Areas › Anger › Choosing your response
The relief people describe afterwards has little to do with clever insight. It is the feeling of being back behind the wheel, which is a large change if you have been living as though other people operate you.
She made me. He knows exactly which button to press. Both can be true about the provocation and still leave the response yours. Notice that this is good news rather than more blame: what belongs to you is somewhere you can actually work, whereas another person's behaviour never was.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Even among your spouses and your children you have some enemies, beware of them, but if you overlook their offences, forgive them, pardon them, then God is all forgiving, all merciful (Quran 64:14). The provocation from those closest to you is taken seriously, and the overlooking is still placed in your hands.
يَٰٓأَيُّهَا ٱلَّذِينَ ءَامَنُوٓاْ إِنَّ مِنۡ أَزۡوَٰجِكُمۡ وَأَوۡلَٰدِكُمۡ عَدُوࣰّ ا لَّكُمۡ فَٱحۡذَرُوهُمۡۚ وَإِن تَعۡفُواْ وَتَصۡفَحُواْ وَتَغۡفِرُواْ فَإِنَّ ٱللَّهَ غَفُورࣱ رَّحِيمٌ
Believers, even among your spouses and your children you have some enemies- beware of them- but if you overlook their offences, forgive them, pardon them, then God is all forgiving, all merciful
Qur’an 64:14read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A meta-analysis found that difficulties with regulating emotion are reliably associated with posttraumatic stress symptoms, which supports treating regulation as a skill worth working on in its own right rather than as something that simply follows from what happened to you. That is a different problem and the evidence is associational. It is quoted here for the narrow point that the handling is a target, not only the history.
Seligowski AV, Lee DJ, Bardeen JR, Orcutt HK. (2015). Emotion regulation and posttraumatic stress symptoms: a meta-analysis.. Cognitive behaviour therapy doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Anything you own is something you can change, and blame leaves you nothing to hold.
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 no point reasoning with yourself while you are still lit up. Wake the part of you that does the reasoning first, then hand it the problem.
You are free in principle and a good deal less free at half past eleven at night in the middle of a row. Freedom is a capacity that rises and falls, which also means it can be built.
Set the terms of a break while nobody is angry: what you will say, how long you will take, where you will go, and that you will not drive. Then it is a shared arrangement rather than something you do to the other person.