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
6 practicesIf the thought arrives that this is going too fast and you cannot keep up, that thought gets a dot like everything else. There is no version of this you can fail.
Fast minds are common and they are not a disqualification. When too much is going past to mark, mark that. The exercise is not a race against your…
There is no accuracy to aim for here and nothing to beat. Every dot means you got back to the bank, and that is the entire scoring system.
People who are hard on themselves will turn anything into a test, and a test is the one thing that will wreck this. You are not aiming for a tidy…
If the page is covered in dots, that is not a mind that failed to settle. That is the number of times you came back.
Nearly everyone assumes the aim is a quiet head and then quits when the head refuses. Change what you are counting. Quiet is not something you can…
The black and white thinking that shows up in anger is not proof that something in you is broken. It is what a threat detector does, and threat detectors are built to be crude.
Calling it a distortion invites shame, and shame usually feeds the next flare rather than shrinking it. It helps more to say the thinking did its job…
The river is different every minute. The one sitting on the bank is the same one who sat there ten years ago, and will be there in ten more.
This is the part that offers something to people whose sense of themselves rises and falls with how they were treated that day. If who you are is the…
Some signals cannot be acted on. Ringing in the ears, an old ache, a resentment about something long finished: the alarm is real and there is nothing to answer it with.
Fighting a signal you cannot switch off lays a second misery on top of the first. People who live well with long term pain tend to do something else…