When Other People’s Crises End, Your Own Begins

During a police crisis negotiation, the negotiation team focuses its full attention on the person in crisis. The primary negotiator spends roughly eighty percent of the time listening and twenty percent speaking. They take in every word, every movement, and every emotion, gradually building rapport. This helps them influence the person and ultimately change their behavior. Then, after hours of communication, the person puts down the knife, climbs down from the roof, releases the hostages, or takes that one step towards safety. The equipment is packed away, the incident ends, and the negotiators hold a brief debriefing. Then they leave – sometimes to go home, but often to return to their regular duties, where they are expected to carry on as though they had merely been on a break.

What Remains After the Incident

But not everything stays on the scene. Some conversations – and above all, some emotions – follow us home. For a long time, I never really thought about what we call mental self-care. I don't have one precise routine that lets me “switch off” after a demanding situation. Over time, however, I have discovered several things that help me.

What Helps Me Process Emotions

I have a few colleagues I can talk to – people to whom I do not need to explain the context and in front of whom I do not have to pretend that everything was fine. They are people who listen actively. In essence, they do for me what I do for other people in crisis during a negotiation. Long walks in nature help me too. Sometimes I need the exact opposite of negotiation: silence and time to become aware of my emotions, so that I can name them and understand what is happening inside me – or whether anything is happening at all.

To help others, a person must first be in a good place themselves.

Learning and sharing experience also play an important role for me. When I lecture on crisis negotiation or crisis communication, it compels me to reflect on what I have experienced, why something worked, and what could have been done differently. I often receive a question from the audience that has never occurred to me yet proves highly important and helpful.

When Experience Takes on a Deeper Meaning

I see the projects I work on the same way. If the experience gained from one incident can be transformed into something that may one day help a colleague or someone in crisis, then what I went through takes on added meaning. This is also why I try to promote peer support within the Slovak Police Force. Not because a colleague should replace a psychologist – they should not. But there is a vast space between saying “I’m fine” and “I need professional help”. That's precisely where a trusted colleague can be extremely important.

Writing as Space for My Own Emotions

Recently, I have started doing one more thing. I write. I record certain situations, conversations, and, above all, the emotions that remained with me after a negotiation or crisis intervention. Not as police reports, but as the stories of someone briefly given the opportunity to step into the most difficult moment of another person’s life. Perhaps those notes will one day become a book. Perhaps they will remain just notes. But the act of writing itself helps give certain things a place and makes me aware of many of my own emotions.

Those Who Help Others Also Need Space for Themselves

During a negotiation, we try to create a psychological space for the person in crisis – a space in which they can speak, be heard, and gradually begin to think rationally again. I have come to understand that the person who creates such a space for others is not immune and needs one for themselves. Otherwise, they may find themselves in the very kind of crisis they so often help others through.

To help others, a person must first be in a good place themselves. If they are not, their effort to help can quietly turn into yet another complication. A negotiator who fails to protect their own psychological balance can become part of the very crisis they so often help to resolve.