Verbal abuse, bullying and harassment are personally devastating. This form of cruelty ravages lives and destroys relationships.

Worse, when verbal attacks are not addressed and then escalate, they lead to more emotional impact and, in many cases, physical harm. The fact is that almost all physical violence begins with a verbal confrontation.

And, if you pay attention to the news, you know that verbal attacks are a growing problem for our society.

However, for victims of such attacks (wheter it's you, your child or other family member), it isn’t a societal issue — it’s a personal.

If you're like most victims of verbal abuse, bullying or harassment, you are looking for answers — and, as you’ve probably discovered, there is no shortage of "experts" who want to help.

The problem that most of these folks are great at describing the problem and how serious it is. But, when it comes to offering advice, they don't have much to offer -- and the advice they do give is largely based on theories, not facts.

The reality is that we all know how serious the problem is and the last thing we need are a bunch of theories.

What's needed are SOLUTIONS -- practical and proven tactics that YOU can use -- RIGHT NOW -- to make verbal abuse, bullying, and harassment stop.

That’s why we decided to get involved with these destructive problems.

We’re the Vistelar Training Group and we’re recognized as one of the world’s leaders in verbal, physical, and situational self defense and safety. In 2009, to address the problems of verbal abuse, bullying and harassment, we developed a partnership with the Verbal Judo Institute to take their research over the last 27 years with professionals (eg., police, corrections, security) and apply it to day-to-day life.

The Verbal Judo Institute was founded in 1983 by Dr. George Thompson to research and develop training programs in an area of study he named “Tactical Communications.” In addition to being a university professor for over 10 years, he had been a police officer for five years — where he became acutely aware that almost all physical violence begins with verbal confrontation.

However, at the time, officers were not being trained in how to deal with such conflict. Despite the fact that these professionals were expected to use words to try to prevent verbal conflict from escalating to physical violence almost every day, all of their training focused on physical defense and the use of lethal and non-lethal weapons.

Dr. Thompson developed “Tactical Communications” to address this issue and, since 1983, the Verbal Judo Institute has trained more than one million professionals in its principles through a world-wide network of certified instructors in 7 countries. In addition, Dr. Thomson has published five books on this topic, with over 300,000 copies sold.

Verbal Judo has been proven to work with the most violent of criminals but its principles have not been broadly applied to everday life. That’s why we decided to join forces with this 27-year-old institute.

Since then we have jointly developed training programs that are being used all over the world to educate the general public in how to effectively deal with verbal abuse, bullying and harassment. We have programs for parents and their kids -- and for adults.

On this website, we encourage you to access our Free Verbal Defense Tips and to consider purchasing one of our Training Programs. We also have a unique technology in place where you can ask one of our experts a question via video, audio or text -- and, if your question is one on the ones we select, your question and our expert response will be posted on this site.

We look forward to interacting with you --- and hope we can help you live a life without verbal abuse, bullying or harassment.