THE NATURE OF EDGEWORK TRAINING
Thank you very much for visiting this website. We welcome an opportunity to work with your staff to increase not only their sense of safety, but their ability to manifest ‘Grace Under Fire:’ ready for the worst while presenting their best. Most participants find our training full of laughter and surprise: focused adamantly on safety for all concerned, clinically sound, yet entertaining at the same time.
Other sections of this website will describe the specific training seminars that we offer. Here we would like to describe what makes Edgework training unique, and help you determine if it right for your agency. (NOTE: Please also read the page on Edgework Books, to understand how vital all Edgework Certified Trainers (ECT) believe Ellis Amdur’s books to be as a component for training. Through the use of these books, members of your agency are empowered to continuously increase their skills. Purchase is not required to set up an Edgework training, but we cannot emphasize strongly enough how they enhance your employees’ skills, years after the training has occurred.)
Edgework training could be termed a ‘dynamic interactive classroom.’ We attempt to provide a tremendous amount of useable information in a very short period of time. We do this by presenting the information in as energetic and colorful way as we can. The imagery we use is memorable, and our role playing can be physically quite dramatic. We recount episodes from our own careers, in particular our mistakes, so that people can laugh and learn at the same time. We’ve met people ten years after a training who remember a story one of us told that transformed the way they did their own work. (Please see the page Praise for Edgework for attendees’ perspective on this method).
Why do we teach this way? In crisis intervention, you only have a brief moment to Assess, Decide and Act. People manifest many types of aggression, and many more types of emotionally disturbed behaviors (irrespective of cause, by the way – crisis intervention is based on behavior not diagnosis or a root cause). This is only possible is you are able to instantaneously recognize a mode of aggression or type of behavior, so that you can apply the best tactical intervention. Each type of behavior that people exhibit must be associated with a best-practice tactic that offered the optimum chance of ensuring safety for everyone involved. We want people to be able to recognize what type of danger they are facing, so that they are never caught unawares and victimized by predators, bullies or desperately ill and disordered individuals, each of whom manifests aggression in a different way. You must know each of these styles well, so that you can immediately enact the de-escalation tactic that best ensures everyone’s safety.
A central part of Edgework is ‘control of self,’ specifically learning how to manage one’s own reactions so that one’s ‘buttons’ aren’t pushed. We teach specific breathing methods to achieve an emotional balance similar to that of a tightrope walker or skateboarder, a dynamic calm where you are relaxed, yet prepared for anything. We also teach how to become aware of your ‘hot buttons,’ the things that throw us off balance and make us lose control of our own thoughts, behavior, and boundaries. If your hot button is pushed – for example, someone insults your mother, derides your appearance, says a nasty obscenity, or a sexist or racist slur – you must have the skill to calmly push that button back to the ‘off position,’ so you can do your job with both compassion and strength. If you are able to maintain such calm, you will neither act like a victim, overwhelmed with emotion and open to attack, nor a combatant, escalating the problem as you ‘argue back’ in reaction to what the other person said or did. You will also be able to differentiate between the genuinely malevolent and those who were uncouth, unconscious or unaware at that moment.
We consider it a moral responsibility for anyone serving the public to master themselves. To succeed in any ‘edge’ profession, be you social worker correctional officer, human resources manager or police, you must be the ‘eye of the hurricane,’ compelling the chaos to revolve around your calm center. We all have hot buttons – each of us certainly does – but the art of the work we do is to roll with the punches, be they emotional or physical: not counter-attack or crumple because we allow ourselves to become emotionally off-center.
The possibility of being a victim of aggression or even violence is frightening to all of us. Any safety training is thus, inherently ‘unsafe,’ due to its subject matter (of course, on ethical grounds, it is never gratuitously so). If we do not achieve the ability to clearly differentiate the nature of aggressive behavior, which may range from the quite amusement of a sociopathic criminal, the thuggish brutality of the bully, to the berserk chaos of an individual in excited delirium, we will not be safe when it really matters.
On the other hand, an information rich, high-energy training that frequently rolls with laugher and surprise, enables one to consider this subject with a spacious attitude: that within us, we have the resources to handle the worst that may occur. Interestingly, violence is then less likely to to come our way, because joyous, emotionally powerful people are far less often targets of potentially aggressive people.