Areas › Anger › Making it stick
Sometimes you can feel the whole exchange lined up before it starts: your line, then theirs, then the door. Leaving your line out is enough to stop the sequence that once.
Nothing impressive is required. You sit there, you say nothing, you let the moment go past unfilled and you find out that it can. Some scripts do lose their grip after being interrupted a few times, although expecting one silence to end a pattern for good is asking a great deal of one silence.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Bear anything that happens to you steadfastly: these are things to be aspired to (Quran 31:17). Holding your tongue once, in a car, with nobody watching, is a small instance of exactly that.
يَٰبُنَيَّ أَقِمِ ٱلصَّلَوٰةَ وَأۡمُرۡ بِٱلۡمَعۡرُوفِ وَٱنۡهَ عَنِ ٱلۡمُنكَرِ وَٱصۡبِرۡ عَلَىٰ مَآ أَصَابَكَۖ إِنَّ ذَٰلِكَ مِنۡ عَزۡمِ ٱلۡأُمُورِ
Keep up the prayer, my son; command what is right; forbid what is wrong; bear anything that happens to you steadfastly: these are things to be aspired to
Qur’an 31:17read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
The evidence on staying changed is humbler than the evidence on changing. An updated Cochrane review of behavioural relapse prevention for people who had recently stopped smoking found little sign that those specific additions kept them stopped. That is smoking rather than couples, and programmes rather than single moments, so take it only as a caution against assuming one win has settled things.
Hajek P, Stead LF, West R, Jarvis M, Hartmann-Boyce J, Lancaster T. (2013). Relapse prevention interventions for smoking cessation.. The Cochrane database of systematic reviews doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
A pattern between two people needs both parts, so leaving your part out changes what happens next.
When not to
Going quiet in order to punish someone is a different thing altogether and it does not work like this.
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
Nobody sees the times you did not say the cutting thing, including you a week later. Put them somewhere you can look at: one sticky note on the wall for each.
If the word mindfulness makes you wince, leave the word out. Paying attention to your breath, or to the sounds in the room, is the whole of it.
Meditation does more as upkeep than as a fire extinguisher. Doing it on the calm days is what lowers the level your threat system sits at.