" Your task, if you’re facing a person who’s running amok, is to break that lock. How? By talking the person up gradually from “I want to hurt someone” to “I’m terribly upset” to “I need to find a smart way to handle this.” These stages correlate with the three levels of the brain: the primitive reptile brain, the emotional mammal brain, and the logical human brain. To get an out-of-control person to act sanely, you need to move the person up gradually through all three levels in order. (Think of it as “rapid evolution.”) "

― Mark Goulston , Just Listen: Discover the Secret to Getting Through to Absolutely Anyone