The moment before you snapStep 1 of 8

Before you read on

Read this before you start. If someone in your home is frightened of you, or has changed how they behave to keep you calm, or if you have hurt a person or broken something in anger, then this is a safety matter and not a self help matter. Carrying on with an anger course is itself a risk in that situation. Get specialist help, and go to the course Recognising harm at home instead of this one. Nothing here may be used to justify frightening, threatening or striking anyone, in any relationship, and no ruling permitting any of that is given or implied on this platform. Where a fiqh question comes up in the lessons you will be sent to a qualified mufti rather than to a search engine.

Lesson 5 of 6

Anger is usually second

Something almost always got there first, and anger is the version of it that feels active instead of exposed.

Fear is the most common one. Then humiliation, which is fear about how you look to somebody. Then helplessness, when you cannot fix a thing that matters. Then grief. Then an expectation that got broken, which is why the smallest domestic things produce the largest reactions.

Anger is preferable to all of those because it feels like power rather than like being small. That is not a fault in you. It is what the feeling is for. The cost is that the first thing never gets said, so it never gets addressed, and it turns up again next week wearing the same disguise.