De-Escalating Conflict in the Divorce Process (and Beyond...) with Doug Noll
Why are you angry and how do you de-escalate?
Divorce isn’t easy and emotions almost always run high. In today’s episode, Seth and Pete talk with Doug Noll, an expert peacemaker who co-founded Prison of Peace, an organization dedicated to training maximum security prison inmates how to be peacemakers and mediators in their prison communities. He had been a trial lawyer, so knows a thing or two about battles in the court room. So today, we’re having a conversation about conflict and de-escalation.
It all starts with emotions. We’re emotional beings, and they far often outweigh rational thought. But why do we get so emotional? And how can we start learning our triggers and how to respond? Those are things Doug knows a thing or two about.
Once you’re there, how can you bring yourself down? And what do you do to de-escalate the conflict when it’s your ex who’s bringing it? Doug talks Seth and Pete through some tools that can help you when you’re dealing with high conflict in your divorce.
About Doug
Douglas E. Noll, Esq. is an award-winning lawyer-mediator who has mediated thousands of conflicts. His calling is to serve humanity, and he executes his calling at many levels. He is an award-winning author of three books, a teacher, speaker, and a trainer. His fourth book De-Escalate was published by Beyond Words Publishing in September of 2017. De-Escalate is now in four languages and in its second printing.
Doug’s work carries him from international work to helping people resolve deep interpersonal and ideological conflicts. He is the co-founder of Prisonw of Peace, and creator of the Noll Affect Labeling System. In 2012, Doug was honored by California Lawyer Magazine as California Attorney of the Year.
Links & Notes
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De-Escalate: How to Calm an Angry Person in 90 Seconds or Less
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Pete Wright:
Welcome to How to Split a Toaster, a divorce podcast about saving your relationships from TruStory FM. Today, your toaster just can't cool down.
Seth Nelson:
Welcome to show, everybody. I'm Seth Nelson. I'm here as always with my good friend, Pete Wright. Our guest today is co-founder of Prison of Peace, an organization dedicated to training maximum-security prison inmates how to be peacemakers and mediators in their prison communities. He's a lawyer turned peacemaker and bestselling author and speaker, and he's here today to help us deescalate conflict in the divorce process. Doug Noll, welcome to The Toaster.
Doug Noll:
Hey, guys. Sounds like it's going to be a hot seat today. Thanks.
Seth Nelson:
Well, are you comparing Pete and I to guys on death row? What's going on here?
Doug Noll:
No, no, no, I'm not.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. I have to ask first and foremost, just to get this out of the way. How did you get, briefly, into the Prison of Peace business? It sounds like just such a fascinating pivot.
Doug Noll:
My dear friend and colleague, Laurel Coffer received a letter from a woman serving a life sentence without possibility of parole in the largest, most violent women's prison in the world in August of 2009. She read the letter and had her mailbox, picked up the phone and called me and read it to me and said, "What do you think?" what this woman was asking for was for Laurel to come into the prison and train about 150 women, all of them lifers, how to mediate violence and stop the violence because they were tired of it, and we said, "Yes." It took us six months to get approval from the administration. The prison bureaucracy is unbelievable.
Seth Nelson:
I thought six months was good.
Doug Noll:
Well, I worked it pretty hard.
Seth Nelson:
I'm in the divorce world, man.
Doug Noll:
We ended up teaching our first cohort of women, 15 women in April of 2010 and spent three years in that prison, then it made it sustainable. We've designed the program to become sustaining. So we teach our students how to become trainers so they don't need us. Then that prison was repurposed to a men's prison, and we came back and did the same thing with the men. Finally, the state started seeing the results we were getting and started funding us with grants. Today, we're in 15 California prisons, 12 prisons in Greece, a prison in Connecticut, which is going to expand to the full state of Connecticut, we think. We're talking to Colorado, we've got a project that's going to start in Denmark, a project in Nairobi. It's just unbelievable how it's grown.
Pete Wright:
It's a fantastic project and the website is prisonofpeace.org, prisonofpeace.org. There is a video right on the front page that is just chock full of people who've been through the program who are inmates and it is just lovely. It is lovely to watch and I feel like it really sets the table for the conversation we're having today. If you can go in and deescalate arguments in a prison institution, surely you have something to contribute to deescalating conflict in divorce.
Doug Noll:
Absolutely. Absolutely.
Pete Wright:
All right. So let's talk then, Seth.
Seth Nelson:
We'll just sit back and tell us how it's done.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, right. Well, it really is what I'm curious from your perspective to get to the bottom of why arguments start and then spin out of control in the divorce process. What is the root of that?
Doug Noll:
Sure, or in any process. It all has to do with emotions. One of the great problems we have in fighting all of this because I've mediated. I was a commercial and business trial over 22 years, tried a lot of jury trials. I only did one divorce when I was a brand new lawyer and decided that wasn't for me. But the problem is emotions. What happens is that we are 96% of all families are emotionally dysfunctional and raised emotionally dysfunctional adults. This has going on for generation after generation, after generation. So we're in these adult bodies and we have a facade of maturity, but whenever there's any stress or upset, we revert back to being four or five, six-years-old because we've never been trained how to become emotionally competent, and it's a skill that has to be learned just like riding a bike.
So you get into a relationship, an intimate relationship and in many cases, the people coming into the relationship do not have the tools to deal with the conflict that will normally arise, because they don't have any good role models, and they don't have a specific training of the skills necessary to keep a problem from escalating out of control. So what happens is somebody does something or says something, or maybe there's a simmering anger or resentment typically, or maybe it goes back to childhood, "I'm never good enough. You never do enough for me," or whatever it might be, and there's a trigger one or both parties gets extremely emotional.
At that moment, the emotional centers of their brain take over, their prefrontal cortex shuts down and they go back to all the reactive programming of childhood. If you've ever noticed in an argument or a fight, the voices escalate, gets louder and louder and louder, and that's because it's the instinctive response of trying to be heard. It's like sitting across a river trying to shout at somebody across a river. We raise our voices because we're not being heard and we need to be heard. Of course, we're not listening to the other person either, so it becomes a battle of who's going to shout the loudest, but it goes nowhere because nobody knows how to listen, and nobody knows how to truly, truly reflect what the other person is saying and that's the problem. That's where it all starts.
Seth Nelson:
Doug, in that hypothetical and scenario that gets played out across the forces and people fighting all day long every day, is that one way to check yourself when you hear your voice rise to say, "Wait a minute, I need to slow down?"
Doug Noll:
Yeah. If you've got the emotional control to regulate at that point in time, you probably won't be raising your voice in the first place, because this is happening unconsciously, pre-consciously.
Seth Nelson:
Sure. Yeah, but that was my thought is that if it happens pre-consciously and as I talk over you and raise my voice to be heard, if I hear myself doing that, it's now a conscious thing where I can be like, "Slow down, stop talking.
Doug Noll:
If you can do that, absolutely. Absolutely. That's part of what we call emotional self-awareness and emotional self-regulation, two of the three elements of emotional competency.
Seth Nelson:
What's the third?
Doug Noll:
Yeah. The third one's empathy, cognitive and affective empathy. What's interesting is the way you learn emotional self-awareness and emotional self-regulation is by learning empathy first, cognitive empathy, which is the skill that I teach that I discovered.
Pete Wright:
We should start there and how that plays out, because so much of what you're talking about, it feels to me like if you were aware of these things in yourself and in your relationship, you probably might have had a better ability to handle natural conflict in the marriage, which may have saved you from divorce. But from our perspective, by the time they're listening to this show, my assumption is usually you're either readying yourself to enter into the divorce process. So my hope is that you listen to this episode and walk away with some tools or some new ways to think about how you manage your own emotional world.
Doug Noll:
I'm going to give you one tool that works both ways. It works on your spouse or ex-spouse, and it works on yourself as well. It's equally powerful, and this is all based on neuroscience. Let's suppose that there's an incipient confrontation argument forming. The first thing you do is you ignore the words. Your partner is shouting at you, screaming at you, spitting in your face, spitting angry. You just ignore the words. You've heard these words all before. There's no news here. There is no reason for you to listen to those words, make it white noise, and that will prevent you from getting triggered. The second step is to read the emotions, the emotional data that your partner is projecting. I'll go into more detail on how we do that in a minute. It's natural. It's innate. It's easy to do, but because of our cultural bias against emotional competency, we never learn how to do it.
Then the third step is, as we start perceiving the emotional data of our partner, we reflect back that emotional experience with a simple use statement. So Pete, I might say something like, "Man, Pete, you are really pissed off. You're angry. You're upset. You're frustrated. You don't feel like you're being respected. You feel like you're being completely ignored. You're not being supported. The whole thing just really is pissing you off, and it's making you anxious too. You're scared because you don't know what's going to happen next. You get a little embarrassed when you blow your top because you don't want to, but you do because you can't control yourself. The whole thing is just making it really sad. At the end of the day, you feel completely abandoned. You feel unloved and you feel unlovable, like a complete reject."
Pete Wright:
You're saying this to the person who's blowing up. Let's say I'm escalating.
Doug Noll:
That's right. Now, what happens when I do this, what the brain scanning studies show is that when I label your emotions this way it has an effect of immediately inhibiting the emotional centers of the brain, primarily the amygdala, but also other limbic systems in the brain that are related to emotions. At the same time, and this is where with this study was so counterintuitive, nobody knew we were going to see this, is that it activates the right ventral lateral prefrontal cortex, which is the executive function of our brain. So as I label your emotions, two things happen: your brain immediately begins to deescalate emotionally, and at the same time, the thinking part of your brain comes online and you regain control of yourself, and the whole process takes 60 to 90 seconds. It works every single time.
Pete Wright:
It is super counterintuitive, because I hear you talking about it, and I'm living in my head right now. My expectation would be if we were doing this in a conflict situation that you labeling those things about me would be triggering, and that would set me off even further.
Doug Noll:
They absolutely do not. They do exactly the opposite. That's why it's so counterintuitive.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Seth Nelson:
I'm going to put this in the dumb lawyer explanation that Pete just did very eloquently. I would've been like, "Fuck you. Don't tell me what I'm thinking about."
Doug Noll:
All right. Sometimes you get that response, "Who the fuck do you think you are?" Am I a psychiatrist?
Seth Nelson:
Yeah, "Stop fucking psychoanalyzing me."
Doug Noll:
Right. It happens very rarely, but when it does happen, it's an indication of tremendous success.
Pete Wright:
How so?
Doug Noll:
Because what has happened is that you have this person who is really angry, has built up a wall, a barrier, probably emotionally shut down, emotionally wounded, has built up all these barriers around their emotional life, has never felt emotionally safe. Most people never do feel emotionally safe, and like a superhero, you've just penetrated through all those walls and barriers and seen this person for who he or she really is. It scares the crap out of him, and that's where you get the pushback. So what you do is you stop, back off, you give it 15 minutes, and then you come back and you're a little more subtle about it, more nuanced. Maybe you don't lay on as many emotions. Maybe you say, "Oh man, you're really pissed off."
Pete Wright:
And then stop.
Doug Noll:
And that's all you say. You just drop it. So you do get that pushback, but very rarely, very rarely.
Pete Wright:
That's fascinating. Well, I want to try it first of all. So Seth, get ready because buckle up, buckle up buttercup. So what's next? Let's assume that you have re-engaged my executive functioning, you've reengaged the thinking centers of my brain, and I'm able to calm down a little bit. In terms of conflict, I assume, that was the empathetic stage. I'm rediscovering how to rename-
Doug Noll:
Okay. So you're looking for unconscious relaxation responses. So you're going to get a nodding of the head. The person's going to say something like "Yeah!" Or, "Exactly!" Or, "Damn right! That's exactly right!" Something like that, a really strong affirmation. You're going to get a dropping of their shoulders and you're going to get an exhalation, a sigh of relief, "Ah, finally got me." When you've gotten to that stage, you can stop because you've now deescalated, and you follow up as a simple question, "Well, what do we need to do? What do we need to do? How do we solve this problem?" Now they're in a space where they're extremely grateful, because you've taken the time to listen to them, so they feel validated. I call it, listing them into existence. You've listened them into existence. They feel heard. They feel like you really get them, and now you can problem solve, negotiation, whatever it might be. That's how you resolve the conflict.
Seth Nelson:
When this is happening, I'm assuming it's not such a smooth line of, things escalate. Someone's yelling. We use these mechanisms to identify their emotions. They calm down. You ask the simple question, "How do we solve this problem?" then they say, "Oh, okay. Here's how it happens." I'm assuming they could blow up again when you start trying to problem solve, and then you rinse and repeat.
Doug Noll:
Rinse and repeat. When I'm mediating high-conflict cases, I might affect label 10, 15 times a day in a mediation session. I get people, they get riled up. I calm them down. We talk for a while. They get riled up, and I talk them down and that's normal, because that's just the way they are. They're highly escalated and triggered, and you have to repeat the process.
Pete Wright:
Two points: one, you just put a name to it, affect labeling. For my own sense of memory, I have to say it out loud, so I remember what it is, affect labeling. The other piece is to Seth's point that it might not be always a direct line, what I can't help but think of is, if I'm in a conflict situation, I might have the cognitive ability to go through the affect labeling process with somebody who's escalating. But what's also going on for me? I feel like likely I'm not going to be in my best place either.
Doug Noll:
Actually, what happens is pretty amazing.
Pete Wright:
You're going to counterintuitive me again, aren't you?
Doug Noll:
That's right?
Seth Nelson:
Yeah. You knew it was coming.
Doug Noll:
What happens is, as you develop this practice, this skill of affect labeling, reflecting emotions, you gain and new insight, which changes everything. You learn that human beings are not rational. This whole myth of rationality that we've been lied to for 4,000 years doesn't exist, and we are not rational beings; never been, never will be. What separates human beings from other animal species are our emotions. No other animals have emotions. Only humans have emotions.
Seth Nelson:
Wait a minute. Wait-
Pete Wright:
What about-
Seth Nelson:
Wait a minute.
Pete Wright:
What about Seth's dogs?
Seth Nelson:
Yeah, I was about to ask. They look so sweet?
Doug Noll:
No. Dogs have affect, but they don't have emotions and all mammals have affect. In fact, all animals, all vertebra animals have.
Seth Nelson:
So explain the difference for Pete's cousin who lives somewhere in Iowa.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Doug Noll:
First of all. Okay. I'm going to get a little nerdy here.
Pete Wright:
Do it.
Doug Noll:
All right. So first of all, let me give you the definition of emotion. I keep it handy because I get challenged on this all the time. Emotions are biologically-based patterns, patterns, a perception, experience, physiology, action, and communication that are culturally created in our brains. They're created. We are not born with emotion. We start creating emotions at about 18 months of age through a process known as emotional categorization, and we are born with affect. Depending upon which model you use, I happen to use model developed by Sylvan Tomkins, a 1960's psychologist, which is nine affect model. You've got these nine affects these physiological states that arise in the brain, which are basically divided into pleasantness versus unpleasantness. Like an artist's palette, these affect are all combined in an infinite number of ways to give us different experiences that relate us to our environment.
Pete Wright:
Okay.
Doug Noll:
The thing about emotions is that when we take this affect and we concretize it through this emotional categorization process. It allows us to consciously know what we're feeling, otherwise, we would just be slaves to affective reaction. It allows us to do causation. "What's causing me to have this feeling? Why am I angry?" It allows us to make decisions about what to do next. We cannot make decisions without emotions. In fact, all this so-called rational thinking, none of it happens unless you're emotional first. Then finally, it allows us to communicate our emotions to somebody else. No other species can do this other than human beings.
Seth Nelson:
I'm going home petting the dog saying, "You've got no emotions."
Doug Noll:
[inaudible 00:17:45] affect.
Pete Wright:
Right. You're a hollow [inaudible 00:17:47].
Doug Noll:
Dogs have affect.
Pete Wright:
This is really interesting. It's really interesting to me because if I'm understanding this right, what you're saying is, as babies don't develop emotional response until 18 months that when an infant cries, that is an affective response-
Doug Noll:
Correct.
Pete Wright:
Not an emotional response.
Doug Noll:
Correct. Think about it, the emotional centers of the brain aren't even mature enough to activate until about 18 months. How can you have an emotion if you don't have the brain structure in place mature enough to have the emotion in the first place?
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Doug Noll:
The baby is just an affective, physiological response to the environment.
Pete Wright:
To like, "I'm hungry now." "I am uncomfortable."
Doug Noll:
Or, "I'm Happy."
Pete Wright:
Or, "I'm happy." Right, but not emotionally.
Doug Noll:
It's not an emotion.
Pete Wright:
Yet. Okay.
Doug Noll:
It's an affect.
Pete Wright:
You can tell a little bit. You've broken my brain just a smidge.
Doug Noll:
I know. I do-
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Doug Noll:
I recognize that. [inaudible 00:18:40] Everything I talk about is counterintuitive to everything I think we know.
Seth Nelson:
Pete, Doug's like, "I do this shit all day long.
Doug Noll:
I do this all day, yeah.
Seth Nelson:
Get in line, brother.
Doug Noll:
Yeah.
Seth Nelson:
I'm changing the way we think here.
Doug Noll:
You're not the first one that's told me that. So let's go back to the original question. What happens inside of you when you affect label somebody else? First of all, every time you affect label you reprogram your brain in a super positive way. You are building up your emotional database, your ability to categorize affect into emotion, which makes you more emotionally aware and it allows you to emotionally self-regulate in more powerful ways. Number two, as I said before, you begin to gain this insight that human beings are not rational beings, they're emotional beings. When you see somebody who's really angry, they're not being angry or irrational, they're just being emotional and they happen to be having an intense, negative, emotional experience. What that does is it triggers our compassion response. It's like holding a baby and you're holding the baby and a baby just lets out a big poop. Right? You go, "Ugh."
Seth Nelson:
Yeah.
Doug Noll:
"Baby, let me help you with that." That's compassion.
Seth Nelson:
Okay.
Doug Noll:
You say, "Oh, you're really upset. Let me help you." You say this inside yourself, and so you begin to feel compassion. The other thing that happens is that you create literally a protective bubble around yourself so that no matter what somebody says, they can't hurt you. They can't trigger you. They can't do anything, because they're just having this emotion. You're sitting there focused on their emotional experience, telling them what they're experiencing, and you're calm, cool, collected. You know what to say, how to say it, when to say it. No matter how intense this situation is, you're never at a loss for words and you never escalate anything. Everything calms down. So it's extremely powerful on yourself as the person who's the listener.
Pete Wright:
Okay. Okay.
Seth Nelson:
I don't feel like you're buying this.
Pete Wright:
No, I'm absolutely buying this. Every word Doug says, I feel less equipped to be able to handle this in a conflict situation, so I'm trying to figure out how am I going to start practicing this day-to-day?
Doug Noll:
Okay, so here's how you do it. You've got to start in very low-risk social situations where if you make a mistake or blow it, you won't embarrass yourself. My favorite practice laboratory, Starbucks. You walk into Starbucks, you go up to the counter, you place your order, give your credit card to the person at the cash register. You look at them right in the eye and you say, "Wow, you look really happy today. You're really happy and excited to be here," and most Starbucks people are, right? They're hired because of that. Then you shut up and watch what happens. Put your lab coat on and what's your lab rat going to do? What you will observe is a big, bright smile. "Thank you. I'm having a great day. I love being here, and by the way ... " All of a sudden, they just start talking. You're the first person that's ever listened to them in probably their entire career at Starbucks, and you just validated one simple little emotion, and they felt completely validated and safe with you and start talking.
Pete Wright:
Okay. I just understood something new and so it blows my mind. It's the Ted Lasso thing Have you watched Ted Lasso, either of you?
Doug Noll:
Un-huh.
Pete Wright:
Both of you?
Seth Nelson:
Oh, yeah. I love that show.
Pete Wright:
Love that show. One of the things that Ted Lasso always does at the end of an engagement with somebody that he might not know, it's somebody in the bar who serves him a beer or whatever. He always looks back at them and says, "I appreciate you," instead of, "Thank you," or something like that. That's his line, "I appreciate you."
Doug Noll:
It's different.
Pete Wright:
How so?
Doug Noll:
First of all, you used an "I" word.
Pete Wright:
Oh, okay.
Doug Noll:
In this process, you never use "I."
Pete Wright:
Okay.
Doug Noll:
You never used that old active listing crap from the 1950s. That was all developed by Thomas Gordon. He was a protégé of Carl Rogers.
Pete Wright:
Oh, we don't like him.
Doug Noll:
I won't go into a long story of the history of all of this but basically, it morphed into this idea, "What I think you're feeling is X." Total bullshit, doesn't work. It never has worked, never will work. Don't do it.
Pete Wright:
But why does, "I appreciate you," make people smile?
Doug Noll:
It does not. It aggravates people. Has anybody ever used that active listening stuff on you when you were upset?
Pete Wright:
Well, I don't know. I don't remember.
Doug Noll:
Okay.
Pete Wright:
Now, you're putting me on the spot, man.
Doug Noll:
For people who have had it used on them, they will tell you, "I feel it's very patronizing and manipulative and rude."
Pete Wright:
It pisses them off.
Doug Noll:
When I teach my workshops and classes, sometimes people say, "Well, what about active listing?" So we do an experiment and I have them practice affect labeling using an "I" statement versus practice using a "you" statement, and the "you" statement always wins, hands down, always wins. Don't use "I" statements.
Pete Wright:
So what would be the alternative then to turning that into a "you" statement?
Doug Noll:
Okay. It's okay for you to give a gratitude statement, and that's what you did.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Doug Noll:
You gave a gratitude statement.
Pete Wright:
Right.
Doug Noll:
"I appreciate you."
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Doug Noll:
Actually, the full gratitude statement would be something like, "Boy, when you served me that beer really timely and I was super cold, I really appreciate it, because I really needed a place to calm down and relax, and you made that happen for me. Thank you." That's the full gratitude statement. But just saying, "I appreciate you," is a third of the gratitude statement. That's fine, but if you're going to go the other way, then you say, "You're really excited to be here today. You're really happy to be here, serving people and making people happy and it's really making your whole evening," if that's what you're reading from the [inaudible 00:24:13]
Seth Nelson:
I'm thinking about this, Doug, because the interaction I'm about to tell you that I'm going to explain, I've done hundreds of times. I'll be at the grocery store and I'll engage in a little conversation with the person who's running it all through.
Doug Noll:
The checker, right.
Seth Nelson:
I'll say something like, "Are you having a good day?" They might say, "Oh, it's long," or, "I just started my shift," or it will be a downer type of a statement.
Doug Noll:
Checkers are that way.
Seth Nelson:
I always say, "Feels good on payday, though.? Then they always brighten up and they're like, "Yeah, it does," or if it's a holiday, they're like, "Oh it's the 4th of July. I'm here." I'm like, "Yeah, time-and-a-half, though." I try to point to the positive. In my experience with the lab coat, as you described, now that I look back on this, they always perk up when I mention that part, like the reward, the why they're there, so to speak. How am I doing it wrong? Pete's going to love it if you tell me I'm doing it wrong.
Pete Wright:
I can't wait. I've got a bell. I'm ready to ring it.
Doug Noll:
So a couple of things. Number one, when you do that, you're not affect labeling. Okay. The second no-no is, never ask questions. "Are you angry? You look like, are you angry?" No upturned voice. You never ask what somebody is feeling, never. That will only infuriate them.
Pete Wright:
Interesting.
Doug Noll:
So don't do that.
Seth Nelson:
Because if you ask them it's as if you can't figure it out, you fucking idiot.
Doug Noll:
Remember, their prefrontal cortex is offline. They probably don't know what they're feeling.
Seth Nelson:
Gotcha.
Doug Noll:
They get frustrated because they can't access their emotional database, so they can't tell you whether they're angry or not. Because they're already in a heightened emotional state, that's just adding fuel to the fire. So don't ask questions. Pointing out something positive is useful, but what is more useful is to say, "You're really tired and frustrated that you're working overtime today, but you're really excited that your next paycheck's going to be really hefty, and that really gets you happy and excited." You see the difference.
Pete Wright:
It sounds awkward to me.
Seth Nelson:
I know. I do see the difference, but it sounds like I've got a lot of assumptions in there that I might not know, but for the fact that I screwed it up for the last 100 times I've asked all these other people.
Doug Noll:
I said it earlier, we have this innate ability to read emotions. This goes back millions of years. The evolutionary biology of this is really interesting. As homo sapiens, we only developed the ability to speak 230,000 years ago, just an instant in geological times. Our predecessors have been on the planet for millions of years. How did we communicate before that really interesting event occurred that allowed us to start developing language? By the way, that interesting event was mastery of fire. When our predecessors mastered fire, they could take animal meat and animal fat, render it and make it digestible, and it changed the caloric intake of the diets of those people. That had over the next 25,000 years, our brains radically expanded.
In particular, the pharyngeal nerve and the pharyngeal muscles that control all of our vocalization expanded 10 times, and now, all of a sudden we could start making much more sophisticated sounds. We went from grunts to proto language and then to language, and then with language became abstract thinking, and we evolved from there. But before that, the only way we could communicate was through emotion, and emotions are communicated through the eyes and facial expressions more than anything else. So we are highly attuned to other people's emotions. The problem we have is that because of this 4,000 year lie that we're rational and not emotional and being emotional is irrational, we have let this innate ability just sit there without developing it, but it's powerful and you're never wrong. It's 100% accurate. That's the thing that's so amazing to me.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. It feels like we let this, not to put words in your mouth, but it feels like in your intention, this fictional rationalization in all of us get in the way of the fact that we already have a skill that we know how to do.
Doug Noll:
That's right. Well, we need to be trained in it, but it's easy to learn. It's really easy to learn, and it's just an innate skill. It's like riding a bicycle.
Seth Nelson:
It's a good thing Judge Tibbals isn't here. I always try to make arguments I always say judges will understand.
Pete Wright:
Right.
Doug Noll:
I've been a lawyer for 25 years. I'm used to it.
Seth Nelson:
Yeah, exactly. Doug, you're speaking so eloquently about the mind and the emotion and how it all works that I forgot that you're a lawyer. Pete always feels ganged up when I have another lawyer on the show, so this is good. So what I was going to say to just simplify this is really, our language gets in the way of communicating what is painfully obvious to both of us when we're in this situation, which is all the nonverbal clues that we were taking in and also showing because they're going both ways.
Doug Noll:
That gives me a great entree into saying, sort of, yes.
Pete Wright:
Excellent. Excellent.
Seth Nelson:
Pete, that's not a no.
Pete Wright:
It's a no enough.
Seth Nelson:
That's not an idiot, but it wasn't a ring the bell.
Doug Noll:
But you're right, but I want to reframe it a little bit.
Seth Nelson:
Please do.
Doug Noll:
So our brains do not work well with what is known as unstructured data. We all know this is lawyers that we got to take information and we got to process it and organize it and put into something we would call a legal brief or an argument that we can present to a judge or to a mediator, or to somebody like that. So we can only work with structured information. What we've learned to do from the time we started to talk at about 18 months is we learned how to structure words as information. Learning language ability is all about structuring words as data. Because it's the only data we've ever learned to structure, we think it's the most important, and we let the more important data, the intended meaning of the speaker and the emotions of the speaker slip by.
Our brains just see them as completely unimportant, because it's never learned how to structure intended, meaning and emotion. All communication is words, intended meaning and emotion, and words only constitute 7% of a total utterance of information being communicated by one human to another; 7%. We focus on that 7% because that's all we've learned to focus on and the other 93% goes right past us. So what we have to learn how to do is structure this data in intended meaning and emotion, and that's what I teach. How do you structure this data? How do you structure emotional data so that you can use it and you have access to it so your brain can immediately grab it?
Seth Nelson:
In this example, Doug, and I've seen actors do it when they're learning their skill of acting. I've actually seen it done on stage as part of a play where they'll say the exact same word 50 different ways.
Doug Noll:
Sure.
Seth Nelson:
To your point, it's the same word, but it conveys different meanings.
Doug Noll:
Speed, intensity, tonality, all of that. Absolutely.
Seth Nelson:
Yeah.
Doug Noll:
So the word itself, the words themselves, and here's the other thing. So it's the words, part of the problem is it's when you said language gets in the way I would reframe it to say, we just haven't learned how to structure the other part of the information properly so we can access it and use it.
Seth Nelson:
We're too focused on the word, less focused on it. It could be, "Hi," or, "Hi," or-
Doug Noll:
Exactly correct. So part of learning how to affect label is learning how to structure emotional data so that you can use it. You get immediate access to it. I can look at all of you guys and I can tell you exactly what you're feeling right now, because I have a way of structuring the emotional data that you're projecting that makes perfect sense to me. So you have to learn how to do that. It's not hard, it's easy really, but you just got to learn how to do it. So that's why words oftentimes do get in our way, and we put too much weight on words and we're not looking at what's underneath it. Sometimes people will say stuff and we can tell there's emotion underneath it, or they'll say one thing and do something else that we can tell they're lying, or they're not telling the truth, but that's at the very gross level; where we're far more sophisticated in our ability to figure out what people are actually experiencing once we start paying attention to it.
Pete Wright:
Where does this come into play for somebody who's in, let's say, a contentious divorce, process? 8:00 AM, day one, they've heard this podcast and they want to figure out how to change. At what point, how do they change the nature of their relationship and divorce? At what point, I guess there's a follow-on question, which is at what point should they just not engage, maybe just let the lawyers do it?
Doug Noll:
Well, I guess it depends on how much money you want to spend.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Doug Noll:
Here in California, you can mediate a modest divorce for less than six or $7,000. If you want to litigate it, you're going to spend between 100 and $`300,000.
Seth Nelson:
I vote for litigation.
Doug Noll:
You fight it. How big's your bank account and how much wealth you want to destroy? That's really the question. But sometimes people are so upset. They're willing to spend every dime of whatever their marital estate is for vengeance, to make the other guy hurt more than me.
Seth Nelson:
Well, also, Pete, we've talked about this before is cases settle when they're ready to settle. Part of that is when people can get past the emotional aspects of it and then they can settle. I've had very difficult cases where I've had clients who have become much more self-aware during the process and will say, "Well, Seth, this is the same settlement we talked about 18 months ago," and that then I was saying, "No," and now I'm saying "Yes," and you would say, "Yes, I don't want to be like, 'I told you so.'" I'm like, "Well, what's different?" They've told me the two things is, "One I wasn't emotionally ready to do that. I was acting out of more of emotions. Now that I'm farther away and I've spent a lot of money, but you've written me letter after letter saying, 'Don't spend, don't spend, don't spend,' then now I see it differently." It's a change of focus.
Doug Noll:
So here's how we shorten that from 18 months to maybe a lot less time. What you do is, I think what you do with your clients and for people who are listening to this, whether you're divorce lawyers or people facing divorce is, learn how to affect label yourself. You got who's belittling you or cheating or betraying you or whatever, what you need to do every single time you feel an emotion come up around the relationship, positive or negative. You say to yourself, "I'm really pissed off. I'm angry. I'm frustrated. I feel completely disrespected. I feel like I've been completely betrayed and cheated and completely ignored.
I feel like I mean absolutely nothing to this person, and I'm anxious and scared because I don't know what the feature is going to hold here. I don't know how this is all going to shake out. I'm really sad and upset and distressed that I have to go through this. I feel really distressed over all of this. It's really causing me to lose sleep, and I've got a lot of anxiety and I'm sad. I feel a lot of grief over what could have been, but wasn't and every time I think about it, I feel like crying. I feel abandoned and unloved. I feel unlovable and I don't feel like anybody will ever me again." Say that to yourself every single time something comes up. Go back and rewind, write those words down.
Seth Nelson:
Okay, and now they do that. The guy's still giving them an offer that they think is shit, and the lawyer is saying "No way. I know I can do better in court than this."
Doug Noll:
Then you got to decide how much money you want to spend. Any lawyer that says, "I think I can do better than this," that's bullshit, bullshit. Fire that lawyer and find another one.
Seth Nelson:
Exactly.
Doug Noll:
That lawyer has no opinion.
Pete Wright:
Why is that bullshit? Why is that bullshit for those listening?
Seth Nelson:
It's because what a lawyer should say is I can say, "Look, I've done the analysis. Here's my legal opinion, based on all the information I know, and here's what I believe a court should do. It can be a pretty narrow range, because I've been doing this a long time, but I can't promise you the court will do it."
Doug Noll:
You don't know what's going to happen.
Seth Nelson:
"We don't know what's going to happen court. We know what I believe should happen. I can never tell you what will happen."
Pete Wright:
That's the extent of your predictive power.
Doug Noll:
"By the way, it's going to cost you 250,000 bucks to take this to trial, because we're going to need all these forensic experts and we're going to need evaluation experts and appraisers."
Seth Nelson:
I break it down less than that, Doug. Someone calls me and there's an issue and we have to file a motion and I'll say, "Here's what it's going to cost," because in the moment of a panic phone call to the divorce lawyer, they want action now. Pete, we've talked about this. What can I do? I can reach out to opposing counsel and say, "We have a problem. Can we try to land this turbulent plane? If we're not going to land it now, let's make it a little less turbulent," see if I can get response from opposing counsel to call their client to see what's going on, and we're playing the telephone game back and forth. It turns out there's miscommunication and the clients aren't really telling the lawyers the full story. We have that, or-
Doug Noll:
That never happens.
Seth Nelson:
No, shocking, or what happens is you don't reach out to opposing counsel or you do and you get nothing. So I write a letter, it's called a motion. We file it with the court. We set it for a hearing. We prepare our witnesses. We go to a hearing. We clear the dates. We have all that stuff, and then you go to court and you get an order, and maybe or not, the person follows the order and then you're back in court.
Doug Noll:
It's a painful process, which is why I quit it, and went back to school and got my master's degree in peacemaking a conflict study. Like I said, 22 years, I was hardcore, a hardcore trial lawyer, tried over 200 jury trials, state, federal, arbitrations, you name it I did it. All usually pretty big cases, big-dollar cases. Here's what I tell lawyers to do, especially for guys that do the kind of work you do is, when your client calls really upset, don't ask questions, affect Label them, "You're really upset. You're angry. You're off. You're frustrated. You feel betrayed." Just label the emotions. You label it until you get those four responses. Now they're calm and now you can have a conversation, "Well, what do you want do?" "Well, I don't know. I called up because I was really pissed off and I just wanted you to cut his balls off."
Pete Wright:
"I need somebody to be off with me and I was hoping you would be that person."
Doug Noll:
That's right. But now that you've calmed me down, thank you very much. I can see that maybe it's awful what's happening, but maybe it's not something that we should mess with and I shouldn't spend the money on it."
Pete Wright:
Right.
Seth Nelson:
Doug, I cannot tell you how often I've told clients, "The best thing to do is nothing."
Doug Noll:
Best thing to do is nothing, but you can give them an even greater service and they will love you, and they will also refer work to you by simply affect labeling them, validating them.
Pete Wright:
That's amazing.
Seth Nelson:
Oh, I've got clients that call me all the time that said, "Seth, I am now going to vent to you. We've had this conversation. I know that you're going to charge me for your time because you get paid by your time, and I know that at the end of this conversation, you're going to tell me to do nothing and I need a half-hour of your time." I'm like, "Okay, as long as we're clear."
Doug Noll:
Right. Well, now in that half-hour, you'll cut it down to five minutes and you will give them a service that is priceless-
Pete Wright:
That's perfect.
Doug Noll:
You will listen them into existence and you'll calm them down, and they will feel deep gratitude for the fact that you really get them and understand them.
Seth Nelson:
I think in my profession, Pete, divorce lawyers don't do what Doug saying is enough. I was just recently in a mediation and I saw my client respond in ways that, and I'm really pleased to have Doug here and I'm not trying to toot my own horn, I did what Doug was saying we should do. I didn't know this, I just was doing it naturally, I guess. But I got right to the root of what I thought was happening with her emotionally. I said, "Here's what I think is happening. You're anxious about the kids and they're not being parented the way you think they should be parented. Then you turn to, 'Well, why is that?' That why is the blame, because it's the other and now what do we do about that? You get all riled up and you become more emotional." At the end of the day, she was like, "Oh, my God. Yeah, you pegged it. That's exactly what's going on and it starts with my anxiety that the kids aren't going to be taken care of."
Doug Noll:
You can go a lot deeper than that, and you should go a lot deeper than that because emotions don't come one at a time. Multiple emotions all arise at the same time. There's one emotion that presents like anger or anxiety, but underneath that are usually three or four or five, even six other emotions that are tagging along behind it. If you really want to help somebody, you've got to go below and label all those other emotions.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Seth Nelson:
Where you don't feel validated and you don't feel loved. You don't-
Pete Wright:
That's right.
Seth Nelson:
... feel being listened to, all that stuff.
Doug Noll:
If you notice I have a structure for how I do this and I [inaudible 00:43:04]
Seth Nelson:
I was trying to figure it out and I think it was alphabetical by the third letter in the emotion.
Doug Noll:
No, let me give you the structure because it's very simple. I developed this. We'll just stick with negatives, but I also have a whole structure for positive emotions too that you would use for kids or other people too. But the negative emotions, you start with the anger emotions: anger, frustration, annoyance, irritation. Then you go to dignitary emotions: not being heard, being disrespected, being ignored, not being appreciated, not being supported. Then you go to the fear emotions: fear and anxiety, terrified, scared. Then you go to shame, humiliation, guilt, and embarrassment. Then the next level of sadness and grief, the stress, anguish.
At the last level, the bottom level where everything starts is abandonment, feeling unloved, feeling unlovable, feeling betrayed. You start with the presenting emotion, which is going to be anger usually, sometimes fear and anxiety and you label that, and then you just start at the top. So I would go from, "Oh, man. You're really anxious, and you're really angry. Nobody's listening to you. You feel completely disrespected. This is a completely unfair process, and you're a little embarrassed that you get so agitated so easily about this and you're sad." Then you go down to, "And you feel completely abandoned and betrayed."
Pete Wright:
And that hits home.
Doug Noll:
See how it's structured? That's what I call structuring the data.
Seth Nelson:
Right. Now, I got a tough question for you, Doug, which I think you're going to hit out of the park. See, tough, but hit out the park. See how I didn't that, Pete?
Pete Wright:
I did. That was awesome.
Seth Nelson:
Yeah. Yeah. Does this work if I'm talking to opposing council?
Doug Noll:
Absolutely. I cannot tell you how many times I've deescalated counsel in mediations using this. Here's the thing that really is striking, frankly, lawyers are horrible negotiators. I've done over 2000 mediations, I can count on one hand the number of lawyers that appeared before me that were good negotiators. Most of them are awful and they do really stupid shit like get upset. The moment you get upset as a lawyer and you start getting emotional and somebody's not there to affect label you, your prefrontal cortex is shut down for the rest of the day. It'll take you six to eight hours to reboot yourself back to a place where you can give good advice.
I watch these people get crazy with me in mediations, and I can't say anything, but I just shake my head and say, "You're blowing it." Maybe they're putting on something for their clients or they're showing their client how tough they are, but toughness is doesn't play in negotiation. You're not there to win, you're there to make a deal. There's no such thing as win in mediation. Either you settle it and make a deal or you don't. Lawyers bring in this adversary ideology, which by the way, did you know the word zealous advocacy does not exist in any of our professional codes of conduct? It does not exist. It was taken out by the ABA, I think, in 1981 and at least in the California Code Professional Conduct, it doesn't exist, and yet zealous advocacy, and by the way, the boundaries is up don't get me started on this.
Seth Nelson:
I'm like, "Okay, we got a five-hour show coming now. Here we go."
Pete Wright:
Yeah. Right.
Doug Noll:
You get me going on zealous advocacy, it just drives me crazy because it gives lawyers today permission to do whatever they want. There are no guardrails, when really zealous advocacy has some very, very narrow guardrails when it's appropriate to be a zealous advocate. Most of the time, you're not in that environment, so zealous advocacy is not appropriate. In fact, it's unethical to be that way, but too many lawyers see it exactly the opposite and they're wrong. They're wrong ethically.
Seth Nelson:
There is a free continuing legal education on the Florida Bar website that says, Crossing the Line: Zealous Advocacy or Unprofessional and Unethical Conduct.
Pete Wright:
Well, and it gets back to, at least the point that I'm getting away from this, is that we approach this from the perspective of people who are going through the divorce process in some way, shape or form, and this is a reminder that the lawyers are human beings and-
Doug Noll:
That's right.
Pete Wright:
... they are in
Doug Noll:
And they are emotional.
Pete Wright:
... so many ways, they're no different-
Doug Noll:
They're not rational.
Pete Wright:
... than you are. They are emotional.
Doug Noll:
They're not rational. They are emotional, and that is all drilled out of [inaudible 00:47:39].
Pete Wright:
I am so excited.
Seth Nelson:
Pete's so excited to be bashing the divorce lawyers right now. He's loving it.
Doug Noll:
That emotional stuff is drilled out of us in law school. I've done a lot of studies on this. It's one of the reasons why lawyers have such a high divorce rate, why there's so much dissatisfaction in the law, it's because we're trained the wrong way. We're trained against our humanity, but lawyers are emotional. They can't even be rational until they're emotional first, because they're human beings, and human beings can't be rational. How would you know how to be rational unless there was something in the environment that told you had to bring critical thinking, for example, to bear on a problem. How do you even know that there's a problem there unless you have an emotional reaction to the environment that tells you, "I got a problem to solve?"
Pete Wright:
Right. Right.
Doug Noll:
So we're emotional first always, and then depending on the circumstance, we can take what Kahneman calls our System 2 thinking processes, decision making processes, and bring it to bear on the problem. That's what we learn in law school. We learn how to think a lawyer, critical thinking skills, analytical skills, but they don't talk about the fact that we have an emotional experience that triggers all of that.
Seth Nelson:
Never once was that mentioned in law school, not once. That's one of the reasons, Doug, that lawyers avoid family law because they say, "Oh, it's all emotional."
Doug Noll:
That's right.
Seth Nelson:
What I always think is, so are your cases. You don't think if someone has a business that they're being sued-
Doug Noll:
You lost a 5 million contract was breached on you, that's going to cost you-
Seth Nelson:
... that that's not emotional?
Doug Noll:
Exactly.
Seth Nelson:
It's just the subject matter.
Pete Wright:
Or criminal cases? You take a criminal case, you mounting a defense for somebody who did something wrong or vile, somehow there is an emotional response you have to navigate to be able to take that case in the first place.
Doug Noll:
Right. If nothing else, why did that person offend?
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Doug Noll:
I've worked in prisons for 12 years. I've met thousands and thousands of life inmates and trained them. Why did they offend? It's because their emotional upbringing was violent and abusive. Murderers are not born, they're bred. When you're criminal defendant, you're a criminal offense attorney. You're starting with an emotional situation to begin with. Your client has been emotionally abused, horribly probably.
Pete Wright:
Well, Doug, look, I don't want to do it, but I have to put a fork in this because clearly, I feel like we could talk about this stuff all day long and I absolutely love it. I feel like you have offered us some in incredible tools and practices to help navigate complex emotional situations, or at least recognize when you're in one-
Doug Noll:
Right.
Pete Wright:
... and that's a real gift. Thank you so much.
Doug Noll:
I created a webpage.
Pete Wright:
Sure.
Doug Noll:
For anybody who's listening to this-
Pete Wright:
Yeah, Please.
Doug Noll:
... let me give you the link. There are resources on the page-
Seth Nelson:
Please do, show notes. Yeah.
Doug Noll:
... from free to expensive, depending what you want to do. The URL is Doug Noll, D-O-U-G N-O-L-L.co/toaster.
Pete Wright:
Oh, look at that.
Doug Noll:
dougnoll.co/toaster. My regular website is dougnoll.com. You can email me at doug@dougnoll.com. I answer all my own email all by myself. I don't have an entourage and I respond to all my own emails, but dougnoll.co/toaster will get you a free ebook that describes exactly what we've been talking about today. You can buy my book, Deescalate my fourth book. You can buy a video course, How to Deescalate somebody. Then if you want to really dive into emotional competency, you can buy my Develop Emotional Competency courses that are online courses.
Pete Wright:
It's wonderful. Great set of resources, Doug. Thank you so much, dougnoll.co/toaster. That will be in the show notes as well.
Seth Nelson:
But Pete, he doesn't say the best part of what he's already put on this webpage for us.
Pete Wright:
What's that?
Seth Nelson:
It's the cartoon.
Doug Noll:
Yeah, the good stuff's hidden back in the woods.
Seth Nelson:
It says, "All the really cool stuff is in the deep woods." That's the quote, and it's a guy talking to a bear, and between the trees is a merry-go-round, a hot dog stand-
Pete Wright:
It's a whole amusement park.
Seth Nelson:
It is an amusement park setting. So, Doug, thank you for joining us in putting out these amazing resources for our listeners. I'm certainly going to dig into this much, much deeper. I'll tell you, Pete, I'm going to have my lawyers take this video course because all of this is about connecting with clients and deescalating and getting to solutions.
Doug Noll:
Yeah. I've learned that I started out discovering this in a really difficult mediation between a divorced couple, as it turned out. I discovered it, the science came out two years later. We acid tested it in the prison over the last 12 years. I've been teaching this stuff since I discovered it in 2005 and I've come to conclude it is the foundational skill of life. If you can master these skills, everything changes, everything changes. You'll never have a fight or argument again in your life with anybody.
Pete Wright:
I love the podcasts that we do. I really do. I love this show, and it's been a while since we have done a show that has left me just in that state, just on the precipice of just straight up dumbfounded. I feel like you've challenged some long-held assumptions in a way that's going to take some serious reflection. I really appreciate that. I hope others listen to this and have that same experience. That's eye-opening.
Doug Noll:
You're walking the same path I did 20 years ago.
Pete Wright:
Oh, it's wonderful. Doug, thank you-
Doug Noll:
You're welcome.
Pete Wright:
Deeply, thank you so much. Thank you, actually, everybody for downloading and listening to this show. We sure appreciate your time and attention. If you would like to ask us a question, we would love to hear that question. You can just visit howtosplitatoaster.com. Push the button that says ask a question. There's a little form. You can type it out and we will answer it on the show. Thank you, everybody. Thank you, Doug Noll. On behalf of Doug Noll and Seth Nelson, America's favorite divorce attorney, I'm Pete Wright. We'll catch you next time right here on How to Split a Toaster, a divorce podcast about saving your relationships.
Outro:
Seth Nelson is an attorney with NLG Divorce and Family Law with offices in Tampa, Florida. While we may be discussing family law topics, How to Split a Toaster is not intended to, nor is it providing legal advice. Every situation is different. If you have specific questions regarding your situation, please seek your own legal counsel with an attorney licensed to practice law in your jurisdiction. Pete Wright is not an attorney or employee of NLG Divorce and Family Law. Seth Nelson is licensed to practice law in Florida.
