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Areas › Anger › When anger turns to harm
Ideas about what really drives harm, or about a person being more than the worst thing they have done, are easily heard as excusing it or as blaming the listener. What makes them sayable is the credit built up beforehand: enough time of being useful and straight that the other person can assume you are not setting a trap. Waiting is not cowardice. It is what stops a good point being spent for nothing.
If anger in your home has become frightening for anyone, self help is not the right tool. Please reach for real help.
Tell My servants to say what is best. Satan sows discord among them (Quran 17:53). Saying the best thing includes when to say it, since a right word at the wrong moment does the work of a wrong one.
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.
An updated Campbell systematic review of court mandated interventions for domestic violence found the evidence for reduced reoffending is weak, which is sobering given how widely these are used. Attendance plainly is not the same thing as being persuaded. The review cannot tell you that the alliance is the missing ingredient, but it does argue against assuming someone is with you simply because they are in the room.
Wilson DB, Feder L, Olaghere A. (2021). Court-mandated interventions for individuals convicted of domestic violence: An updated Campbell systematic review.. Campbell systematic reviews doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
People can take a hard idea from someone they already trust, and from almost nobody else.
Ask whether the anger is really about this person at all, or whether it is contempt for a whole category of people that happens to have someone standing nearby.
See what you made me do to myself. When self-harm is carrying a message like that, naming the message is not dismissing it, it is looking for the thing that could be said instead.
The person you love and the person who frightened you are one person, and you are not obliged to decide which of them is the real one. Both were in the room.