Areas › Anger › What anger actually is
Everyone knows the line about sticks and stones. If words really could not hurt you, you would not still be turning over what he said.
It is a rhyme we all agreed to and none of us believe. Rather than argue with it, set it beside the evidence: the words landed, so something in them was taken personally. That is the thread worth pulling, because what makes a remark personal is a judgement about the person who said it and what they meant by it, and judgements can be revisited.
Qur’an and Sunnah
God does not like bad words to be made public unless someone has been wronged (Quran 4:148). Words are treated here as things that do real damage, so it is no weakness that they reached you.
۞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 case control study found that people with depression showed a specific bias towards blaming themselves rather than others, rather than simply feeling more of everything negative. That is direct evidence that where blame gets pointed varies between people and is not fixed by the event itself. It was one comparison in one clinical group, so it should not be stretched into a general account of why insults sting.
Green S, Moll J, Deakin JF, Hulleman J, Zahn R. (2013). Proneness to decreased negative emotions in major depressive disorder when blaming others rather than oneself.. Psychopathology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Words hurt to the extent that you read them as a true verdict on 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
You can be patient all day at work and lose it inside ten minutes at home. That is not hypocrisy, it is different situations pulling different reactions out of you.
Get the shouting and the slammed doors down first. The deeper questions about where all this came from will keep, and they are hard to think about while incidents are still happening weekly.
Defence starts at a boundary. When anger flares, something has been read as crossing a line, so the question worth asking is which line.