Stamp Out Fires

Sometimes in email you get riled. How could that so-and-so have done you wrong like that? How dare they? Why, you've got a good mind to tell them just what you think of them.

Okay, do it. But don't send it. Write white-hot, pour all your scorn into it. Then go back and edit out every last bit of scorn. Don't leave even a hint that your feathers were ruffled.

Now you've got it out of your system, and you've also avoided being noisy. Cool!

An interesting approach. I'm a little wary of it because it seems like it might play into the "letting it all out" fallacy, which is the belief that you can reduce your level of anger by "letting it out". In reality, "letting it out" just reinforces the anger response by reducing the experience of stress without actually eliminating the original stressors.

I'm a big fan of LettingItAllOut? when it adresses frustration, rather than anger. When I'm mad at somebody, I don't hit them, or yell at them - makes things worse. When something unfair happens to me - the more usual case - and nobody else is involved, LettingItAllOut? (yelling or thumping the desk or whatever) does help.

Going back and editing the same email, however, seems like it could be very helpful depending on how it's done. One good method is to be entirely factual. That doesn't mean that you don't express your feelings or opinions. It just means that you express them as facts about yourself instead of projecting them onto the world at large as if they were facts. For example: "That was insulting!" could be rephrased as: "I consider that particular phrase to be an insult, so when I saw it in your email to me my feelings were hurt". When writing about your feelings keep in mind that there are no emotions who's names end in "ed" -- insulted, abandoned, attacked, abused, and misrepresented, are all examples of judgements that are often couched as feelings. Separating the judgment from the feeling is very helpful both in communication with others and for managing and taking responsibility for your own emotions.

My wife and I use a method to StampOutFires that is different from the one outlined here. We call it the "24 hour" rule. When we write an email while in an angry mood we do the best job we can and then let it sit for a day before sending it. Sometimes we use each other as a filter: "Would you be mad if someone sent this to you?". This approach is beneficial because it allows you to practice giving a balanced response while under fire, and getting feedback about how you did, without exposing you to the negative consequences of failure. It has the downside that it's much more difficult to practice. I can see how it might be useful to just write whatever you happen to think in the heat of the moment and then sort through it for facts later -- as long as you actually do get to the work of problem solving and you don't hurt anyone in the process.

Phil