Areas › Anger › What anger actually is
A certain wariness is standard equipment. Nothing in this work is trying to leave you soft and open to whatever comes along.
People often hesitate here because it sounds like being asked to stop protecting themselves. The opposite is nearer the truth: you keep the guard and gain a say over when it goes up. Skin protects precisely because it is sensitive, and it would be no use to you numb.
Qur’an and Sunnah
God does not like bad words to be made public unless someone has been wronged (Quran 4:148). Even the strict rule about speech leaves the wronged person somewhere to stand.
۞لَّا يُحِبُّ ٱللَّهُ ٱلۡجَهۡرَ بِٱلسُّوٓءِ مِنَ ٱلۡقَوۡلِ إِلَّا مَن ظُلِمَۚ وَكَانَ ٱللَّهُ سَمِيعًا عَلِيمًا
God does not like bad words to be made public unless someone has been wronged: He is all hearing and all knowing
Qur’an 4:148read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A meta-analytic mapping of common regulation strategies found that acceptance, distress tolerance and non-judgement cluster together and sit apart from avoidance-based strategies, suggesting these are distinguishable skills rather than one general ability. What is on offer is an addition to what you can do rather than a subtraction. The mapping describes how strategies relate to each other and does not test what happens when people learn them.
Naragon-Gainey K, McMahon TP, Chacko TP. (2017). The structure of common emotion regulation strategies: A meta-analytic examination.. Psychological bulletin doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Choosing when to defend yourself protects you more than reacting to everything the same way.
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
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.
Listen for the shoulds. When anger is writing the sentence the words go absolute: always, never, obviously, and a great deal of no.
If you swallow it all day at work and it comes out at home, home is not where the problem is. It is just the safest place to put it down.