It was nighttime in the shelter dining room.
The lights were dimmed.
Not much was happening.
One old man with wispy hair was eating a late-night snack.
An apple.
And out of nowhere, Suzanne started yelling.
She accused the old man of cutting in line for laundry the week before.
Not five minutes before.
The week before.
And suddenly the room changed.
The old man yelled back. Voices got loud. Chairs scraped.
A few residents, woken up by the commotion, drifted over to watch. A couple joined in.
The quiet dining room became a little courtroom and a big headache.
A new staff member ran over and immediately got pulled into the argument.
She tried to figure out the laundry problem.
What are the laundry rules? What happened last week?
Which, honestly, is a normal response.
I would have done the same thing when I was new.
WHEN IS THE LAUNDRY NOT ABOUT THE LAUNDRY?
Afterward, I pulled the staff member aside.
Not because she had done anything wrong.
Because she had walked into a conflict that took me years (and a few psychology books!) to understand.
I told her that what happened looked random. It looked unpredictable.
It looked like Suzanne was furious about something insignificant.
But some behavior only looks unpredictable because we do not yet know the pattern.
Some mental health issues look like mental health issues.
If someone is hallucinating, most staff recognize that something clinical is happening.
Personality disorders are different.
A personality disorder is a mental health condition that doesn’t look like a mental health condition.
It can look like drama.
It can look like someone being “really difficult.”
It can look like starting a fight over week-old laundry.
These patterns may not look like a mental health issue, but they are very real.
Research has linked some personality disorders with differences in the prefrontal cortex (the calming part of the brain) and the amygdala (the fight-or-flight part).
Some behavior that looks random is actually predictable once you know the pattern.
And very often, those patterns lead to conflict.
SO WHAT DO YOU DO?
If you work with vulnerable populations—or even the general public—you can learn to see the vulnerability behind the behavior.
You are not diagnosing anyone. But you can learn to spot clues that a personality disorder, traumatic brain injury, PTSD, or another issue may be changing how a person handles conflict.
When you understand where conflict is coming from, you can adjust your approach in ways that are more likely to calm the situation down.
Sometimes the issue really is the laundry.
Usually, it is not.
That is why the first training in our new series, Conflict Prevention and Deescalation School, goes deeper into this exact problem.
Have a great week, and may all your laundry stay boring!
Peace,
Ryan