Areas › Anger › Choosing your response
You cannot swap the temperament you were born with, but you can change what you do with it. A reactive person who has trained handles things better than a calm person who never had to.
Be honest about the part that will not move. If you have always run hot, you probably always will, and pretending otherwise turns every flare into proof that you are failing. Aim at the part that does move: what you have practised, what you have arranged in advance, what you say in the first ten seconds.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Only those who are steadfast in patience, only those who are blessed with great righteousness, will attain to such goodness (Quran 41:35). Answering badness with something better is described as an attainment, which means it is reached rather than handed out at birth.
وَمَا يُلَقَّىٰهَآ إِلَّا ٱلَّذِينَ صَبَرُواْ وَمَا يُلَقَّىٰهَآ إِلَّا ذُو حَظٍّ عَظِيمࣲ
but only those who are steadfast in patience, only those who are blessed with great righteousness, will attain to such goodness
Qur’an 41:35read 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 of sixteen sessions of individual cognitive behavioural therapy for social anxiety, people came to use reappraisal more often and more successfully and to suppress less, and those shifts tracked their improvement. Regulation skills really do move with training. That was social anxiety rather than anger, so read across with some care.
Goldin PR, Lee I, Ziv M, Jazaieri H, Heimberg RG, Gross JJ. (2014). Trajectories of change in emotion regulation and social anxiety during cognitive-behavioral therapy for social anxiety disorder.. Behaviour research and therapy doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Effort spent on the trainable part pays you back, while effort spent on the fixed part only wears you down.
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
Picture a machine set to strike at anything that even slightly resembles a threat. It would hit the postman, the neighbour's dog and, sooner or later, a child in a muddy coat.
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.
Knowing you have other options and taking one are different things. Somewhere in there is the moment the choice actually gets made, and that moment is what you want to train.