrupt: something tactile that pulls the mind off the spiral it's locked in and onto something real and immediate. You could see her begin to settle.
A second officer clipped into a safety line, came alongside her, and said the words that mattered most: "We're going to do this together." Not come back over. Not let's go.
Together.
That single word turns a standoff into joint problem-solving — two people working the same problem instead of facing off across it.
Then he said, "We can sit here for ten minutes. We can sit here for half an hour." He didn't rush her. He gave her room to breathe.
He asked once, early, whether she was ready to come back to safety. She wasn't. He said, "Okay, that's fine," and he let it go. He didn't ask again. He just kept building the bridge until she was ready. And when she was, the officers took hold of her and brought her back over.
He never rushed the ask.
That's the last EAT-style technique I want to point out, and maybe the hardest: pushing too soon would have told her this was about him and not her, and the bridge would have collapsed under the weight.
This week, this newsletter is about something much more important than how to negotiate a deal. None of this is meant to make light of a life-and-death moment by setting it next to a garden-variety business negotiation. Instead, it's meant to teach you one communication framework for defusing intense situations, no matter what they look like.
Look at what every one of those moves had in common.
Learning her name. Asking permission instead of giving orders. The hand through the barrier. "We're going to do this together." The patience to let a no sit.
Not one of them was about control, and not one was about winning.
Each was a different way of doing the same single thing — absorbing the other person's tension instead of answering it with your own. That's the whole tool, and it fits in three letters. EAT.
It holds up in your world too – in situations that are NOT life or death. In those situations, you won't have to reach for a safety line. But you'll reach for the same principle, and it'll show up in a hundred small ways.
Empathy absorbs tension.
Remember: negotiation is life.
– Gene
