Anchoring in Terror

She doesn’t know it, but Antoinette Tuff was my teacher today.

This video is worth 16 minutes of your life.

Antoinette prevented a massive, highly dangerous man from another epic disastrously awful school shooting in Georgia yesterday. Not by pinning the man down, or calling the police, or shooting him.

She cared for him.  She had compassion for him.  She recognized he was a hurting person, not unlike herself.

She shared her story.

She supported and encouraged him.

She gave him a drink of water…literally and figuratively.

She made sure he was safe, as she told him she would.

And she did that by first taking care of herself.  She remembered her pastor teaching her about “anchoring” herself as a person is in a troubled situation. She grounded herself in Truth in a highly terrifying situation that allowed her to be fully present in a way that turned that situation around.

Antoinette anchored herself and extended compassion in one of the most frightening scenarios in North America…with a highly armed man in a school office with children down the hall.

I think Antoinette’s anchoring shows how grounding is effective. Profoundly effective.  As she was able to remember what was real and what wasn’t real, she could lower her heart rate, calm  her breathing…and be better able to do and say what she needed to, to defuse an incredibly tense situation.

And he responded.  And softened. And gave himself up peaceably.

He had a back story that was hard and difficult…and Antoinette instinctively knew it, and waited for it, and encouraged him to talk about it.

Ana Marquez-Greene is a victim of the school shooting in Connecticut eight months ago.  Her parents are advocates of changing policy and culture so that this doesn’t reoccur.  Their most common mantra that they hang their hats on:

Yesterday, in Decatur, Georgia, love won.