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Areas › Anger › Equanimity and perspective
It has to be a real question. The rhetorical version, asked with your jaw set, makes things worse and both of you know it. Ask, then stay quiet long enough to hear an answer that might not fit what you had already decided.
He has the keys to the unseen: no one knows them but Him (Quran 6:59). Some of what you are furious about sits in what you do not yet know.
الأنعام
۞وَعِندَهُۥ مَفَاتِحُ ٱلۡغَيۡبِ لَا يَعۡلَمُهَآ إِلَّا هُوَۚ وَيَعۡلَمُ مَا فِي ٱلۡبَرِّ وَٱلۡبَحۡرِۚ وَمَا تَسۡقُطُ مِن وَرَقَةٍ إِلَّا يَعۡلَمُهَا وَلَا حَبَّةࣲ فِي ظُلُمَٰتِ ٱلۡأَرۡضِ وَلَا رَطۡبࣲ وَلَا يَابِسٍ إِلَّا فِي كِتَٰبࣲ مُّبِينࣲ
He has the keys to the unseen: no one knows them but Him. He knows all that is in the land and sea. No leaf falls without His knowledge, nor is there a single grain in the darkness of the earth, or anything, fresh or withered, that is not written in a clear Record
Qur’an 6:59read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
Across two different therapies for generalised anxiety disorder, people improved as they became better at seeing thoughts as passing events rather than facts, which suggests a mechanism shared by both. Holding your account of an argument as one possible account is the same move in miniature. This comes from analysis inside trials rather than a study built to test that step on its own.
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.
Anger runs on certainty, and nobody can be certain and genuinely curious in the same moment.
Loosening your grip on who you take yourself to be can go further than you meant it to. Go a little way, then come back to something solid.
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.
You get one life, and spending the whole of it at war with how it turned out is a heavy price to pay for being right.