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Areas › Anger › Equanimity and perspective
Automatic does not mean permanent. Notice which situations you keep colliding with: the same shop, the same hour of the evening, the same person's tone of voice. The repetition is a gift, because it tells you exactly what to prepare for.
Every soul will taste death (Quran 3:185). Held against that, most of what we collide with in a day turns out to be very small.
آل عمران
كُلُّ نَفۡسࣲ ذَآئِقَةُ ٱلۡمَوۡتِۗ وَإِنَّمَا تُوَفَّوۡنَ أُجُورَكُمۡ يَوۡمَ ٱلۡقِيَٰمَةِۖ فَمَن زُحۡزِحَ عَنِ ٱلنَّارِ وَأُدۡخِلَ ٱلۡجَنَّةَ فَقَدۡ فَازَۗ وَمَا ٱلۡحَيَوٰةُ ٱلدُّنۡيَآ إِلَّا مَتَٰعُ ٱلۡغُرُورِ
Every soul will taste death and you will be paid in full only on the Day of Resurrection. Whoever is kept away from the Fire and admitted to the Garden will have triumphed. The present world is only an illusory pleasure
Qur’an 3:185read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A randomised controlled trial of an attention based treatment drawing on mindfulness based cognitive therapy and dialectical behaviour therapy reduced aggression and improved anger coping in autistic school aged children. It shows that highly automatic reactions can shift when a routine is trained rather than merely intended. The population is specific and the result does not transfer wholesale to adults.
Clifford P, Gevers C, Jonkman KM, Boer F, Begeer S. (2022). The effectiveness of an attention-based intervention for school-aged autistic children with anger regulating problems: A randomized controlled trial.. Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
A reaction that fires without thinking can still be retrained by preparing for the situations that set it off.
Under most anger sits a refusal: this should not be happening. Letting the fact stand as a fact, without agreeing that it is fine, takes a surprising amount of heat out of it.
Anger has a shape before it has words. The body turns half away, a hand comes up, and the whole posture is saying no to something that has already happened.
Focus on the person and it feels personal. Widen out to what is around them, the hour, the queue, the week they are having, and it usually stops being about you.