Areas › Anger › When anger turns to harm
Working out what someone meant by hurting another person is a conversation for the person who did it. Said to the one who was harmed, they were not really trying to hurt you lands as being talked out of your own experience.
Anyone who has been on the receiving end of violence has usually spent a long time being told it was not what it was. Even a kindly meant explanation can sound like one more voice on that side, and people walk out over it. If a question about motive genuinely matters for their safety planning, ask what they noticed and what they expect next, rather than telling them what it all meant.
If anger in your home has become frightening for anyone, self help is not the right tool. Please reach for real help.
Qur’an and Sunnah
God does not like bad words to be made public unless someone has been wronged (Quran 4:148). The person who was wronged is given room to say plainly what was done to them.
۞لَّا يُحِبُّ ٱللَّهُ ٱلۡجَهۡرَ بِٱلسُّوٓءِ مِنَ ٱلۡقَوۡلِ إِلَّا مَن ظُلِمَۚ وَكَانَ ٱللَّهُ سَمِيعًا عَلِيمًا
God does not like bad words to be made public unless someone has been wronged: He is all hearing and all knowing
Qur’an 4:148read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
In a small randomised trial with women who had left emotionally abusive marriages, forgiveness therapy reduced depression, anxiety and posttraumatic stress more than an alternative treatment. Worth noticing is where that work sat: with women who had already got out, taking it up for themselves. The sample was small, and nothing in it supports pressing a reframe on somebody who has not asked for one.
Reed GL, Enright RD. (2006). The effects of forgiveness therapy on depression, anxiety, and posttraumatic stress for women after spousal emotional abuse.. Journal of consulting and clinical psychology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
A person needs their own read on danger trusted, because that read is part of what keeps them alive.
When not to
If the person is still living with the danger, safety planning comes before any discussion of what it meant.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
If the harm has only ever happened when someone had been drinking, the drinking is not the background to an anger problem. It is the anger problem.
Before anything else, take seriously what self-injury is doing for a person. Pain in the body can be easier to hold than pain in the mind, and a hurt you chose yourself can feel like control coming back.
Whatever is driving it, behaviour that frightens someone is frightening. The reason behind it does not soften what it was like to stand on the other side of it.