Areas › Anger › What you are actually defending
Try saying the word until it goes silly. Respect, respect, respect: a socially agreed comment on how tall you are supposed to be.
The point of the joke is not to demolish respect, which is fine and worth having. It is to shrink the fear of not getting it, because that is the part doing the damage. Something you can laugh at is something you can talk about, and a word held too sacred cannot be examined at all.
Qur’an and Sunnah
What use were your great numbers and your false pride (Quran 7:48). The question is put to the thing itself, which is roughly what a joke does to a word.
وَنَادَىٰٓ أَصۡحَٰبُ ٱلۡأَعۡرَافِ رِجَالࣰ ا يَعۡرِفُونَهُم بِسِيمَىٰهُمۡ قَالُواْ مَآ أَغۡنَىٰ عَنكُمۡ جَمۡعُكُمۡ وَمَا كُنتُمۡ تَسۡتَكۡبِرُونَ
and the people of the heights will call out to certain men they recognize by their marks, ‘What use were your great numbers and your false pride
Qur’an 7:48read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
In a community sample of 380 adults, experiences of shame went with lower self-esteem, more difficulty handling emotion and more aggression. That places the fear of being seen badly close to the anger rather than far from it. The design was cross-sectional, so it shows the three sitting together and cannot say which came first.
Velotti P, Garofalo C, Bottazzi F, Caretti V. (2017). Faces of Shame: Implications for Self-Esteem, Emotion Regulation, Aggression, and Well-Being.. The Journal of psychology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Taking the heat out of the word makes the fear underneath it discussable.
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
Some situations genuinely run on how you are seen. A job interview, a court hearing, a first meeting with in-laws: the image matters there, and it is honest to say so.
Understanding an idea is not the same as being changed by it. The explaining is soil preparation, and the crop comes later.
A lizard's temperature is whatever the rock is. A mammal shivers, sweats and pants, and stays roughly the same whether it is a good day or not.