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Areas › Anger › What anger actually is
People often hear this as a way of lowering them. It runs the other way. A creature with old defensive equipment reacting fast to a threat is behaving normally, which leaves you answerable for what you do next rather than for what you are. Most of the shame people carry about their temper is attached to the wrong half of that.
Man was truly created anxious (Quran 70:19). The restlessness is stated as part of how the creature is made.
المعارج
۞إِنَّ ٱلۡإِنسَٰنَ خُلِقَ هَلُوعًا
Man was truly created anxious
Qur’an 70:19read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
Work developing a standard measure of guilt and shame proneness separates guilt about an action from shame about the self, and the two predict different behaviour, with guilt the one tied to putting things right. That is exactly the distinction being drawn here. It was measure development in general samples, so it describes tendencies rather than telling you how to talk to yourself.
Cohen TR, Wolf ST, Panter AT, Insko CA. (2011). Introducing the GASP scale: a new measure of guilt and shame proneness.. Journal of personality and social psychology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Shame about what you are has nowhere to go, while responsibility for what you did comes with a next step in it.
Anger is a bit like fingernails where claws used to be. Still there, still occasionally useful, mostly not what the situation is asking for.
Some reactions are pure reflex, some are feelings, and some are really stories about yourself. What helps differs for each, so it is worth knowing which you are dealing with.
If you swallow it all day at work and it comes out at home, home is not where the problem is. It is just the safest place to put it down.