Areas › Anger › Practising under provocation
Working on anger is not meant to leave you with nothing to say. The aim is to keep the objection and let go of the force it was riding on.
Two things are worth pulling apart: whether something has genuinely gone wrong, and how hot your body has gone about it. A good share of the heat comes from a knock to your standing rather than a threat to your safety, and that is the part that can come down without costing you anything. If the plan is only to swallow it, the grievance sits where it was and tends to come back later, usually louder.
Qur’an and Sunnah
If you [believers] have to respond to an attack, make your response proportionate, but it is best to stand fast (Quran 16:126). Responding is not forbidden here. What is held down is the size of it.
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
In a randomised trial of dialectical behaviour informed skills training for people with borderline personality disorder, the benefit ran through a shift from anger into assertion, and that shift statistically accounted for the improvement. That supports keeping assertion inside the goal rather than aiming only at being calmer. It was one trial in one clinical group, so read it as a direction rather than a settled result.
Kramer U, Pascual-Leone A, Berthoud L, de Roten Y, Marquet P, Kolly S, Despland JN, Page D. (2016). Assertive Anger Mediates Effects of Dialectical Behaviour-informed Skills Training for Borderline Personality Disorder: A Randomized Controlled Trial.. Clinical psychology & psychotherapy doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
A complaint said calmly still gets said, so there is nothing left to store up.
When not to
If the anger is about harm that is still happening, the work is not on your delivery but on changing the situation, with help if needed.
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
The jolt you feel when someone humiliates you is very old machinery. Where standing decided whether you ate, reacting hard to a public slight made sense. In traffic it makes none.
What you are proudest of will tell you where you are most easily wounded. The two grow on the same root.
Nearly every everyday flare up comes from one small family of stings: being disrespected, disapproved of, invalidated, misunderstood, or brushed aside. Learning the family is easier than learning a thousand separate grievances.