Areas › Anger › Choosing your response
Choosing has two halves: seeing that there is more than one thing you could do, and then actually taking one. Failing at either looks identical from outside and needs quite different work.
Some people genuinely cannot picture a second option in the moment, and the job there is building a menu in calmer hours. Others can list four options while doing the old thing anyway, and their work is in the taking rather than the knowing. Be honest about which one you are, because the wrong repair on the wrong problem is discouraging for no good reason.
Qur’an and Sunnah
If you have to respond to an attack, make your response proportionate, but it is best to stand fast (Quran 16:126). Two courses are laid side by side, which is what a choice looks like: something to see, and then something to take.
وَإِنۡ عَاقَبۡتُمۡ فَعَاقِبُواْ بِمِثۡلِ مَا عُوقِبۡتُم بِهِۦۖ وَلَئِن صَبَرۡتُمۡ لَهُوَ خَيۡرࣱ لِّلصَّٰبِرِينَ
If you [believers] have to respond to an attack, make your response proportionate, but it is best to stand fast
Qur’an 16:126read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A systematic review found that people with social anxiety or depression report holding feelings in more and reinterpreting situations less than others do, which suggests the range someone can reach for is sometimes genuinely narrow rather than merely unused. The review drew on cross sectional and treatment studies rather than experiments, so it describes a pattern without showing what causes it.
Dryman MT, Heimberg RG. (2018). Emotion regulation in social anxiety and depression: a systematic review of expressive suppression and cognitive reappraisal.. Clinical psychology review doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Two different faults need two different fixes, and naming yours saves you months.
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
Having the capacity to choose and actually using it are separate questions, and only the second one changes your evening. The useful work all sits in the gap between them.
You can tell someone they have hurt you without your voice showing it. The message and the heat come apart, and it is usually the heat that stops the message being heard.
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.