Five minutesAny ordinary dayCoreAnger

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.

Which tells you the aim is not to switch off your ability to spot a threat. It is to get that ability accurate. Someone who cannot register that a person is dangerous is at the mercy of whoever turns up, and no one is actually after that kind of calm. Keep the detector, work on the reading.

Qur’an and Sunnah

and defend themselves when they are oppressed (Quran 42:39). The capacity to defend yourself is listed as a quality, not as a fault to be trained out.

وَٱلَّذِينَ إِذَآ أَصَابَهُمُ ٱلۡبَغۡيُ هُمۡ يَنتَصِرُونَ

and defend themselves when they are oppressed

Qur’an 42:39read it in the library

Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.

What the research says

A study of dominant emotional responses to traumatic events found that for many people the leading response was anger, guilt, sadness or numbness rather than fear, and those responses still predicted later post-traumatic symptoms. Anger sits inside the system that answers danger, which is part of why removing it wholesale is not the aim. It was cross-sectional and relied on people recalling their own reactions.

Hathaway LM, Boals A, Banks JB. (2010). PTSD symptoms and dominant emotional response to a traumatic event:an examination of DSM-IV Criterion A2.. Anxiety, stress, and coping doi

Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.

Why it works

Threat detection protects you, so the goal is a better reading rather than no reading.

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

Some anger arrives with an argument already inside it: that they disrespected you, that this is not how you are meant to be treated. It burns cooler than the sudden kind and it lasts much longer.

Twenty minutesWhat anger actually is

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.

Five minutesWhat anger actually is

This is just how I am ends more attempts at change than anything else. It is also less true than it feels.

Five minutesWhat anger actually is