Areas › Anger › What anger actually is
People say true things when they are angry, even when they say them badly. Listen past the delivery for what is being defended.
Keeping face takes effort, and anger spends the effort elsewhere, so what comes out is closer to the bone than the careful version would have been. If you can stay steady while it happens you will learn more in five minutes than in a month of composed conversation. Staying steady is the whole skill here.
Qur’an and Sunnah
God does not like bad words to be made public unless someone has been wronged (Quran 4:148). The exception is telling: harsh speech often has a wrong sitting under it that is worth hearing out.
۞لَّا يُحِبُّ ٱللَّهُ ٱلۡجَهۡرَ بِٱلسُّوٓءِ مِنَ ٱلۡقَوۡلِ إِلَّا مَن ظُلِمَۚ وَكَانَ ٱللَّهُ سَمِيعًا عَلِيمًا
God does not like bad words to be made public unless someone has been wronged: He is all hearing and all knowing
Qur’an 4:148read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A validation study of an anger scale separated what people do when they are angry from what they are trying to achieve by it, supporting the view that anger is aimed at something rather than only reactive. What it is aimed at is often the most informative part of the episode. It was a questionnaire validation, so it shows the two can be measured apart and not what any particular outburst means.
Recchia S, Steffgen G, Weber H, Kubiak T. (2010). [French validation of the anger reactions and goals scale (RBC)].. L'Encephale doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Under that much heat there is no spare capacity for editing, so what surfaces is nearer to what is actually there.
When not to
Never draw anger out on purpose to see what it reveals, and step away if the situation stops feeling safe.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
There is a rare genetic condition in which people trust everyone and read no threat at all in an angry face. It sounds lovely and it leaves them badly exposed.
Name what kind of anger it is and you have usually named the fear as well. Each sort of anger points at something the person is trying not to lose.
Not all hostile looking anger is hostile. Some people are not reading malice into a situation, they simply cannot tell what the other person meant and fall back on assuming the worst.