Let's talk about retaliation. As pretty much everyone knows if you stand up to a bully or harasser, you're almost assuredly going to experience retaliation. Right. This is why, as much as we are told to report, we don't. We know if we report our situation a isn't likely to improve and be reporting is probably going to make things worse for us. Now, the good news is that not only is retaliation predictable, we know why it happens and what it takes to get it to stop.

The bad news is that it's not easy to stop. It turns out that retaliation is actually part of what's called a behavioral extinction process. Now, what do I mean by that? We have learned from various behavioral studies that unlearning behavior follows a very predictable pattern and I'm not going to cite the research for it here. If you want to learn about Behavioral extension, go to Google Scholar type in behavioral extinction, you'll come up with like, hundreds of thousands of articles dating back to the 30s. All right.

What we've learned from all that research is that the process of behavioral extinction is the same. Whether you are extinguishing a smoking behavior or getting a dog to start running, it really doesn't matter what animal it is, it really doesn't matter what the behavior it is, you are stopping the process to get it to stop follows this pattern period. All right. The first thing that happens is you will eliminate the reward for the behavior. This triggers what's called an extinction burst, which is an escalation of the behavior which people being harassed experiences retaliation, because it's an escalation of the behavior, retaliation. You continue to not reward the unwanted behavior.

That's the hard part. And eventually, if the reward does not come back The animal blows out and the behavior stops, it's extinguished. All unlearning follows this pattern, all of it, no matter who it is what's being unlearned, it follows this pattern, right reward is removed, behavior escalates, reward continues to not show up. Eventually it goes away altogether. And in case you're wondering, you do this too. You really do.

To better understand what is happening, and why escalation, retaliation is beyond the control of the person you've asked to stop. Let's consider how hard it is to break a habit. Let's say there's a vending machine in your office and every day, at three o'clock you go down to the vending machine, you put in your money, you push the little buttons and outcomes. I like Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. All right, there goes my Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. And one day I go down and I put in my money and I punched the little buttons and nothing happens like nothing.

It doesn't even go We're good. Provided nothing happens, right? What do you do? Well, pretty much everybody tries to get that candy bar or chips or whatever your favorite thing is, we will push more buttons we will try to shake machine will try to shake our thing loose. We might try to reach our hand up inside the machine to try and reach for it. What we won't do is look at it and go, Oh, it's broken and walk away.

No one looks at a broken machine vending machine and walks away. It doesn't matter how futile we know our behavior is because the machine is broken. We still try to make it work. Right? That's what the extinction processes everybody does. It happens every single time in every animal and you are not a not an exception.

All right. Now how bad you behave, how aggressive you get to this broken vending machine depends entirely on how bad your habit is. Think how badly do you need that candy bar? how long you've been in this habit? And what your natural level of aggression is some people are more aggressive than others. Some people give up quicker than other people do.

And that's not a bad thing. That's just part of our differences as humans. Now, this escalation of behavior, the working really hard to get the reward back. Is the extinction burst in harassment and retaliation, this escalation of behavior and attempt to get the reward back we call retaliation. All right. Now retaliation occurs because harassment is bullying and bullying is all about control.

Right? And people don't give up control very easily, and they certainly don't give it up without fighting. Now, just like people don't give up their vending machine treat without a fight. People don't Give up the control over they have another person through bullying without a fight either. Long story short, if you're going to eliminate harassment, you have to control the retaliation dynamic, which is actually the extinction process itself. And there's only one protocol that works to do this.

Right. And we've had 70 years of research on this, there's only one process that seems to work to make this happen. Right. And if you deviate from this protocol, you will not only fail to eliminate the harassment, you're also going to make things worse for yourself. And I'm going to explain why. Right?

Like I said, this can be done but it's very, very hard to do because there's, you really have to stick to this program to make it work straight from it and you're gonna fail.