What the return is for

The return is half the technique, and it is the half people drop.

The Qur'an does not stop at not retaliating. It describes repelling with what is better, and the outcome it names is a changed relationship rather than a point scored. That is the shape of a return: you come back and you do the better thing, which is usually much smaller and much duller than it sounds. You finish the conversation. You say the thing you actually meant. You apologise for the volume without attaching a but to it.

Read the verse straight after it too, because it protects you from a conclusion. It says plainly that only the steadfast reach this. If a return is hard, and it usually is, that is the verse's own expectation of it and not information about you.

And the report says the opposite of what a return feels like from the inside. Forgiving does not lower you, and neither does making yourself small for the sake of Allah. It names the two acts a return actually consists of, and it says what each of them does.