Areas › Anger › What anger actually is
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.
Neither is health and neither is illness. They are rules, learned early enough that they feel like instinct. Saying yours out loud is the useful move, because a rule you can name is one you can decide about, and the person you live with almost certainly learned a different set.
Qur’an and Sunnah
when the foolish address them, reply, Peace (Quran 25:63). A way of answering can be taught and practised until it is simply what comes out.
وَعِبَادُ ٱلرَّحۡمَٰنِ ٱلَّذِينَ يَمۡشُونَ عَلَى ٱلۡأَرۡضِ هَوۡنࣰ ا وَإِذَا خَاطَبَهُمُ ٱلۡجَٰهِلُونَ قَالُواْ سَلَٰمࣰ ا
The servants of the Lord of Mercy are those who walk humbly on the earth, and who, when the foolish address them, reply, ‘Peace’
Qur’an 25:63read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
In a survey of 335 hospital nurses, rigid beliefs about how other people ought to behave, along with a habit of dwelling on slights, predicted whether anger got bottled up or came out destructively. Held expectations shaped the form the anger took. It was cross-sectional and in one profession, so it shows an association rather than a cause.
Ham EM, You MJ. (2018). Role of Irrational Beliefs and Anger Rumination on Nurses' Anger Expression Styles.. Workplace health & safety doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Something you can see as a rule stops feeling like the only way to be.
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
If you grew up where the threat was real, your reading of a raised voice is not a distortion. It is accurate to somewhere you used to be.
Your anger is usually arguing for something. Underneath it sits a judgement about how things ought to be and, almost always, something you care about.
The energy behind your anger is not waste. People who feel strongly about what is wrong are often the ones who end up changing something.