As we thought about crisis color, we were focusing on the mood, tone, or affect of the individual in crisis.  The color then, is his overall or predominant emotional tone or state.  As we talk about communication feeling, it will be important to keep this understanding of crisis color in mind.

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Crisis communication is based on faith in people.  The belief and assumption that people can understand and think about their problems are fundamental values underlying this social interaction model for crisis communication.  Our goal is to minimize the effect of intense emotion and confusion and to maximize the rational, thinking, planning ability of the individual.  We gradually get him to focus on his crisis, understand the precipitating event, develop a picture of his situation, see his problems in a manageable perspective, and think about possible ways of coping with those problems.  Crisis intervention is a supportive, enabling process that helps and encourages the individual to calm down, think things through, and plan ahead.

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Once we are sure that the individual has not neglected any important responsibilities or overlooked some important undesirable consequences of the present situation, we will help him think through possible ways of dealing with his present crisis.  With him, we have come to an understanding of what happened and of what is happening.  Now we will help him focus on what is likely to happen.  We are now beginning to make our planning skills available to him.  As he gradually begins to calm down, settle down, think things through, and plan ahead, we are nearing the end of the crisis intervention process.  The now potential is substantially reduced and the self-resolution factor is rapidly increasing.  Within the communication loop, we have effectively combined crisis color with crisis content and moved toward the goal of crisis reduction.

Ivan, age sixteen, has been telling us about a fairly complicated crisis.  He was initially very upset and felt as if everything was hopeless.  Using our understanding of communication color, we are able to get him to calm down and explain what happened.  In the last few days, things had gone from bad to worse.  He had a big fight with his girl friend, accusing her of being too friendly with another boy at school.  After thinking about it, he came to the conclusion that she is a vivacious, friendly young girl and that he is jealous of any attention she pays to other boys.  He sees that he had probably overreacted and that the fight was mostly his fault.  The problem is that she is not speaking to him now.  In addition, he flunked his English exam.  He blew up when the teacher handed him back his test paper, and she sent him down to the office.  The principal had really raked him over the coals for his belligerent attitude toward the teacher and had called his parents.  That started things at home, and he got into a huge argument with his father.  The result was that his father grounded him for a month, which means that he will not be able to go to his job after school and will not get paid next Friday.  He knows that his girl friend wants to go to the school dance next Saturday evening, but since he is not going to get paid, he will not have enough money to take her.  If all this were not enough, he stormed out of the house after the argument with his father, jumped into his car, tore out of the driveway, and ruined the transmission.  There’s no money to get that fixed, and he can’t use the car, anyway, since he is grounded.  The final straw came today when his mother learned from the mother of his best friend that Ivan had smoked some marijuana at a party two or three weeks ago.  Now she is down on him, threatening to take him to juvenile court.  It is all too much.  He feels like just taking off. …

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How do we help an individual in crisis deal with the content of that crisis?  We gently encourage him to become involved with us in the assessment set.  First, we want to think with them about the precipitating event and what happened.  We know that the conflict is in the interaction and that the precipitating event disrupted the interaction between the individual and his situation.  We also know that the precipitating event occurred fairly recently.  It may be true that the conflict has been going on for a long time.  But the crisis was precipitated by a fairly recent event, a worsening of the conflict, some exacerbation of the difficulty in the interaction.

Frequently, people in crisis will not be particularly receptive to this notion.  They will want to blame themselves, see the cause as originating in the past, or, more often than one might think, try to convince us that the crisis has no cause.

Harold says, My relationships with my family, friends, fellow workers, and so on, are fine.  They are all wonderful people.  Don’t try to blame them for this.  I really haven’t done anything, either.  Nothing has happened.  This just came over me, and there is no reason for it.

Our understanding of crisis and of the crisis intervention process lets us know that crises always have a precipitating event.  In crisis communication then, we gently but persistently encourage the individual to think about himself, his situation, and the interaction between him and his situation until we both can see what caused the crisis.  Usually, discovering and understanding the precipitating event is not particularly difficult.  Sometimes though, we must be very patient and skillful to get to where both of us understand what happened. …

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In crisis communication, we want to be as helpful to the individual as our knowledge and skills let us, and we can do more than merely filter the individual’s crisis color through our blue screen.

In crisis communication, an important part of our goal is to make our skills and abilities available to the individual.  We have made our mood or tone available to him in a way that helps him calm down and plan ahead.  In the same way, we can make our skills and knowledge available to him in terms of thinking, questioning, considering, and planning.  For example, people caught up in the emotions of crisis are usually trying to think about and concentrate on what to do about the situation.  Their thoughts and ideas about what to do are generally motivated by a very emotional and somewhat confused notion of what happened.  When we ask them What happened?  we are asking them to think more clearly and objectively about what caused them to be so upset or confused.  The question, What happened? gently encourages them to begin to think about this situation in a more reasoning and systematic way.  If they were not so upset, they would probably be figuring out what happened themselves instead of using all their energies thinking about what they are going to do.  Our questions, interest, and calm concern gradually nudge them to use their own thinking and planning skills.  They start out by using our questions, our way of systematically looking at their situations, and our skills at thinking through problems.  Our skills and knowledge are available to them, and they use these as a means of getting in touch with their own skills and knowledge. Basically, we become a part of their communication process, asking questions, giving focus to problems, helping them to be more systematic.

We have all had conversations with someone who goes into great detail as he talks.  He wants, for example, to tell us that he is unable to keep a date he has with us.  The short version of his story is that something unexpected came up.  He calls up to cancel our meeting.  The conversation starts: I got a call yesterday from my mother.  She hasn’t been feeling well.  It probably is a recurrence of an old back injury she received in an automobile accident several years ago.  She was driving her car past a school, when a school bus backed out into her lane of traffic.  Fifteen minutes later, and after having completely exhausted our patience, he tells us that his mother has a doctor’s appointment, and he has to take her.  That is why he will not be able to meet with us. …

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In human services, there is an adage that directs us to work with the individual in an effort to maximize his strengths and minimize his weaknesses.  In crisis situations, anger, fear, confusion, apprehension, depression, despair, and so forth are interpreted as temporary weaknesses.  They have welled up in the individual, temporarily overpowering his reasoning, thinking, and planning strengths.  Our faith in people leads us to the belief that no matter how upset and overwhelmed the individual feels he has more than enough strength within him to cope with his situation.  Understanding and using communication color leads to reducing and minimizing the temporarily disabling effect of crisis color.  Understanding and focusing on communication content directly enhances the individual’s capacity to deal with his world.

Mrs. M, age twenty-nine has eight children.  The oldest child is fourteen, and the youngest is seven months.  Six of the children are normal and have no particular physical, emotional, social, or adjustment difficulties.  Her twelve-year old however, has a chronic kidney disease, requires regular medical treatment, and has to have her activities carefully supervised and regulated.  The seven-year-old is in the second grade, is mildly retarded, and has been diagnosed as a hyperactive child.  Mrs. M deals quite well with the mild retardation, but to her, the hyperactivity roughly translates into a walking disaster.  The little boy has an extremely short attention span, cannot sit still, is always into everything, seems unable to follow directions or accept limits, still wets the bed and occasionally messes himself during the day, and seems to require more time and attention than all of the other children put together. …

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Once we understand the color in crisis and that our mood or affect is an important dimension of crisis communication, we can begin to consider crisis content.  People not trained in crisis intervention generally focus more or less exclusively on the content when talking with an individual in crisis.  As our understanding of crisis color suggests, the mood or tone of the individual in crisis is at least as critical as, and perhaps even more critical than, the specifics of what happened and what is happening.  If we look at any of the examples of crisis in the text, we can see that a calm, rational, planning person would be able to understand and deal with the situation.  The critical aspect of the situation comes primarily in terms of the individual’s mood or color.  It is his anger, fear, anxiety, apprehension, extreme depression, and so on that elevates the now potential and works against his dealing with the situation himself.  It is the blue of crisis communication that directly responds to the most critical part of the crisis, that is, the individual’s being so upset or agitated that he is unable to calm down, slow down, and plan ahead.

At first glance, it may seem naïve to suggest that most crises can successfully be reduced by the simple technique of controlling your mood, or affect, as you respond to the individual in crisis. If you can consistently respond in purposeful shades of blue, assuming that your verbal comments are relatively neutral and innocuous, you will usually need to do nothing more than filter the individual’s communication through your blue screen.  If you continue this process patiently, caringly, and persistently, the crisis will pass.  With further thought and experience with people in crisis though, you will see that the intensity of the individual’s emotional state, his crisis color, is what is really keeping him from dealing with the situation himself.  Filtering and modifying those emotions then, is the main thing we have to do to reduce the crisis.  If you can stay calm, keep your cool, and avoid verbally or emotionally attacking the individual or pushing him away, he will respond positively. …

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Crises come in red, yellow, and black.  Crisis intervention is always in carefully and caringly controlled shades of blue.  In any crisis, the individual has a predominating mood or tone.  This mood is typically anger (red); anxiety, fear, and an extreme feeling of discomfort (yellow); or depression, despair, a sense of hopelessness and futility (black).  In crisis situations, the individual frequently vacillates, presenting a mix of moods or dispositions.  Whether the individual mood or tone stays fairly constant or tends to fluctuate, the intervention response should be calm and not feed into or exacerbate the individual’s intense crisis mood.  A blue intervention response will tend to help the individual calm down, develop an increased perspective, think more clearly, and plan ahead.  The mood or tone conveyed by crisis intervention workers may be communicated through the tone of their voice, their individual speech patterns, whether they talk rapidly or slowly, and through the words they use to express their ideas and thoughts.  We must start where the individual in crisis is, and this involves recognizing, understanding, and acknowledging his crisis color; gradually and gently urging him to focus on his situation; gradually filtering or absorbing the intense emotions within the crisis; and moving toward consideration of possible solutions.

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As we begin to understand the significance and meaning of color in crisis, we will see that our mood or color is an extremely important dimension of crisis communication.  We are familiar with such expressions as The life of the party,  Laughter is contagious, and others suggesting that our mood has the power to affect or infect.  People in crisis may cause us to feel angry, anxious, depressed, indifferent, and so on, affecting our mood by the power of their own.  The converse is also true.  Our mood or tone has the power to affect or influence the mood of the individual in crisis.  For example, if we respond to anger with anger, the person in crisis will tend to become even more angry.  If we respond to anxiety and fear by becoming anxious and fearful, the person will tend to become even more anxious and afraid.  If we respond to the immobilized mood of a black crisis by becoming emotionally immobilized ourselves, it will have the effect of making the black crisis even more black, to whatever extent that is possible.

Our mood or color is then, an important dimension of the crisis intervention process and is an important aspect of crisis communication.  If we know that anger begets anger, it is important for us to respond to a yellow crisis in a concerned but thoughtful manner.  If we know that depression begets depression, then it is important to respond to a black crisis in a friendly, interested, somewhat happy way.  Since we know the kinds of mood or tone that tend to exacerbate or irritate various kinds of crisis situations, it is important for us intentionally to avoid making matters worse.  We do this by consciously and caringly controlling our mood or color in a way that has the best and most desirable effect on the person in crisis.

Our response to a crisis should always be in shades of blue, that is, we always want to convey a mood of calmness; a sense of control; a feeling that we understand, care, and will be able to help the individual resolve his crisis.  Our response to crisis is never yellow.  There is a rule worth remembering: In crisis situations, there is room for only one person to be anxious or afraid—and that person is not you.  Your mood is blue; it is calm and calming.  As the individual’s anxiety, fear, apprehension, and confusion in his yellow crisis is filtered through your blue screen, the individual will calm down, slow down, and begin to think more clearly and plan ahead.  Similarly, your color is never red.  Anger pushes people away, makes them more agitated.  A quiet blue from you will gradually slow down and calm down the individual’s anger.  By adopting a blue mood, you can gradually absorb and refocus the individual’s anger and frustration.  It is unlikely that an individual will strike out at someone or something if you quietly and caringly let him get out his anger and indignation.  Blue takes the red out of crisis. …

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As you acquire experience with people in crisis and with crisis situations, you will realize that crisis may be, and usually is, a mix of red, yellow, and black.  It is important to see that crisis color refers to the mood or affect of the individual in crisis.  As we talk with him, we usually see that his mood tends to fluctuate.  Occasionally, we will see an individual who starts out very angry—who is in a red crisis.  As we talk with him, his anger gradually softens and becomes less intense, but his mood or the color of his crisis never appears to be yellow or black.  Similarly, we may occasionally see a person experiencing a yellow crisis, and as we work with him, he is gradually able to calm down, become less anxious, and generally think more clearly.  Throughout this process however, we may not see his mood turn to anger or his crisis turn black.  In addition, a person in a black crisis may gradually become more animated and involved in his surroundings without reflecting any red or yellow dimensions to his crisis.  More typically however, crises fluctuate between red and yellow, and less frequently between red, yellow, and black.  The important thing in crisis communication is for us to understand and tune in to the mood or color of the crisis but remain sensitive and responsive to shifts in color or mood.

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