Areas › Anger › What anger actually is
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.
Notice what happens straight after an outburst. The difficult subject has usually gone. Nobody is asking what you were afraid of or what you want, and the room has moved on to how you behaved instead. If the argument reliably stops the harder conversation, that is worth knowing about yourself.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Remember the man with the whale, when he went off angrily (Quran 21:87). Leaving in anger is described plainly, and what it cost him came afterwards.
وَذَا ٱلنُّونِ إِذ ذَّهَبَ مُغَٰضِبࣰ ا فَظَنَّ أَن لَّن نَّقۡدِرَ عَلَيۡهِ فَنَادَىٰ فِي ٱلظُّلُمَٰتِ أَن لَّآ إِلَٰهَ إِلَّآ أَنتَ سُبۡحَٰنَكَ إِنِّي كُنتُ مِنَ ٱلظَّٰلِمِينَ
And remember the man with the whale,when he went off angrily, thinking We could not restrict him, but then he cried out in the deep darkness, ‘There is no God but You, glory be to You, I was wrong.’
Qur’an 21:87read 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 ways people handle emotion found that acceptance, tolerating distress and not judging what you feel group together and sit apart from avoidance based strategies. That suggests staying in a hard conversation is a separate skill from getting out of one, and separate skills can be built. The mapping rests on questionnaires, so it describes how these things cluster rather than showing one causes the other.
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
Blowing up closes the conversation, and a closed conversation cannot ask anything of you.
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
A lion chasing a gazelle is not in a temper. It wants dinner. Some harm is done coldly, with a purpose, and it needs a different answer entirely.
Anger runs through all of you at once, in the breath, the muscles, the gut and the thinking. Which means there is more than one door into it.
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.