This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantan.

For 31 years, Beth Nichols has worked at a homeless shelter in Chicago.

This story takes place probably about 25 years ago.

In all those years of work, she's witnessed incredible displays of compassion and intense moments of conflict.

One day, Beth was in the shelter kitchen making lunch.

She could hear people laughing and talking in the dining room.

Then the tone changed.

And two mothers were at two separate tables and they were angry about something that had gone on

among their children. They began shouting at each other.

Beth rushed into the dining room.

The women got closer and closer together and circumstances got more and more loud and

verbally things became more and more threatening.

Nothing I was doing was working and I felt that we had reached a point where I was not even

present in their minds. Like it was just the two of them.

And as they were just inches from coming to blows,

I had a washcloth in my hand from the kitchen and there was not a moment of premeditating

this at all. I threw the washcloth up in the air and yelled, go for it!

And they dropped their arms and they turned and stared at me with their mouths open.

And everybody in the dining room was like, what?

And it worked.

By suggesting that she was flagging the start of a race, Beth turned a tense moment

into a joke. Yeah, but it actually was effective strangely enough.

...