Areas › Anger › Choosing your response
Hours in a room do not do the work on their own. If you are counting sessions towards a total, the count will run out and leave you roughly where you started.
This bites hardest when the attendance was ordered rather than chosen. A better question at the end of each week is what you practised and what happened when you did. Even one honest attempt between appointments gives you and whoever is helping you something real to look at.
Qur’an and Sunnah
They will be given their rewards twice over because they are steadfast, repel evil with good, give to others out of what We have provided for them (Quran 28:54). The reward is attached to things done, and they are all described in verbs.
أُوْلَٰٓئِكَ يُؤۡتَوۡنَ أَجۡرَهُم مَّرَّتَيۡنِ بِمَا صَبَرُواْ وَيَدۡرَءُونَ بِٱلۡحَسَنَةِ ٱلسَّيِّئَةَ وَمِمَّا رَزَقۡنَٰهُمۡ يُنفِقُونَ
They will be given their rewards twice over because they are steadfast, repel evil with good, give to others out of what We have provided for them
Qur’an 28:54read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
Over sixteen sessions of individual therapy for social anxiety, people came to reinterpret situations more often and more successfully and to hold expression in less, and those shifts tracked their symptom improvement. What moved was how they handled feeling, not how many appointments had gone by. One diagnosis and one treatment is a narrow base, so read it as suggestive for anger rather than settled.
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
You are changed by the new thing you keep trying, not by the time you spend sitting near 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
The version of you making sensible plans this afternoon is not the version standing in the kitchen at eleven at night. Plan for the other one.
Offer a practice as a question rather than an instruction. What do you think it would be like to wake yourself up once a day? That is a very different sentence from you should.
One walker keeps a small pebble in his sock on walks he would otherwise take in a daze. Every few steps it says the same thing: you are here, this is now.