Loading practices
Loading practices
Areas › Anger › Choosing your response
It runs in both directions. When you push your own volume up to make a point land, what arrives at the other person is an attack, and they answer the attack rather than the point. If you notice the sound level climbing on either side, say so plainly and bring yours down first.
Tell My servants to say what is best. Satan sows discord among them (Quran 17:53). Discord often begins in how something sounded rather than in what was meant by it.
الإسراء
وَقُل لِّعِبَادِي يَقُولُواْ ٱلَّتِي هِيَ أَحۡسَنُۚ إِنَّ ٱلشَّيۡطَٰنَ يَنزَغُ بَيۡنَهُمۡۚ إِنَّ ٱلشَّيۡطَٰنَ كَانَ لِلۡإِنسَٰنِ عَدُوࣰّ ا مُّبِينࣰ ا
[Prophet], tell My servants to say what is best. Satan sows discord among them: Satan is a sworn enemy of man
Qur’an 17:53read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
Pooled neuroimaging studies show that deliberately reinterpreting an emotional situation draws on frontal and parietal control regions and lowers activity in the amygdala. Re-reading loudness as urgency instead of attack is that kind of reinterpretation, and it shows up in the brain rather than being merely a nice idea. These were controlled tasks rather than family arguments, so take it as the mechanism and not a promise.
Buhle JT, Silvers JA, Wager TD, Lopez R, Onyemekwu C, Kober H, Weber J, Ochsner KN. (2014). Cognitive reappraisal of emotion: a meta-analysis of human neuroimaging studies.. Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Loudness gets read as intent, so lowering it takes away a threat that was never being sent.
Once you are already alight, reasoning with yourself will not reach it. Clever thinking is a tool for before, not for during.
No medicine installs a skill. Staying steady when you are provoked is closer to a language you practise than to something anyone can prescribe you.
A new response cannot be laid on top of a cycle that is still turning. Break the circle first, even clumsily, and the room for something else appears.