Areas › Anger › Choosing your response
You are free while you are still weighing something up, and once you have chosen you carry that choice until the next one comes round. So the useful thing is to have more of those moments, not to make one perfect decision.
Treat a hard evening as a run of small forks rather than one big test you pass or fail. Reply now or in an hour. Say the sentence or leave it. Stay in the kitchen or step outside. Each fork you actually notice hands you the steering for a second, and going the wrong way at one of them is not the end, because another is coming.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Repel evil with good (Quran 23:96). It is put as one move to make at the time, and it is there again the next time, and the time after that.
ٱدۡفَعۡ بِٱلَّتِي هِيَ أَحۡسَنُ ٱلسَّيِّئَةَۚ نَحۡنُ أَعۡلَمُ بِمَا يَصِفُونَ
Repel evil with good- We are well aware of what they attribute to Us
Qur’an 23:96read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
In a randomised laboratory experiment, people who recalled an anger provoking event ended up in quite different places depending on how they thought about it, with reinterpreting bringing anger down and going over it keeping anger up. What you do with the memory mattered more than whether it turned up. It was a single session with a recalled event in volunteers, so it is a demonstration rather than a treatment.
Ray RD, Wilhelm FH, Gross JJ. (2008). All in the mind's eye? Anger rumination and reappraisal.. Journal of personality and social psychology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
More forks noticed means more chances to go a different way.
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
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.
The circle was never the point. Any break in a running routine will do, because the break itself is what puts you back in the driving seat for a moment.
Not taking things personally is a question rather than a personality. The question is short: was that aimed at me, or was I simply standing there?