Areas › Anger
Anger
Almost nobody wants to be the person who says the thing they cannot take back. The window between the surge and the words is short and it can be widened. That is most of what this area is about, along with the fear or hurt that anger is usually protecting.
Narrowed down
6 practicesTheme · What you are actually defending
How long you have · A minute
Approach
Respect comes from the Latin for looking, with the prefix meaning again. It is literally the second look, the head that turns as somebody important walks past.
Knowing that does something useful. A word that felt close to sacred turns into a plain social behaviour you can examine: who gets looked at twice,…
Disrespect is a paper tiger. It comes at you looking like something, and it has never once actually done you any damage.
Worth noticing what your body does anyway. The heart goes, the jaw sets, and you get ready as though something physical were about to happen. The…
When your thinking comes back online mid-argument, say so and offer a restart. I could feel myself getting defensive and this is not helping either of us, shall we try that again?
Most people escalate sometimes. The skill worth having is not never starting but knowing how to get out once you have. Naming it yourself gives the…
Anger and doubt cannot really occupy the same moment. Anger sharpens everything to a point, and a genuine maybe blunts it.
This is why an honest question does more than an argument. Not a challenge, which hardens things, but a real one: what if I have got part of this…
Your mind is always slightly behind what is happening. Reality moves and you are the response, which leaves you permanently a step late and permanently not quite sure.
Put that way, uncertainty is not a flaw in your thinking, it is the position you are standing in. You are flying into the next moment without having…
Not understanding what is happening frightens a person before it angers them. If you flare up when a situation is unclear, you are meeting something very old in yourself rather than a fault you invented.
Watch the order of it next time. First the blank, the not knowing what this means or where it is going, then a tightening in the chest or jaw, then…