Areas › Anger › The moment before you snap
Sometimes you dislike a person or a room before you can say why. The fast part of you stores feelings, not explanations, so the reaction arrives whole and wordless.
If you cannot account for your reaction, you are not being evasive, and neither is anyone else who cannot account for theirs. Asking "why are you angry" at the peak rarely gets anything true. It works better to ask what it feels like, or what it reminds them of, and to leave the reasons for later.
Qur’an and Sunnah
And say, "Lord, I take refuge with You from the goadings of the evil ones" (Quran 23:97). A goading is felt rather than reasoned with, and what is offered in reply is turning towards God, not an explanation.
وَقُل رَّبِّ أَعُوذُ بِكَ مِنۡ هَمَزَٰتِ ٱلشَّيَٰطِينِ
and say, ‘Lord, I take refuge with You from the goadings of the evil ones
Qur’an 23:97read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A systematic review across anxiety, depression, substance use, eating disorders and borderline personality disorder found that improvements in emotion regulation accompanied symptom improvement in all five groups, supporting emotion regulation as a shared treatment target. That points to how a feeling is handled as the useful place to work, rather than the account someone can give of it. Being a review of outcome studies, it shows things moving together rather than proving what causes what.
Sloan E, Hall K, Moulding R, Bryce S, Mildred H, Staiger PK. (2017). Emotion regulation as a transdiagnostic treatment construct across anxiety, depression, substance, eating and borderline personality disorders: A systematic review.. Clinical psychology review doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
The system that reacts first does not deal in words, so an explanation is not there yet to give.
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 can sit on a bench a few feet from a waterfall and be perfectly safe. Step in and you go over. Feeling something powerful is not the danger, and getting swept into it is.
If watching your mind feels too open, rest your attention on your breathing instead. Do not deepen it or slow it down. Just feel the breath you are already taking.
The river is a way of talking, not a scene to imagine. You are not trying to see water, you are looking inward and noticing what turns up.