Areas › Anger › Choosing your response
Those first three circles were reactions rather than actions. Something old moved your hand, and you learned what it had decided at the same moment everyone else did.
This is why people say, honestly, that they did not decide to say the thing they said. The words were out before anything you would call choosing had happened. Hearing that as an explanation rather than an excuse is the useful part: an explanation tells you where to put the work, an excuse tells you to stop looking.
Qur’an and Sunnah
If you do good, openly or in secret, or if you pardon something bad, then God is most forgiving and powerful (Quran 4:149). Pardoning is counted here as a thing you do, which is the difference between an act you author and a reaction that simply comes out of you.
إِن تُبۡدُواْ خَيۡرًا أَوۡ تُخۡفُوهُ أَوۡ تَعۡفُواْ عَن سُوٓءࣲ فَإِنَّ ٱللَّهَ كَانَ عَفُوࣰّ ا قَدِيرًا
If you do good, openly or in secret, or if you pardon something bad,then God is most forgiving and powerful
Qur’an 4:149read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
Across four experiments, being provoked left people with less capacity for self control afterwards, and dwelling on the provocation was one of the routes from being provoked to acting aggressively. So the sequence really can carry someone along. These were laboratory tasks with volunteers, and none of it removes anyone's responsibility for what got done.
Denson TF, Pedersen WC, Friese M, Hahm A, Roberts L. (2011). Understanding impulsive aggression: Angry rumination and reduced self-control capacity are mechanisms underlying the provocation-aggression relationship.. Personality & social psychology bulletin doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Something that ran without you gets changed by working on what runs, not by resolving harder.
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
If they made you feel this, then only they can undo it. That is the quiet trap inside taking things personally.
After you do something deliberately, skip the question of what you did differently. Ask what it felt like from the inside.
Aim for the cat rather than the dog. The dog goes off the second the door knocks, while the cat waits, watches, and still moves decisively when it decides to move.