Areas › Anger › Practising under provocation
Be careful with the language about growing a thicker skin. Before anyone is asked to mind less, someone has to check that what they are minding really is only a slight.
Where the insults are discrimination, bullying or the run up to abuse, telling a person to toughen up is telling them to distrust an accurate reading of their own situation. That is not resilience, it is being talked out of your own eyes. The check is fairly plain: is anything real being taken from them, and does the same source keep doing it.
Qur’an and Sunnah
It is best to be patient: from God alone I seek help to bear what you are saying (Quran 12:18). Ya'qub chooses patience without once pretending that the pain is not real.
وَجَآءُو عَلَىٰ قَمِيصِهِۦ بِدَمࣲ كَذِبࣲۚ قَالَ بَلۡ سَوَّلَتۡ لَكُمۡ أَنفُسُكُمۡ أَمۡرࣰ اۖ فَصَبۡرࣱ جَمِيلࣱۖ وَٱللَّهُ ٱلۡمُسۡتَعَانُ عَلَىٰ مَا تَصِفُونَ
and they showed him his shirt, deceptively stained with blood. He cried, ‘No! Your souls have prompted you to do wrong! But it is best to be patient: from God alone I seek help to bear what you are saying.’
Qur’an 12:18read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
In a cluster randomised trial across English secondary schools, a whole school programme teaching restorative practice and social and emotional skills reduced bullying and aggression. Where harm is real and repeated, changing the setting is part of the answer rather than leaving it all to the person being harmed. That was a school programme, so applying it to a workplace or a family is an inference.
Bonell C, Allen E, Warren E, McGowan J, Bevilacqua L, Jamal F, Legood R, Wiggins M, Opondo C, Mathiot A, Sturgess J, Fletcher A, Sadique Z, Elbourne D, Christie D, Bond L, Scott S, Viner RM. (2018). Effects of the Learning Together intervention on bullying and aggression in English secondary schools (INCLUSIVE): a cluster randomised controlled trial.. Lancet (London, England) doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Learning to mind less only helps when nothing real is actually being taken from you.
When not to
If the slights are discrimination, bullying or abuse, the work is not to mind less but to get support and change the situation where you can.
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
A cut heals and you stop thinking about it. An insult has no moment where the body tells you it is over, so it stays available to be replayed for years.
Call the practice whatever fits you. Stress inoculation, rolling with the punches, a Teflon mind, the art of not giving a damn: the name changes nothing about what you do, and a name you can stand makes you likelier to do it.
The shape of the whole thing is simple. Find the judgement that stings, meet it, talk it through, meet it again with a different intention, talk it through, then mark that you did it.