Areas › Anger › Choosing your response
Aim for the cat rather than the dog. The dog goes off the second the door knocks, while the cat waits, watches, and still moves decisively when it decides to move.
Plenty of people hear delay as backing down, and would rather explode than be walked over. Watching an animal that waits without being timid separates the two. Nothing in the pause says you will not act, or that what happened was fine, only that the timing belongs to you.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Turn away from them and say, 'Peace': they will come to know (Quran 43:89). Turning away with a word of peace is offered as an ending you have chosen, not as losing.
فَٱصۡفَحۡ عَنۡهُمۡ وَقُلۡ سَلَٰمࣱۚ فَسَوۡفَ يَعۡلَمُونَ
but turn away from them and say, ‘Peace’: they will come to know
Qur’an 43:89read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
In a randomised trial of skills training informed by dialectical behaviour therapy, what carried the benefit was a shift towards expressing anger directly and assertively rather than either swallowing it or exploding. Assertive is the middle thing the cat is doing. The trial was in people with borderline personality disorder, so the group is specific and the finding concerns the mediating path rather than a rule for everyone.
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.
Why it works
A pause concedes nothing, it moves the decision to a moment when you can make it.
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
Eat a meal with your other hand. Wear your watch on the wrong wrist for a week. Use a fork where you would normally use a spoon. These are cheap rehearsals of the only skill that matters here.
A new response cannot be laid on top of a cycle that is still turning. Break the circle first, even clumsily, and the room for something else appears.
Before you decide someone is having a go at you, go looking for the boring physical explanation. A good deal of the time it is right there.