Areas › Anger › What anger actually is
You can be patient all day at work and lose it inside ten minutes at home. That is not hypocrisy, it is different situations pulling different reactions out of you.
It helps to stop asking whether you have a temper and start asking where. Which room, which person, which time of day, which subject. The answer is usually narrow and specific, and a narrow problem is far more workable than a verdict on your whole character.
Qur’an and Sunnah
but tight-fisted when good fortune comes his way (Quran 70:21). The same self-protective reflex is described showing up differently depending on what has just happened.
وَإِذَا مَسَّهُ ٱلۡخَيۡرُ مَنُوعًا
but tight-fisted when good fortune comes his way
Qur’an 70:21read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A meta-analytic mapping of common regulation strategies found acceptance, distress tolerance and non-judgement clustering together and sitting apart from avoidance-based strategies, which suggests these are distinguishable skills rather than one general ability. If regulation is not a single dial, being good at it in one place need not carry to another. The mapping looked at how strategies relate to each other and not at how people behave across different rooms.
Naragon-Gainey K, McMahon TP, Chacko TP. (2017). The structure of common emotion regulation strategies: A meta-analytic examination.. Psychological bulletin doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
You can prepare for a handful of known situations, but you cannot prepare for being a certain sort of person.
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.
Certainty closes a mind and a moment of not quite following opens it again. Sometimes the most useful thing you can say is the sentence that takes a second to work out.
How you show anger was taught to you long before you had any say. Some households raise their voices and forget it by supper, others go quiet for three days.