Twenty minutesAfter a rowCoreAnger

Anger feels righteous while it lasts. The useful moment comes later, when the regret shows up and the story has gone quiet.

Nobody changes course mid-shout, and pressing then only adds fuel. Hours or a day afterwards there is usually a stretch where a person is uncomfortable about what they did and not yet defending it. Conversations started there go somewhere, so it is worth arranging your time to be around for it rather than a fortnight later.

Qur’an and Sunnah

but then he cried out in the deep darkness, there is no God but You, glory be to You, I was wrong (Quran 21:87). Yunus went off angry and the turn came afterwards, in the dark, not in the storming off.

وَذَا ٱلنُّونِ إِذ ذَّهَبَ مُغَٰضِبࣰ ا فَظَنَّ أَن لَّن نَّقۡدِرَ عَلَيۡهِ فَنَادَىٰ فِي ٱلظُّلُمَٰتِ أَن لَّآ إِلَٰهَ إِلَّآ أَنتَ سُبۡحَٰنَكَ إِنِّي كُنتُ مِنَ ٱلظَّٰلِمِينَ

And remember the man with the whale,when he went off angrily, thinking We could not restrict him, but then he cried out in the deep darkness, ‘There is no God but You, glory be to You, I was wrong.’

Qur’an 21:87read it in the library

Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.

What the research says

Work developing a standard measure of guilt and shame proneness separates guilt about an action from shame about the self, and shows the two predict different behaviour, with guilt the one tied to putting things right. So the bad feeling after an outburst is not all one thing, and which sort it is matters for what happens next. This was measure development in general samples, not a study of when to time a session.

Cohen TR, Wolf ST, Panter AT, Insko CA. (2011). Introducing the GASP scale: a new measure of guilt and shame proneness.. Journal of personality and social psychology doi

Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.

Why it works

Being uneasy about what you did is what makes doing it differently feel worth the trouble.

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

You will not get the honest version in one go. Ask, let it be refused, carry on with something else, then come back to it later in the same conversation.

LongerWhat anger actually is

Skills rehearsed in total calm tend to vanish at the moment you need them. Practise on something still slightly warm, a real incident from this week, close enough that you feel a little of it.

Twenty minutesWhat anger actually is

At the start the anger drives and you are in the passenger seat. With practice you get to take the wheel, though the engine stays the same engine.

LongerWhat anger actually is