PrepperPsych 101: Five Lessons from Experience -Time and Decision in a Crisis

It was a dark and stormy night.  Some loser drunk had collided with a power pole and left its debris in the road.  Salty and I hit  at highway speed a cable that was stretched across the road.  The front of our car collapsed toward our faces as a 15 foot long chunk of telephone pole whipped around like the weight at the end of a bolo and slammed into my door. The cable cut through the headlights & parking lights, radiator and battery, spewing steaming hot fluid everywhere… the hood of the car was peeled back and the force of the 55 MPH wind slammed it half way through the windshield, completely shattering the safety glass. We were rolling down an unknown highway, after midnight, on a curve at highway speeds, the sparks from the cables we were dragging the only illumination in the pitch dark night…

Our little car only Wished it looked this good after meeting the telephone pole and cable. Thanks Karrmann* for the image.

Some responses are instinctive and unavoidable.

I screamed like a wounded rabbit.  That high pitched scream was entirely unhelpful but also entirely unavoidable.  It was instinctive, so automatic that it took me a second to realize that sound was coming from me.  Many other animals do the same thing; emit a loud (usually high-pitched) call when grabbed.  In frogs, it’s called the ‘death croak reflex’. It does the possessor no good, but it warns other members of the community that trouble is on the loose.

Even for immediate responses, ingrained training matters.

As I screamed, I just as quickly pulled arms and legs in close to my body.  As sparks flew up in a sheet between the crumpled hood and the crumpled windshield (now inches from my face), the barest flickers of thought flitted across my consciousness: “Hot wire!” and “Don’t touch!”  Without consciously considering what to do about those thoughts, I’d pulled arms and legs in to not ground myself against the metal of the car.  I held that position until the car was stopped, I realized why I was curled up like a basketball, and reasoned that touching the car would be ok as I still wasn’t grounded.

There was no time there for deep thought before acting.  The basic pattern (Don’t touch!) had to be a conditioned response.  It was for me, as at the time I was working in a lab using equipment with serious power use that would kill you if you got careless; I’d spent significant mental effort not being careless with it.  (The dying option was motivational.) . Salty told me later he didn’t have the same thought; his was about “Keep the car out of oncoming traffic”…also a conditioned response.

The key here?  If you want to react in a particular way to a situation, train that reaction.  It can make a difference even when there’s only milliseconds in which to choose a response.

You can do a lot of thinking in a second or two, and most crises give you that long.  Use them.

Salty was helping the camper slide off the truck bed as I pulled the truck forward.  As the weight came down on the leg of the camper, bolts gave way and the leg crumpled.  There’s Salty, holding up one corner of this behemoth, calling for bracing.  As I jumped from the truck, my first urge was to holler at him to back out from under … but he didn’t need advice, he needed help.  Are those blocks strong enough? Yes.  Ground hard enough to support underneath them? Yes.  Can I get them placed without being crushed if the camper comes down? If I come from the front.  Do it.  Salty (insert cheer here for Big Strong .Man!) is able to back out without risking having a camper in his lap.

The point here was that the crisis was so immediate, at first I didn’t think there was any time at all for thought.  Turns out thought’s pretty fast though. You can do a lot of it in a second or two. I’m trying to plant a seed here to make you aware that you usually can spare that second, and that bit of thought can make the situation so much better; so don’t be rushed away from that precious second.

Emotion is not the best decision maker for rational problems.

I’d had cancer before.  When the doc told me I had a new one and asked what I wanted to do about it, “Get it Out!” was out of my mouth before my brain could was even done wrapping around the problem.  He started to nod, but then I took a deep breath, admitted to him that was revulsion not my best decision making strategy, and asked him to talk me through options and probabilities.  We ended up with a much better plan, just as safe without him having to dig around in my bleedy parts.

My emotional responses didn’t know much about modern cancer treatment.  They knew ‘Cancer bad.  Don’t want it in me.”  (All of me is with you there, Emotional Spice!) . This was was a problem where logic made a big difference, so it was important to take those deep breaths, which help chill out the stress response, and pull logic into the discussion.

Emotion can be a good decision maker for emotional problems.

A tale of three doctors; two caring and helpful and one just plain evil. Logic couldn’t tell the difference, but emotion did.

The surgeon had told me there were two oncologists available in town, so if I didn’t like the first one (randomly chosen), let him know and he’d set me up with the other.  I went for the consult with the first guy … and it was horrifying.  It wasn’t so much what he said; it was that he didn’t seem to care about me (or the other sad souls in his office) and the atmosphere in the clinic was of hopeless depression.  I wasn’t going to make a switch (maybe all oncology places were like that?) but Salty urged me to talk to the surgeon again.

Salty was So right.  The next doctor and clinic were a world apart in atmosphere, full of determined energy and hope, and it was clear this doc was going to share everything he knew then respect my choices.  I stayed at the second place and have lived to tell the tale.

The first oncologist?  He’s in the Big House now, imprisoned for the felony crime of diluting the chemotherapy drugs and keeping the money paid for the full doses.  Evil sometimes wears a white coat.

My first approach had been to stick to logic; I’m wired that way.  But it wasn’t a problem suited to logic.  Our emotional selves are very well tuned to pick up subliminal cues about the people we interact with, and my emotional self had been horrified by the evil doc. I am lucky that my logical and emotional selves agreed in trusting the advice of Salty and my surgeon.  

The trick, then, is to figure out which decisions are impacted by things our emotional selves don’t know about (like details of medical treatment) and which decisions are most impacted by features we are suited to have good ‘gut instincts’ about (such as the motivations of people we deal with).  Then we listen to emotion when it’s most likely to be right, but lean on logic when it’s got better information.  One of those two things is likely to be hard for you, but which one varies by person.  

*By Karrmann (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons