Youths curb their violent urges by learning to CHILL

CHICAGO teen Lauryn Hill spent her high school career steeped in the lessons of violence and loss. One friend was shot 22 times. Another died at a vigil when someone sprayed bullets at the crowd of mourners.

Many of her peers at Percy L Julian High School on the South Side also are reeling from losing friends and family to Chicago’s increasing street violence – there were 762 murders last year, the highest number since the 1990s.

Now, community leaders are combining the neuroscientific research from Yale University and relationship research from the Gottmann Institute to help solve the problem. Hill recently joined hundreds of teens from the South and West sides of Chicago for training on how to prevent violent conflicts by tuning in to what happens in their bodies when they become angry.

Then the young adult trainers in the programme, known as CHILL, show them how to de-escalate the conflict and walk away. The group gathered at Malcolm X College and watched people act out various scenarios and decide how best to respond.

The first performer insulted his buddy’s sneakers. The two role-players began snarling at each other. But then one pulled back, took a breath and lowered his voice. His friend, who had been mirroring his aggression, slowed down too.

In the next scene, three CHILL trainers role-played an on-edge cop, a nervous driver and a voice inside the driver’s head. As the driver got agitated, spilling her purse and reaching towards the floor, the young man playing the cop went ballistic, thinking she was going for a gun.

Hill says watching one situation go from potentially dangerous to calm and then being asked to analyse the next one was eye-opening.

“They gave us scenarios that they know we go through now as teenagers, especially living in Chicago where there are always a lot of high-pressure situations,” said Hill.

“When you’re outside like that, looking in on the situation, it helps you to see that what they’re fighting over is really unnecessary.”

Conflict-resolution specialist and South Side resident Andra Medea designed CHILL last year in consultation with leaders of the South Side chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. It is informed by the neurobiology research of Amy Arnsten, a professor of neuroscience at Yale, and by the relationship research of the Gottman Institute.

CHILL is also inspired by research from the institute on marriage conflicts, which found that in relationships that turned violent, the couples whose prefrontal cortexes (the brain’s centre for higher thought and reasoning) shut down – called “flooding” – at the same time suffered the most.

The institute found that when the couples were offered self-soothing training, they were able to counter the effects of adrenaline flooding, and their relationships improved.

Trainer Jonathan Jackson, 20, said initially he was hesitant about teaching CHILL, but now he de-escalates others all the time. “I started using it on my family and friends. I use non-sequiturs on them and brainteasers – little distracting questions you can throw at people (when they’re flooding).

Medea emphasises the training may not instantly result in better choices. The first time they’re in an altercation post-training, they might still throw a punch. But “the third or fourth time you’ll stop yourself because you’ll realise you never got what you wanted those previous times.” – The Washington Post

They gave us scenarios we go through as teenagers