Inshirahone small thing, well groundedRight now

Areas › Anger

Anger

Almost nobody wants to be the person who says the thing they cannot take back. The window between the surge and the words is short and it can be widened. That is most of what this area is about, along with the fear or hurt that anger is usually protecting.

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367 practices
Any ordinary day remove filterClear all
Theme
What anger actually is 58The moment before you snap 49Choosing your response 45Equanimity and perspective 37The fear underneath anger 31Practising under provocation 30Growing empathy 29Cool the body first 25Making it stick 24What you are actually defending 14Righteous anger and perfectionism 13When anger turns to harm 6Anger, alcohol and the body 6
How long you have
A minute 86Five minutes 204Twenty minutes 43Longer 34
Approach
Core 187Mindfulness 85CBT 37Body based 35Medical and treatment 17Trauma informed 5Gottman 1
When · Any ordinary day
Any ordinary day 367Under stress 177After a row 88In a change 5Coming and going 5When apart 2Something good 1

Feeling good about yourself is not the safe end of this. The high and the low come from the same borrowed source, which means the high can be taken back at any point.

You feel valuable while you are fitting in and worthless when you are not, and neither reading was ever yours. It is why an insult can go off like a…

Five minutesWhat you are actually defendingCoreQur’an 2:34

A lot of angry certainty is frightened certainty. Needing to know exactly what is going on, and exactly who is at fault, is more comfortable than admitting the situation cannot be fully read.

From the outside it looks like arrogance, and from the inside it feels like clarity. Underneath it is usually the same discomfort as any other…

Five minutesWhat you are actually defendingMindfulnessQur’an 17:36

Not knowing is not a fault in you. It is the ordinary condition of being alive, and much of the distress comes from the belief that it ought to be otherwise.

There is the discomfort of not knowing, and then a second layer on top: the sense that you were supposed to know by now and something has gone wrong.…

Five minutesWhat you are actually defendingMindfulnessQur’an 49:12

Righteous anger pays you something. It burns off doubt, hands back a sense of being in charge, and can feel very close to intoxicating.

Any plan that treats anger purely as a skills problem runs into this. You are asking somebody to give up a thing that works, and it is fairer to say…

Five minutesWhat you are actually defendingMindfulnessQur’an 12:53

Understand more so that you may fear less. That line is the whole point of learning how your anger works: not cleverness, just less fear.

People with a temper are rarely persuaded by being told to calm down, and are often genuinely interested in how the machinery works. Knowing what…

Five minutesWhat you are actually defendingMindfulnessQur’an 16:90

A small child works out how to feel about itself by looking at its parents' faces. If that face was missing, or busy, the looking does not stop, it just moves on to teachers, coaches, friends and strangers.

It is part of why being disrespected can feel so much larger than the moment deserves. Some of that old search is still running. The work is slow and…

Twenty minutesWhat you are actually defendingCoreQur’an 50:16

Understanding an idea is not the same as being changed by it. The explaining is soil preparation, and the crop comes later.

Somebody can follow the whole argument about respect and self-acceptance, agree warmly with all of it, and lose their temper the same way that…

LongerWhat you are actually defendingCoreQur’an 22:46