Areas › Anger › Making it stick
Anger gets fed from several places: blame, not being able to bear not knowing, losing sight of the other person, and needs you never said out loud. Each one wants a different kind of work.
So it is worth asking which of them is mostly yours. If it is blame, forgiveness is the road. If it is not knowing, the work is learning to sit with a question left open. If the other person's inner life vanishes the moment you are angry, that is perspective, and if you go quiet for weeks and then go off, the work is saying things earlier.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Only those who are steadfast in patience, only those who are blessed with great righteousness, will attain to such goodness (Quran 41:35). All these different roads are heading towards that one capacity, answering a bad turn with a better one.
وَمَا يُلَقَّىٰهَآ إِلَّا ٱلَّذِينَ صَبَرُواْ وَمَا يُلَقَّىٰهَآ إِلَّا ذُو حَظٍّ عَظِيمࣲ
but only those who are steadfast in patience, only those who are blessed with great righteousness, will attain to such goodness
Qur’an 41:35read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
Each of these strands has its own literature and they are not equally strong. A trial of a six week group forgiveness programme, for instance, found participants became more likely to forgive in new situations and not only in the offence they arrived with. That is one strand, in a small group study, so it shows the approach can travel rather than that the whole map is proven.
Harris AH, Luskin F, Norman SB, Standard S, Bruning J, Evans S, Thoresen CE. (2006). Effects of a group forgiveness intervention on forgiveness, perceived stress, and trait-anger.. Journal of clinical psychology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Anger has more than one source, so which practice helps depends on which source is yours.
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
You do not have to believe the calmer sentence yet. Say it anyway, on purpose, often, and belief tends to arrive behind the repetition rather than in front of it.
A new practice needs somewhere to live. Hook it to something you already do a few times a day, like sitting down to eat.
The aim is not to stop feeling angry. It is to stretch the time between the feeling arriving and you doing anything about it, from no seconds to a few.