Areas › Anger › Choosing your response
If someone can predict how you drew those circles, they are not reading your mind. We are all running much the same small programmes.
That is worth saying plainly, because the discovery lands as a personal indictment for a lot of people, and shame makes anger worse rather than better. What is being pointed at is ordinary human wiring, not proof that you in particular are broken or weak. You are not the exception in either direction.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Satan sows discord among them: Satan is a sworn enemy of man (Quran 17:53). The trouble is described as something that comes at people in general, not as a private flaw in 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
A meta-analysis of how emotion regulation strategies relate to one another found that they fall into a few broad families, so people are mostly running variations of the same handful of approaches rather than each inventing their own. That is a claim about how the measures cluster and not about what anyone ought to do. It does still make the point that these patterns are common property.
Naragon-Gainey K, McMahon TP, Chacko TP. (2017). The structure of common emotion regulation strategies: A meta-analytic examination.. Psychological bulletin doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
A problem you share with everybody is easier to work on than one you are ashamed of.
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
There is a difference between stepping out and storming out, and most of it sits in whether the other person knows you are coming back.
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.
If they made you feel this, then only they can undo it. That is the quiet trap inside taking things personally.