Areas › Anger › Growing empathy
Underneath both versions sits the same small dread: somebody being displeased with you. That is the thing to practise surviving, and it does get easier.
Start where it is cheap. Send back the wrong order. Say you would rather not, once, to a person who will be mildly annoyed and nothing worse. Sit with the discomfort for the two or three minutes it lasts instead of rushing to fix it. You are not learning to stop caring what people think, only learning that their frown does not finish you.
Qur’an and Sunnah
My mercy encompasses all things (Quran 7:156). The approval that actually holds you up is not the one being withdrawn across the table.
۞وَٱكۡتُبۡ لَنَا فِي هَٰذِهِ ٱلدُّنۡيَا حَسَنَةࣰ وَفِي ٱلۡأٓخِرَةِ إِنَّا هُدۡنَآ إِلَيۡكَۚ قَالَ عَذَابِيٓ أُصِيبُ بِهِۦ مَنۡ أَشَآءُۖ وَرَحۡمَتِي وَسِعَتۡ كُلَّ شَيۡءࣲۚ فَسَأَكۡتُبُهَا لِلَّذِينَ يَتَّقُونَ وَيُؤۡتُونَ ٱلزَّكَوٰةَ وَٱلَّذِينَ هُم بِـَٔايَٰتِنَا يُؤۡمِنُونَ
Grant us good things in this world and in the life to come. We turn to You.’ God said, ‘I bring My punishment on whoever I will, but My mercy encompasses all things. ‘I shall ordain My mercy for those who are conscious of God and pay the prescribed alms; who believe in Our Revelations
Qur’an 7:156read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
Women given brief self-compassion training showed different alpha-amylase, heart rate variability and subjective responses to a socially evaluative stress task than controls did. So how you meet the moment of being judged is not fixed, and it responds to short training. It was a laboratory stressor with women only, so it indicates a direction rather than describing ordinary life.
Arch JJ, Brown KW, Dean DJ, Landy LN, Brown KD, Laudenslager ML. (2014). Self-compassion training modulates alpha-amylase, heart rate variability, and subjective responses to social evaluative threat in women.. Psychoneuroendocrinology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Discomfort you have sat through a few times loses its power to decide things for you.
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
Closeness arrives much faster in a small group that keeps meeting than in a wide circle you see now and then. If you want to feel less alone, pick the small thing that repeats.
Time alone can be a good idea or a dangerous one, and the difference is what sits underneath it. If you are already low, already dodging people, or drinking on your own, a plan to see fewer people is the wrong plan.
Telling somebody one thing you are quietly embarrassed about will bring you closer than a month of pleasant conversation.