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Areas › Anger › What anger actually is
Drop the first half and you get a lecture nobody listens to. Drop the second and you end up admiring something that hurt people. Said properly it sounds like this: I can see there is real force in you, and I am not going to pretend last Tuesday was acceptable. That pairing is what keeps a hard conversation from collapsing into either flattery or a telling off.
I do not pretend to be blameless (Quran 12:53). Said by a prophet about himself, which is the tone to aim for: honest about the conduct, not contemptuous of the person.
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.
Research developing a standard measure of guilt and shame proneness separates guilt about a particular action from shame about the whole self, and the two predict different behaviour, with guilt the one tied to putting things right. Aiming at the act rather than the person has something behind it. It was measure development in general samples, so it describes tendencies rather than prescribing how to speak to anyone.
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.
People will hear an objection from somebody who has not written them off.
Anger runs through all of you at once, in the breath, the muscles, the gut and the thinking. Which means there is more than one door into it.
The hardest anger to put down is the kind that feels morally correct. It arrives with a rush of certainty and the sense of being on the right side, and that combination is very hard to argue with.
If you have been told all your life that you are too negative, some of that is standard human wiring. Bad news gets more attention than good, in everyone, because it always did.