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I.e. a tit-for-tat exchange or verbal aggression can result is what is nowadays more colloquially called a "toxic environment".

I.e. a tit-for-tat exchange or verbal aggression can result is what is nowadays more colloquially called a "toxic environment".

Most of your post is hard to follow and mixes a lot of topics. On the issue whether pain and social rejection have something in common, a highly-cited fMRI study found that

Likewise a newer study concludes that:

An even more recent study has challenged these though:

And despite what your Polish Zen psychologists would like the reality to be, it just doesn't work like that in practice. Verbal abuse does have some effect, even on people (e.g. nurses) who encounter it often. Granted the effect is not huge. On a scale of 0 (no reaction) to 6 (extreme feeling), the average effects of verbal abuse are reported below:

Most of your post is hard to follow and mixes a lot of topics. On the issue whether pain and social rejection have something in common, a highly-cited (2003) fMRI study found that

Likewise a newer (2011) study concludes that:

An even more recent study (Woo, 2014) has challenged these though:

And despite what your Polish Zen psychologists would like the reality to be, it just doesn't work like that in practice. Verbal abuse does have some effect, even on people (e.g. nurses) who encounter it often. Granted the effect is not huge. On a scale of 0 (no reaction) to 6 (extreme feeling), the average effects of verbal abuse (on nurses) are reported below:

I'd also note that the paper Infante cites for dismissal strategies, Wagner (1980), doesn't have much in the way of citations (in Google Scholar).

Infante also discusses mitigation strategies, although the existence of these doesn't justify your point that verbal aggression is harmless:

Once verbal aggression does occur in a situation, basic concerns are how the effects can be neutralized and how escalation of aggression can be prevented. [...]

[An] approach is based on symbolic interactionism and involves the strategies that victims may use to "dismiss" verbal attacks or render them ineffective (Wagner, 1980). Protecting self from abuse by manipulating symbols, according to this view, is one of the most highly developed functions of our symbol system. Wagner (1980) conceives of these as "strategies of dismissal." He presents numerous strategies that the victim of an attack can use while interacting with the attacker or while interacting with self in order to restore the attacked self to a state of equilibrium. Some of these strategies are reviewed below (see Wagner, 1980, for a more complete discussion).

Many dismissals of an attack rely upon finding an exception to the locus of attack. These can pertain to the situation of the attack, the victim, or the attacker. Dismissal strategies for the situation invoke misinformation (claim that the attack was based on incorrect information) or coercion (contend that the data which attacks self s judgment was obtained by coercion). Dismissals based on the victim involve one's conception of self and utilize the idea that the object of attack was not the "true" self. Some of these strategies are personal growth (maintain that the self characterized in the attack no longer exists because of change), the unconscious (agreeing with the unfavorable characterization by the attacker but claiming the matter is beyond personal control because the unconscious mind is responsible), and excuse (claim the behavior which suggests an undesirable self "was not my fault"). Strategies that focus on the attacker seek to derogate the source. These are based on ignorance (the attacker does not know what he/she is talking about), the dark side (the attack was motivated by lesser human tendencies to be jealous, envious, resentful, vicious, sadistic), and unacknowledged motives (the attacker has a hidden agenda). These strategies of "dismissal" seem aimed mainly at neutralizing the effect of verbally aggressive remarks so that the victim does not experience a sense of dissonance with self. This can be done to a considerable extent at the intrapersonal level.

Unlike your Christian-motivated book, Infante doesn't try to order these strategies. And these are just the purely self-oriented strategies. He spends even more space discussing (non-aggressive) communicative response strategies.