Areas › Anger › Practising under provocation
Pick the calm memory with some care. Sun on a beach, a bike ride, someone cleaning up a scraped knee: what matters is that it is genuinely safe ground for you.
Childhood scenes are often the most vivid, which is what makes them useful and also why they can misfire. If your early years were not safe, a prompt like a parent tending to you may bring up something a long way from calm. Recent and ordinary works perfectly well: a quiet kitchen, a walk you take often, the first minute after prayer.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Seek help through steadfastness and prayer, for God is with the steadfast (Quran 2:153). Where memory is not steady ground, there is somewhere else to seek help from.
يَٰٓأَيُّهَا ٱلَّذِينَ ءَامَنُواْ ٱسۡتَعِينُواْ بِٱلصَّبۡرِ وَٱلصَّلَوٰةِۚ إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ مَعَ ٱلصَّٰبِرِينَ
You who believe, seek help through steadfastness and prayer, for God is with the steadfast
Qur’an 2:153read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
Brief therapist supported programmes that trained mindful awareness of inner states and reappraisal reduced problematic anger in a randomised trial of 234 adults. That supports deliberately working with your inner state, though nothing in it tested memories of calm in particular. Treat the memory as one way in rather than the proven one.
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
The memory only works as an anchor if the feeling it brings is the one you were after.
When not to
If a memory brings up more than it settles, leave it alone and use something recent and plain instead, and get help if the past keeps arriving uninvited.
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
Ask how settled you are and you will usually say fine. Look at your breathing instead, since it is generally more honest than the answer you give.
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.
What you are proudest of will tell you where you are most easily wounded. The two grow on the same root.