Areas › Anger › What anger actually is
Your family had its own rules about anger, quite apart from anything cultural. Those are the ones that shaped you, and they can be renegotiated.
Name two of them plainly. Nobody leaves the table. Whoever shouts loudest wins. We do not mention it the next day. Then ask which you still want. This goes best as a conversation with the person you live with while nothing is wrong, because in the middle of an argument the old rules run themselves.
Qur’an and Sunnah
A kind word and forgiveness is better than a charitable deed followed by hurtful words (Quran 2:263). What gets said at home is weighed carefully here, which is about the right weight to give it.
۞قَوۡلࣱ مَّعۡرُوفࣱ وَمَغۡفِرَةٌ خَيۡرࣱ مِّن صَدَقَةࣲ يَتۡبَعُهَآ أَذࣰ ىۗ وَٱللَّهُ غَنِيٌّ حَلِيمࣱ
A kind word and forgiveness is better than a charitable deed followed by hurtful [words]: God is self-sufficient, forbearing
Qur’an 2:263read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
In a randomised controlled trial of skills training for borderline personality disorder, the benefit ran partly through a shift from destructive or suppressed anger towards assertive anger, meaning anger that states a need instead of attacking. How anger gets expressed turns out to be trainable. It was one trial in one clinical group, so take it as encouraging rather than as a template for a household.
Kramer U, Pascual-Leone A, Berthoud L, de Roten Y, Marquet P, Kolly S, Despland JN, Page D. (2016). Assertive Anger Mediates Effects of Dialectical Behaviour-informed Skills Training for Borderline Personality Disorder: A Randomized Controlled Trial.. Clinical psychology & psychotherapy doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
A rule you have agreed together is easier to keep than one you inherited without noticing.
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
Defence starts at a boundary. When anger flares, something has been read as crossing a line, so the question worth asking is which line.
An alarm that goes off at every shadow is a nuisance, but one that misses the real intruder is worse. Your system was tuned with that trade in mind.
Here is an odd one: anger is often a way of avoiding conflict. Saying what you actually need is exposing, negotiating is hard work, and losing your temper ends the conversation.