Have you ever felt overwhelmed and intimidated by a difficult confrontation involving strong over reactive emotional behavior of someone?

It is an unfortunate reality that we have no control over events or people that come at us in life. We may find ourselves in a difficult situation where someone confronts or criticizes us in an emotionally over reactive way and displays inappropriate behaviour or attitude in our direction. We have no control over that person, but we do have control over our response.

When we are faced with a volatile confrontation we do not need to feel controlled by the emotional behavior of the other person. We do have choices as to how we can respond, and instead of defensively being drawn into a situation we can pause and consider those choices.

Our first decision is whether the cost of engaging in this confrontational situation is worth the consequences. For example, is your life or wellbeing at risk because the person is so out of control that they may use physical violence? It is also important to take a moment to calm yourself so that your response is not emotionally overly reactive. To respond in like manner to any confrontation can escalate the situation and is unproductive.

In such situations I have found the A.C.I.D Process found in Carol Price