Is asking people who are fighting to take a breather and calm down a good idea? For context there was a pretty heated argument in a discord server I’m in and I stepped in and asked everyone to take a breather and change the topic because it was getting too heated and starting to get into kind of personal insults, and one person(who’s side I was mostly agreeing with in the argument) got mad and left the server. Did I do something wrong? I was trying to prevent things from getting worse but I don’t know if all I did was screw things up.

2 comments
  1. Not the worst, but it depends on the person. Because of this I usually word this concept differently in something like “Wait until more time passes so you have more time to think about what to do next,” so as long as the situation doesn’t require immediate action. It seems a roundabout way of saying the same thing, but I don’t want to come off as if I’ve told people what to do or told them how to feel. This at least works with the people I talk to

  2. for me, if im already angry and someone tells me to calm down i will get exponentially more angry because it feels dismissive of my feelings and rude

    even if i know i am being irrational in the moment, i will never respond well to that.

    if i wasnt even mad when someone said it, it would probably make me mad xD

    i cant clearly explain why, but it feels extremely rude and disrespectful to say “can you calm down?”

    basically *any* other way of wording the sentiment would be infinitely more effective

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