Areas › Anger
Anger
Almost nobody wants to be the person who says the thing they cannot take back. The window between the surge and the words is short and it can be widened. That is most of what this area is about, along with the fear or hurt that anger is usually protecting.
What works for this
Anger control, with distress tolerance
Anger has a runway, and the earlier you step onto it the less force you need. The work is in the seconds before, not in the explosion, and it starts with the body rather than the thought.
One move, today
Name the first physical sign you get. Jaw, chest, hands, heat in the face. That sign is your only warning, and noticing it is the whole skill.
What matches
8 practicesSome true things cannot be said early. A reframe that would land well in the tenth conversation will end the second one.
Ideas about what really drives harm, or about a person being more than the worst thing they have done, are easily heard as excusing it or as blaming…
Ask it plainly. Do you think you are a threat to anyone you love? A vague anger problem turns into something workable the moment it has a name attached to it.
Then keep going, because the follow up questions carry most of the weight. Has there been any thought of killing someone, or of dying. What is in the…
Hurting yourself is not always about coping. Sometimes it is aimed at somebody else, and until you know which it is you cannot know what would help.
This is uncomfortable to ask about and it is not an accusation. An act can be a way through an unbearable hour, or a message to someone who has…
See what you made me do to myself. When self-harm is carrying a message like that, naming the message is not dismissing it, it is looking for the thing that could be said instead.
The question can be asked kindly and straight. Do you ever get angry enough with them to want to hurt yourself so that they feel it. People often say…
An act meant to be heard rather than to end a life can still end one. Whatever you believe about the intent, lethality is a separate question and it always gets asked.
The ways this happens are ordinary and awful. A method more dangerous than the person realised. The friend who was meant to arrive, arriving late. A…
Their account makes sense from where they are standing. So does yours. Granting the first does not cost you the second.
This is the part people refuse, because they hear it as folding. It is not. You can say plainly that from where they sat it looked like that, and…
There is a steadiness worth aiming for: hearing someone disagree with you without either going off at them or going quiet and small.
Those are the two ways it usually falls over. Either the temper goes and the point is lost, or the confidence goes and you find yourself agreeing…
While the feeling is at full volume, no argument gets through, including a good one of your own. Settle the body first and talk afterwards.
Reasoning with someone at their peak, or with yourself, nearly always adds heat rather than sense. The order that works is calm, then conversation:…