Areas › Anger › Practising under provocation
Feeling the pull to square up is not something you chose. What your face, your voice and the next thirty seconds do with it is.
Notice too that the pull is not equally sensible everywhere. There are places where standing your ground genuinely matters, and there are places, most of them, where it costs you a relationship and buys nothing. Working out which room you are in is part of the skill, and it is much easier to work out beforehand than halfway through a sentence.
Qur’an and Sunnah
If you have to respond to an attack, make your response proportionate, but it is best to stand fast (Quran 16:126). A ceiling is set for the response and the better option is named alongside it.
وَإِنۡ عَاقَبۡتُمۡ فَعَاقِبُواْ بِمِثۡلِ مَا عُوقِبۡتُم بِهِۦۖ وَلَئِن صَبَرۡتُمۡ لَهُوَ خَيۡرࣱ لِّلصَّٰبِرِينَ
If you [believers] have to respond to an attack, make your response proportionate, but it is best to stand fast
Qur’an 16:126read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
Research on if then plans found they did reduce the pull of an established habit, though the benefit shrank as the habit got stronger. Planning helps, and it helps less the deeper the groove, which is an argument for planning early and repeating it. These were everyday habits studied in volunteers rather than anger in a hard moment.
Webb TL, Sheeran P, Luszczynska A. (2009). Planning to break unwanted habits: habit strength moderates implementation intention effects on behaviour change.. The British journal of social psychology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Separating the impulse from the response leaves the shame out and the responsibility in.
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
Let yourself be five minutes late to something that does not matter. Then ask how you would feel if a friend were five minutes late to you.
Going silent and hard is not a neutral act. A fixed stare and a set brow land on the other person's body as threat, even though you have not said a word.
Before anyone does something exposing, let them check their own conditions and give them a clean way to say no. A public yes given under pressure is not really a yes.