Loading practices
Loading practices
Areas › Anger › What anger actually is
Saying this plainly is not gloom. If you expect people to be naturally peaceable, an aggressive impulse looks like a monstrous exception, and you either panic about it or refuse to look at it. Expecting it lets you ask the ordinary practical questions: what makes it more likely for this person, what is in the house, who else is there when it happens.
man's very soul incites him to evil unless my Lord shows mercy (Quran 12:53). Said by a prophet about himself, which sets an honest baseline for the rest of us.
يوسف
۞وَمَآ أُبَرِّئُ نَفۡسِيٓۚ إِنَّ ٱلنَّفۡسَ لَأَمَّارَةُۢ بِٱلسُّوٓءِ إِلَّا مَا رَحِمَ رَبِّيٓۚ إِنَّ رَبِّي غَفُورࣱ رَّحِيمࣱ
I do not pretend to be blameless, for man’s very soul incites him to evil unless my Lord shows mercy: He is most forgiving, most merciful.’
Qur’an 12:53read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A meta-analysis of youth aggression found that empathy had only a small inverse relationship with aggressive behaviour, while callous and unemotional traits predicted it more strongly. Aggression cannot be read off as simply a failure to feel for others, which is a caution against the tidy explanations. It pooled studies of young people, so the picture in adults may differ.
Ritchie MB, Neufeld RWJ, Yoon M, Li A, Mitchell DGV. (2022). Predicting youth aggression with empathy and callous unemotional traits: A Meta-analytic review.. Clinical psychology review doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
You can only assess a risk steadily once you have accepted that it exists.
Anger moves from person to person in a house, and so does steadiness. Working on your own reactions was never a private project.
Letting it all out does not drain the anger off. Every rehearsal of the row, out loud or in your head, is practice, and practice makes the response easier to reach next time.
For most people anger is weather that passes. For some it is closer to climate: quicker to arrive, bigger when it lands, slower to leave.