Areas › Anger › Practising under provocation
If the room decides how you feel about yourself, anyone in a bad mood can set your whole day. A quiet part of this work is moving that judgement back inside.
It does not have to be a speech you make to yourself. For many people it is closer to a settled sense of what they were trying to do today and whether they did it. Watch for the trap of swapping a demanding audience for a harsher inner one. The aim is to be less at the mercy of the verdict, not to deliver it yourself more severely.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Peace be with you, because you have remained steadfast (Quran 13:24). The greeting comes from God's side at the end, not from whoever happened to be watching at the time.
سَلَٰمٌ عَلَيۡكُم بِمَا صَبَرۡتُمۡۚ فَنِعۡمَ عُقۡبَى ٱلدَّارِ
‘Peace be with you, because you have remained steadfast. What an excellent reward is this home of yours!’
Qur’an 13:24read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
In a randomised trial with 234 adults, brief therapist supported internet programmes that had people practise mindful awareness of their emotions and reappraisal reduced problematic anger. That sits close to this work without being the same thing, since nothing in the trial measured where people located their sense of worth. Read it as support for training attention to your own inner state, which is where this begins.
Bjureberg J, Ojala O, Berg A, Edvardsson E, Kolbeinsson Ö, Molander O, Morin E, Nordgren L, Palme K, Särnholm J, Wedin L, Rück C, Gross JJ, Hesser H. (2023). Targeting maladaptive anger with brief therapist-supported internet-delivered emotion regulation treatments: A randomized controlled trial.. Journal of consulting and clinical psychology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Disapproval stings less when your sense of yourself is not being handed out by other people.
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
Practice gets more useful when someone is really watching. It also gets harder, so agree that part before you begin instead of adding it once the person is already in the middle of it.
You cannot install a new response, and you do not need to. If you have lived one moment of it, the trace is already in you, and the work now is repetition.
Be careful with the language about growing a thicker skin. Before anyone is asked to mind less, someone has to check that what they are minding really is only a slight.