Areas › Anger › Choosing your response
To be compelled is to be driven, the way cattle are driven along a road. It makes a quick test in the moment: am I choosing this, or am I being moved?
You can usually feel the difference. Being driven has a narrow, hurried quality, and a righteous certainty that will not tolerate a pause. Choosing can wait a minute without anything terrible happening. Noticing the driven feeling is already a small crack in it.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Tell My servants to say what is best. Satan sows discord among them (Quran 17:53). The discord is described as being sown by another hand, which fits the experience of being pushed along by something that does not feel like you.
وَقُل لِّعِبَادِي يَقُولُواْ ٱلَّتِي هِيَ أَحۡسَنُۚ إِنَّ ٱلشَّيۡطَٰنَ يَنزَغُ بَيۡنَهُمۡۚ إِنَّ ٱلشَّيۡطَٰنَ كَانَ لِلۡإِنسَٰنِ عَدُوࣰّ ا مُّبِينࣰ ا
[Prophet], tell My servants to say what is best. Satan sows discord among them: Satan is a sworn enemy of man
Qur’an 17:53read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
In a randomised experiment, increasing relative activity in the right frontal part of the brain with mild electrical stimulation made people brood more on their anger. That suggests the state a person is in causally shapes whether they get pulled into going over it. It was a small stimulation study in a laboratory, so it supports the general point without saying anything about a real quarrel.
Kelley NJ, Hortensius R, Harmon-Jones E. (2013). When anger leads to rumination: induction of relative right frontal cortical activity with transcranial direct current stimulation increases anger-related rumination.. Psychological science doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Asking whether you are choosing puts you back in the position of the one who chooses.
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
After you do something deliberately, skip the question of what you did differently. Ask what it felt like from the inside.
The urge arriving and you acting on it are two separate events. Years of history may have welded them together, and they still come apart with practice.
Whichever response you practise is the one getting stronger. Today's small choice is not a test you pass or fail, it is a deposit.