if you see someone at the verge of a panic attack that means they’re fully in their head spiraling - you can try to calm them down the normal way, but you can also try to force them out of their own head and ground them by saying something weird, ideally a question so their mind can latch onto it. It won’t always work, but it might shock them just the right amount to ground them!
I was told that one way to help a young child break out of a tantrum is to ask them an odd question, something like “What color shoes are you wearing?” It does seem to work sometimes, usually by annoying them so much that they forget what they were upset about in the first place. I can well see it working for someone who needs to get out of a mental spiral.
Reminds me of the “make an angry child laugh” trick. Which I absolutely loathed as a child, because it worked but it also wasn’t taking my emotions seriously.
Sometimes their emotions have gone so far past reasonable that the first thing you need to do is bring them back to the point you can actually reason with them. After that, yes it’s really vital to take their emotions seriously, they need to understand them and trust that the people around them will take them seriously, but they also haven’t yet built the skills to moderate their own feelings, so sometimes you need to add those externally.
honestly, this is not a terrible idea
if you see someone at the verge of a panic attack that means they’re fully in their head spiraling - you can try to calm them down the normal way, but you can also try to force them out of their own head and ground them by saying something weird, ideally a question so their mind can latch onto it. It won’t always work, but it might shock them just the right amount to ground them!
I was told that one way to help a young child break out of a tantrum is to ask them an odd question, something like “What color shoes are you wearing?” It does seem to work sometimes, usually by annoying them so much that they forget what they were upset about in the first place. I can well see it working for someone who needs to get out of a mental spiral.
Reminds me of the “make an angry child laugh” trick. Which I absolutely loathed as a child, because it worked but it also wasn’t taking my emotions seriously.
Sometimes their emotions have gone so far past reasonable that the first thing you need to do is bring them back to the point you can actually reason with them. After that, yes it’s really vital to take their emotions seriously, they need to understand them and trust that the people around them will take them seriously, but they also haven’t yet built the skills to moderate their own feelings, so sometimes you need to add those externally.