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Areas › Anger › Practising under provocation
Telling yourself not to get angry leaves a hole where the old plan used to be, and under pressure people reach for the old plan. So give the hole something to hold. A line you are willing to say, a way of ending the conversation that is not a slammed door, an intention to be the one who stayed reasonable. Winning feels good for about a minute and then costs you the rest of the evening.
Do not quarrel with one another, or you may lose heart and your spirit may desert you (Quran 8:46). Quarrelling is described as draining rather than strengthening, even when you are the one winning.
الأنفال
وَأَطِيعُواْ ٱللَّهَ وَرَسُولَهُۥ وَلَا تَنَٰزَعُواْ فَتَفۡشَلُواْ وَتَذۡهَبَ رِيحُكُمۡۖ وَٱصۡبِرُوٓاْۚ إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ مَعَ ٱلصَّٰبِرِينَ
Obey God and His Messenger, and do not quarrel with one another, or you may lose heart and your spirit may desert you. Be steadfast: God is with the steadfast
Qur’an 8:46read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
In a randomised trial, skills training helped people turn anger into assertion rather than attack, and that shift was what accounted for the benefit they got. So the useful move looks like giving the anger somewhere else to go. It was tested in a clinical group learning a structured set of skills, so it says little about how quickly this arrives on your own.
Kramer U, Pascual-Leone A, Berthoud L, de Roten Y, Marquet P, Kolly S, Despland JN, Page D. (2016). Assertive Anger Mediates Effects of Dialectical Behaviour-informed Skills Training for Borderline Personality Disorder: A Randomized Controlled Trial.. Clinical psychology & psychotherapy doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
A replacement you have chosen is easier to reach for than a rule telling you to stop.
Before anyone does something exposing, let them check their own conditions and give them a clean way to say no. A public yes given under pressure is not really a yes.
Your body treats an insult with the same urgency as a threat to your safety, and the two are not the same at all. Saying that to yourself plainly, while it is happening, takes some of the false emergency out of it.
Be careful with the language about growing a thicker skin. Before anyone is asked to mind less, someone has to check that what they are minding really is only a slight.