Areas › Anger › Choosing your response
There is a difference between stepping out and storming out, and most of it sits in whether the other person knows you are coming back.
Two failures sit either side of this one. The first is staying in the room until something is said that cannot be unsaid. The second is going quiet and cold, which feels like restraint from the inside and like a wall from the outside. What you are aiming at is leaving the argument without leaving the person.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Turn away from them and say, 'Peace': they will come to know (Quran 43:89). Turning away comes paired with a word of peace, and that pairing is what keeps it from being a slammed door.
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
A meta-analysis of how emotion regulation strategies relate to each other found that they group into broad families of engaging with a situation or turning away from it, so the useful question is often which stance you are taking rather than which technique. Stepping out and shutting down can look alike from outside and sit in different families. The analysis is about how strategies cluster, not about how couples fare, so treat it as a way of thinking rather than a finding about relationships.
Naragon-Gainey K, McMahon TP, Chacko TP. (2017). The structure of common emotion regulation strategies: A meta-analytic examination.. Psychological bulletin doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
A short, announced break brings your body down without telling the other person they no longer matter.
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
If you are on autopilot, the part of you that would notice is asleep as well. So do not count on waking yourself in the moment, arrange for something outside you to do the waking.
Autopilots are smooth. When something feels slightly awkward and effortful, that is usually the sign that you are genuinely present for it.
Picture a machine set to strike at anything that even slightly resembles a threat. It would hit the postman, the neighbour's dog and, sooner or later, a child in a muddy coat.