From the author: This article is not for psychologists, but about how you can try to apply (with benefit to yourself) one of the many methods/approaches (used by psychologists in their professional activities) in everyday life by an ordinary person. Nowadays, judgments like “ours are fighting against non-users” are quite common, colored in many shades of emotional intensity and political affiliation. Militant apologists of one or another camp enthusiastically cross the blades of their wit (at best) and irrigate the battlefield (the Internet or behind-the-scenes family conversations) with hundreds of hectobytes of the most varied “mind secretions” (may connoisseurs of the mind forgive me) for each. The background of the events taking place is not at all important to them, since they already know it. They know for sure, accurately and unambiguously, and they don’t need more - because then, if “more” appears, there will be a redundancy of information that will be difficult for the mind to completely and consistently fit into the “picture of the world.” And if some “good Samaritan” tries “to reveal the whole truth of the world of a local conflict” to such a person, then this will cause a completely natural defensive reaction in him - a refusal to perceive new information (contradictory to the current understanding) in one form or another, sometimes crude. If the Samaritan turns out to be not “good”, but “strong” and, despite desperate resistance, still “reaches the subcortex” with his revelations, then this will cause the so-called. “cognitive dissonance”, accompanied by all sorts of “freezes” and despondencies of various kinds, which in any case will not improve the microclimate in the place where both warriors and Samaritans live. Well, what can you do? “You won’t be nice by force”...But the “Samaritan” can do something: wait. There is a time and place for everything: haste can be worse than being late. If a person swears at someone and curses him with the last words, then perhaps the issue is not in this “someone” and not in his merits (imaginary or real) - perhaps the person simply needs to speak out, swear, and thereby ask about internal nervous tension, whatever caused it. And in our society there are both safe and unsafe topics, and if the majority supports one side, then it will be safe to speak out violently in support of that side. Well, why not use a socially safe way to speak out and relieve some of the internal tension? If the Samaritan considers such statements from this position, then it will become clearer to him that his attempt to stop the flow of abuse is destructive in itself and does not depend on the essence and meaning of the statements. And if you wait a little, don’t interrupt and let him speak out (or, even better, listen carefully), only then will it be possible to move to another level of communication. And what’s at this other level? Imagine figuratively the following scene: a capricious child who loves and demands ice cream, only that and wants nothing else. And next to him is an adult who has, say, an orange, but no ice cream. What happens if an adult starts to force an orange into an already nervous and tense child? Nothing good, and maybe even worse: the adult will provide the child with psychological trauma and idiosyncrasy for all citrus fruits. What would a truly adult, mature person do in such a situation? At a minimum, he will try to interest you in the merits of an orange. He will offer an alternative and advertise it, but will not force-feed anything to the child. It’s the same in a conversation: if you forcibly “push” into someone something that he does not need at the moment (an idea or views), then a subsequently damaged relationship will result in This is not the worst outcome yet. But if you don’t rush, and let everyone speak until the last word... And then take a short pause and unobtrusively advertise your idea/thought, without giving it away in a word or a half-word, but describing its dissimilar taste in all its seductive nuances... And wait (sometimes for several minutes , and sometimes several days or even months).