Affect Labeling: The 21st Century Listening Skill

I want to give you a quick tutorial on an elegant technique that will allow you to stop any fight or argument, de-escalate any person, calm any anger, and actually prevent fights and arguments from beginning in the first place.

The skill is called affect labeling. I didn’t invent affect labeling, but I did discover it in 2005. And since 2005 have refined it so that I can teach it to other people quickly and easily.

The concept is really simple. and it involves a little bit of neuroscience. When we’re in conflict or we’re angry or emotional or upset, the emotional centers of our brain are activated. When they become too activated, they overwhelm a part of our brain called the prefrontal cortex. When that happens, we can’t think anymore.

I’m sure you’ve had this experience, and certainly when you’ve been in a fight or argument, you’ve seen other people kind of go crazy. They get triggered and reactive. And they can’t think. They just basically go to programming that they learned in early childhood as a response to whatever it is that got them mad.

Why Affect Labeling Works

The secret to calming people down and stopping fights and arguments forever is to inhibit the emotional centers of the brain and reactivate the prefrontal cortex. The skill of affect labeling does exactly that.

In a groundbreaking study in 2007, neuroscientist Matthew Lieberman and his colleagues showed that when you affect label somebody, which I’m going to show you how to do in just a moment, the emotional centers of the brain diminished in activity and one part of the brain, the right ventral lateral prefrontal cortex, was activated.

In essence, as we engage in affect labeling, we calm people down and, at the same time, re-engage the thinking part of their brain so they can start processing emotions again. It turns out that later studies have shown that the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain that contains the abstractions that we call emotions.

Now, there’s a lot to know about emotions and affect and the physiology and the evolutionary biology of all this; I’ll reserve that for more advanced courses and Coaching. You don’t need to know all the science right now to be able to do the practice. If you don’t mind, just take it on faith that this practice is based on hard neuroscience, not pop psychology.

I have deployed this practice in places as diverse as maximum Security prisons and at the Congressional Budget Office where I’ve trained senior analysts how to de-escalate members of Congress and their staff.

How to Affect Label

The skill itself is explained in three steps.

Step number one: Ignore the words.

You want to ignore what the angry person is saying because if you listen to the anger you’re likely to get triggered yourself and become defensive or reactive. Make those words white noise so you don’t even hear what they’re saying. When you do that, two things happen. One, you are much less likely to get triggered yourself. And two, you open up your brain to take the next two steps.

Step number two is to read the emotions.

Now you might be thinking, how do I do that? I don’t even know hardly what my own emotions are? Well, our brains are hardwired to read emotions, and this is the evolutionary biology part, which I won’t bother you with right now. Suffice it to say that our brains have evolved over millions of years to accurately and efficiently read the emotions of other humans. All you have to do is just empty your mind, be quiet for a moment, and let your unconscious brain do the processing. In a few seconds, emotional words will pop into your consciousness, and that’s how you’re reading the emotions.

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Step Number Three: Reflect the Emotions

That gets you to the third step, reflecting the emotions back with a “you” statement, not an “I” statement. No questions. State the emotions that come up in your consciousness back to the person who’s upset.

So you would say something like, “You are really angry. You’re frustrated. You feel completely disrespected. You feel ignored and not heard, and you feel unappreciated and unsupported. And you’re worried and concerned and even a little nervous. ”

“And you’re kind of disgusted at the way this is lot going down. And you feel a little embarrassed. You’re sad and upset and stressed and disconnected, and it makes it you kind of depressed. At the base of it all, you feel completely abandoned, rejected and betrayed. You feel all alone and completely worthless.”

Now take a moment and think about how that landed with you. What did you feel as I said those words to you? You should notice that you relaxed, and you said “Yeah yeah yeah,” even though right now you’re not upset. You were feeling the relaxation response occurring from the affect labeling affecting the emotional centers of your brain. That’s how powerful it is.

So the three steps are: ignore the words, read the emotions, reflect the emotions with a”you” statement. Don’t ask questions. Don’t use an “I” statement.

Why Active Listening and Nonviolent Communication Do Not Work

Active listening does not work. It has never worked. It never will work. Forget it. If you took active listening classes, forget everything you ever learned because it does not work. Likewise, there are other techniques, like nonviolent communication, that do not work.

The only thing that has been proven in neuroscience to work is affect labeling as I’ve described it.

Here’s an example of affect labeling.

This is a demonstration between myself and my wife. It’s a role play, but you’ll see exactly what affect labeling looks like.

So Aleya, what’s going on?

Well I was actually in a meeting today with a couple people but there were two people in particular that were so incredibly disrespectful.

You were really disrespected.

Totally. It was it was so I mean beyond rude.

And it kind of pisses you off.

I mean I just feel so so frustrated. I’m so frustrated and not heard and disrespected. And that they’re not even aware of how disrespectful they are. And I’m their senior. I’m the one that’s actually overseeing this and getting them to do what they need to be doing.

And you’re just kind of astounded that these people are.

I’m blown away. Blown away by the fact that these people are so disrespectful that.

They don’t listen to you. They talk over you. You don’t feel heard and it’s you’re anxious about it.

I’m angry.

You’re really angry.

I’m really angry about it. It just makes me want to not do not do this job, get out so I mean.

You’re so angry you’ve about had it. Yeah. I mean if the Money wasn’t as good as it is then it wouldn’t be worth it. But it’s not even worth it. I mean like I toss and turn. My stomach it clenches. I have heartburn.

You have a lot of upset and Stress over this. A lot of Anxiety.

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Totally. Totally. Just these two people like every single meeting they do this. They pull this thing, and these people are just driving me nuts. It’s unbelievable.

And your anxiety level is through the roof.

Yeah.

And you don’t know what to do with yourself.

Yeah, yeah.

Pretty confused.

Yeah.

And no matter what you try to do, it doesn’t seem to work.

No, nothing. Nothing works. Whatever I do it makes it worse and nothing.

You’re feeling really deeply sabotaged and betrayed by these people.

Totally. Yes. Yeah.

Anything else?

I’ve taught affect labeling to thousands of people in organizations. And every single time I teach this skill, I am amazed at the transformations that occur.

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What Others Say About Affect Labeling

Here’s a sampling of some of the things that people say about this skill.

“My name is Wilton Caraway, Jr. I am the senior minister of the Whitney Avenue Church of Christ, and I consider myself a peacemaker. My biggest takeaway from what I learned from Doug and this program is connection and relationship. That just by listening to people you are connecting to the heart. And when you connect to the heart, you establish that relationship. And that relationship brings healing.”

“Doug was not bringing something that was a reworking of someone else’s work. It just seemed really original and it it wasn’t just some ideas that Doug came up with. The fact of of what I saw with his work with the prisons just thought “Okay, I need to talk to this guy because this is um seems rather revolutionary.”

“My name is Pegotty Cooper and I have been for for 12 years now I have been working with people who find themselves in high conflict situations and I myself have always been an extreme avoider of high conflict situations. I have found that I am now fearless in facing people who might confront me.”

“I’ve found myself very much more able to deal with just the things that come up in my life now that I have this skill set. I have better Relationships, better communication. I feel more calm, confident, and I think that that then ripples into everything that I do so in many ways. It’s really helped every aspect of my life because now if I’m upset, if I’m triggered, I can validate and affect label myself. If I’m with friends, family, colleagues and something happens, I can validate them. So it’s really improved I would say every area of my life.”

“The number of kids that I see on a daily basis in school and can bring them down to calm and to more peace and more problem-solving and then be able to return to their original classrooms and be more productive, it’s it’s life changing for them too.

“in the face of any sort of strife. We all feel really insecure and awkward and or most of us and uncomfortable and really unsafe. Learning the skill it’s so empowering because you can be more aware of how you’re feeling. Then you get to hold a safe space for someone else which then also really protects you. It really is a game-changer for making people feel safe.

“Me, I think it shook Lindsay, but I got to say that in this moment of survival, if we didn’t have your tools and we didn’t utilize affect labeling, there would have been a murder. She’d have killed me, or I’d have killed her.”

If you would like to learn more about affect labeling, schedule a 10-minute Zoom call with me here.

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Originally Published on https://dougnoll.com/

Doug Noll Author, Teacher, Visionary

Douglas E. Noll, JD, MA left a successful career as a trial lawyer to become a peacemaker. His calling is to serve humanity, and he executes his calling at many levels. He is an award-winning author, teacher, trainer, and a highly experienced mediator. Doug’s work carries him from international work to helping people resolve deep interpersonal and ideological conflicts to training life inmates to be peacemakers and mediators in maximum-security prisons. His website is https://dougnoll.com.