Areas › Anger › Practising under provocation
Before you practise something exposing with someone, say out loud what is not at risk. I will not think less of you, and nothing between us changes here.
It sounds obvious and it does a great deal of work. If the relationship really is on the line, then the discomfort is not symbolic and no amount of practice will make it so. Naming that the regard between you holds means whatever sting is left is coming from inside the person, and that is the part they can do something about.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Do not quarrel with one another, or you may lose heart and your spirit may desert you (Quran 8:46). Between people who are on the same side, there is less at stake than the moment suggests.
وَأَطِيعُواْ ٱللَّهَ وَرَسُولَهُۥ وَلَا تَنَٰزَعُواْ فَتَفۡشَلُواْ وَتَذۡهَبَ رِيحُكُمۡۖ وَٱصۡبِرُوٓاْۚ إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ مَعَ ٱلصَّٰبِرِينَ
Obey God and His Messenger, and do not quarrel with one another, or you may lose heart and your spirit may desert you. Be steadfast: God is with the steadfast
Qur’an 8:46read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A randomised trial of programmes for men who had been violent towards partners found that adding motivational strategies improved participants' empathy, which those programmes had set out to build. It supports working alongside someone rather than at them. That was a particular population and one measured outcome, so read it as a pointer about stance and not a rule about wording.
Romero-Martínez Á, Lila M, Gracia E, Moya-Albiol L. (2019). Improving empathy with motivational strategies in batterer intervention programmes: Results of a randomized controlled trial.. The British journal of clinical psychology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Taking the real stake off the table leaves only the imagined one, and the imagined one is the one that can change.
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
The cure for feeling small is not winning the exchange. It is getting to a place where you no longer need to win it.
What you are proudest of will tell you where you are most easily wounded. The two grow on the same root.
Ask yourself what you would least like the person in front of you to be thinking about you right now. Whatever surfaces is usually what your anger has been guarding.