Areas › Anger › Equanimity and perspective
You cannot check whether your own view is fair while standing entirely inside it. Being certain you are right is a feeling, and feelings are not evidence.
In a row, the sense of being obviously in the right is the thing that gives you permission to hit back. Try holding your version as your version: this is how it looks from here, with what you happened to see and feel. You are not agreeing with them. You are letting a little air in around your own account.
Qur’an and Sunnah
It is not people's eyes that are blind, but their hearts within their breasts (Quran 22:46). The blind spot is placed inside us, which is exactly the place we cannot inspect on our own.
أَفَلَمۡ يَسِيرُواْ فِي ٱلۡأَرۡضِ فَتَكُونَ لَهُمۡ قُلُوبࣱ يَعۡقِلُونَ بِهَآ أَوۡ ءَاذَانࣱ يَسۡمَعُونَ بِهَاۖ فَإِنَّهَا لَا تَعۡمَى ٱلۡأَبۡصَٰرُ وَلَٰكِن تَعۡمَى ٱلۡقُلُوبُ ٱلَّتِي فِي ٱلصُّدُورِ
Have these people [of Mecca] not travelled through the land with hearts to understand and ears to hear? It is not people’s eyes that are blind, but their hearts within their breasts
Qur’an 22:46read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
Across two different therapies for generalised anxiety, people improved as they got better at decentering, which is seeing thoughts as passing events rather than as facts. It was an analysis of what changed alongside recovery, not proof that the stepping back caused it, and the work was on anxiety rather than anger.
Sarah A. Hayes‐Skelton; Amber Calloway; Lizabeth Roemer; Susan M. Orsillo (2014). Decentering as a potential common mechanism across two therapies for generalized anxiety disorder.. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Anger runs on a verdict, and treating your view as a view rather than a verdict takes the fuel away.
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
Holding your tongue is expensive. It is fairer to admit that than to pretend the calmer version of you comes free.
Light behaves like a particle in one experiment and like a wave in another, and physicists live with both. That is a good picture for two accounts of one event, and a picture is all it is.
This kind of change is slow, and saying so at the start is a kindness. A goal you can actually reach beats a promise that turns the first bad week into proof of failure.