Areas › Anger › What anger actually is
A lion chasing a gazelle is not in a temper. It wants dinner. Some harm is done coldly, with a purpose, and it needs a different answer entirely.
Two questions sort it quickly. Was there heat, and was something being gained beyond the harm itself. Cooling-down plans and breathing are aimed at the hot kind. When what you are looking at is calm and calculated, the honest conversation is about what it gets the person and what it costs them, and often about safety.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Let harm be requited by an equal harm (Quran 42:40). The allowance is for answering a harm in measure, which is a long way from using harm to get something.
وَجَزَٰٓؤُاْ سَيِّئَةࣲ سَيِّئَةࣱ مِّثۡلُهَاۖ فَمَنۡ عَفَا وَأَصۡلَحَ فَأَجۡرُهُۥ عَلَى ٱللَّهِۚ إِنَّهُۥ لَا يُحِبُّ ٱلظَّٰلِمِينَ
Let harm be requited by an equal harm, though anyone who forgives and puts things right will have his reward from God Himself––He does not like those who do wrong
Qur’an 42:40read 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 measure separated what people do when angry from what they are trying to achieve by it, supporting the view that anger is aimed at something rather than only reactive. If behaviour can be sorted by its aim, harm that serves a purpose without any heat is genuinely a different item. It was a questionnaire validation, so it maps the distinction rather than telling you how to handle either kind.
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
Cooling something down only helps if it was hot to begin with.
When not to
If someone is being harmed deliberately, safety and telling the right people come before any attempt to understand it.
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
Anger is a bit like a fire you have built around yourself. It keeps things away from you in the dark, and it also keeps you standing in a small circle.
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.
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.