Occasionally It’s useful to revisit the core purpose of our program. First and foremost, the Mandt System is a course in crisis prevention. We accomplish this through the development of healthy relationships, positive behavior support, trauma informed training, and healthy conflict resolution techniques. We believe that the way we act should be an extension of our values, and that whenever possible, our interactions should improve the quality of life for ourselves and the people that we serve. While it may not be possible for every interaction to be positive, we believe that maintaining a ratio of 5 positives for every one challenging interaction is an effective strategy for building healthy relationships and minimizing the potential for crisis (Gottman, 1994). Within this context of healthy relationships, to prevent escalation from occurring our core strategy is to pay close attention to the people we serve and the environment around them. This allows us to remove potential triggers or to help a person to manage unpleasant sources of stimulation before they lead the person to escalate.
The second priority of the Mandt System is de-escalation. If our crisis prevention efforts have not been successful, our conflict resolution techniques continue to utilize methods of positive behavior support within a trauma informed workplace culture. However, we also add sub-clinical techniques of neurosequential de-escalation (Perry, 2009). As a person escalates, that person will move from the logical parts of their brain back through the emotional structures of the brain and then to the reactive structures of their brain. To help a person de-escalate, the Mandt System utilizes a safety focused approach that initially coaxes the person from the reactive brain back into the emotional centers of the brain, ultimately inviting that person to de-escalate into the parts of the brain associated with rational thinking.
If our preventative efforts fail, the Technical and Advanced courses in the Mandt System teach intervention tactics to stop violence. As a last resort, this does include physical restraint training. These techniques are not an end in themselves, and must be used concurrently with de-escalation and prevention efforts. All a physical skill can do is stop dangerous behavior long enough for our other strategies to be effective. In the Mandt System, dangerous behavior is stopped long enough for the person to be directed to safer behavior that can then be reinforced. The reinforcement of safer behavior teaches the person to use alternatives that can replace aggressive behavior in future interactions.
John Windsor – Director of Technical Curricula
Gottman, J. (1994) Why Marriages Succeed or Fail…And How You Can Make Yours Last. New York, NY. Simon & Schuster.
Perry, B. (2009). Examining child maltreatment through a neurodevelopmental lens: Clinical applications of the neurosequential model of therapeutics. Journal of Loss and Trauma, 14, 240-255. cris
