Areas › Anger › Making it stick
Your brain is less a single organ than a crowd of billions of cells working out what to do next. The angry pull you feel is one voice in that crowd, not the whole of you.
This matters most in the second when an impulse arrives sounding completely certain. You can hear it, treat it as one contribution, and still not act on it. Nothing about that is denial: the voice is genuinely yours, it is just not all of you.
Qur’an and Sunnah
God does not change the condition of a people unless they change what is in themselves (Quran 13:11). The change is described as happening inside, among the many parts that make a person up.
لَهُۥ مُعَقِّبَٰتࣱ مِّنۢ بَيۡنِ يَدَيۡهِ وَمِنۡ خَلۡفِهِۦ يَحۡفَظُونَهُۥ مِنۡ أَمۡرِ ٱللَّهِۗ إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ لَا يُغَيِّرُ مَا بِقَوۡمٍ حَتَّىٰ يُغَيِّرُواْ مَا بِأَنفُسِهِمۡۗ وَإِذَآ أَرَادَ ٱللَّهُ بِقَوۡمࣲ سُوٓءࣰ ا فَلَا مَرَدَّ لَهُۥۚ وَمَا لَهُم مِّن دُونِهِۦ مِن وَالٍ
each person has guardian angels before him and behind, watching over him by God’s command. God does not change the condition of a people [for the worse] unless they change what is in themselves, but if He wills harm on a people, no one can ward it off–– apart from Him, they have no protector
Qur’an 13:11read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
In work attached to a trial of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, the ability to stand back from your own thoughts, which researchers call decentering, rose specifically in the people who did the practice rather than in those who took medication. That points to the skill coming from doing it rather than from simply feeling better. It was measured in people recovering from depression, not in anger, so read it as the nearest evidence rather than a direct one.
Peter Bieling; Lance L. Hawley; Richard T. Bloch; Kathleen Corcoran; Robert D. Levitan; L. Trevor Young (2012). Treatment-specific changes in decentering following mindfulness-based cognitive therapy versus antidepressant medication or placebo for prevention of depressive relapse.. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Once a thought sounds like one voice rather than the truth, you are free to answer it.
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 do not have to believe the calmer sentence yet. Say it anyway, on purpose, often, and belief tends to arrive behind the repetition rather than in front of it.
Skills bring the flare ups down in number and in heat. What they leave standing is the layer underneath: what you believe you are owed, and how you think people ought to behave.
One move to interrupt, one to settle. Open your hand, then take the slow breaths: the first buys you the gap and the second gives you something to do with it.