Areas › Anger › Choosing your response
It is less anger management than learning to hold an impulse without acting on it. That is a skill, and skills can be learned in a way that characters cannot.
The renaming matters more than it sounds. If the problem is who you are, the only moves left are shame or denial. If the problem is the distance between an urge and a hand, there is something to train, and you get to be a decent person who is currently not good at it.
Qur’an and Sunnah
If you have to respond to an attack, make your response proportionate, but it is best to stand fast (Quran 16:126). Standing fast is named as the better option, which makes restraint an achievement rather than an absence.
وَإِنۡ عَاقَبۡتُمۡ فَعَاقِبُواْ بِمِثۡلِ مَا عُوقِبۡتُم بِهِۦۖ وَلَئِن صَبَرۡتُمۡ لَهُوَ خَيۡرࣱ لِّلصَّٰبِرِينَ
If you [believers] have to respond to an attack, make your response proportionate, but it is best to stand fast
Qur’an 16:126read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
In a randomised controlled trial with forensic mental health patients, anger management based on acceptance and commitment therapy reduced anger rumination and impulsivity scores. Training what happens after the impulse, rather than the anger itself, has some support behind it. It was a particular setting with a particular group, and programmes of this kind generally show modest rather than dramatic effects.
Polat H, Asi Karakaş S. (2021). The effect of acceptance and commitment therapy orientated anger management training on anger ruminations and impulsivity levels in forensic psychiatric patients: A randomized controlled trial.. Perspectives in psychiatric care doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
People stay with work that treats them as untrained rather than as faulty.
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 cannot talk yourself out of a state you are not in yet. Anything you want to have available when you are angry has to be practised, not merely understood.
Under the anger there is usually something you wanted and did not get, or something you are afraid of losing. Say that, and you have handed the other person something they can actually do.
Aim for the cat rather than the dog. The dog goes off the second the door knocks, while the cat waits, watches, and still moves decisively when it decides to move.