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Areas › Anger › The moment before you snap
People who never shout often assume they do not have a problem with anger, and the people living with them know otherwise. The test is not how loud you got but where your attention went: did the room shrink to one person, did you go cold, did you stop blinking. If that is you, the same practices apply, and being quiet does not exempt you from them.
Who whispers into the hearts of people (Quran 114:5). Whispering describes something quiet and internal, which is exactly what silent anger is.
الناس
ٱلَّذِي يُوَسۡوِسُ فِي صُدُورِ ٱلنَّاسِ
who whispers into the hearts of people––
Qur’an 114:5read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
In a randomised controlled trial, internet delivered training in emotion regulation and conflict management reduced aggression towards partners among 65 people who had come forward about their own aggression, and changes in emotion regulation accounted for part of the effect. What was targeted there was how people handled the feeling, not how loudly they expressed it. It was a small self referred sample, so read it as encouraging rather than settled.
Hesser H, Axelsson S, Bäcke V, Engstrand J, Gustafsson T, Holmgren E, Jeppsson U, Pollack M, Nordén K, Rosenqvist D, Andersson G. (2017). Preventing intimate partner violence via the Internet: A randomized controlled trial of emotion-regulation and conflict-management training for individuals with aggression problems.. Clinical psychology & psychotherapy doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Naming the quiet version gives you something to work with instead of a problem nobody has admitted.
If the people at home are frightened of your silences, that is a reason to get help rather than to hold it in more tightly.
Even one go at this leaves you with something. You have seen for yourself that the anger can be handled, and that does not expire when you walk out of the room.
Whatever you fix on costs you everything else in the room. In anger the picture stops moving and the target becomes the whole of it.
Two or three seconds is long enough to say the sentence that ends a job or a marriage. That is the whole reason such a small skill is worth this much practice.