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Areas › Anger › What anger actually is
Alongside that, the greys vanish and everything feels unusually clear. That clarity is convincing and it is the least trustworthy part of the whole experience. If you catch yourself certain about what somebody deserves, that is a moment to slow down rather than a moment to speak.
Do not let hatred of others lead you away from justice, but adhere to justice (Quran 5:8). The verse takes the pull for granted and asks you to hold a line against your own certainty.
المائدة
يَٰٓأَيُّهَا ٱلَّذِينَ ءَامَنُواْ كُونُواْ قَوَّٰمِينَ لِلَّهِ شُهَدَآءَ بِٱلۡقِسۡطِۖ وَلَا يَجۡرِمَنَّكُمۡ شَنَـَٔانُ قَوۡمٍ عَلَىٰٓ أَلَّا تَعۡدِلُواْۚ ٱعۡدِلُواْ هُوَ أَقۡرَبُ لِلتَّقۡوَىٰۖ وَٱتَّقُواْ ٱللَّهَۚ إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ خَبِيرُۢ بِمَا تَعۡمَلُونَ
You who believe, be steadfast in your devotion to God and bear witness impartially: do not let hatred of others lead you away from justice, but adhere to justice, for that is closer to awareness of God. Be mindful of God: God is well aware of all that you do
Qur’an 5:8read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
In a survey of 335 hospital nurses, rigid beliefs about how other people ought to behave, together with a tendency to dwell on slights, predicted whether anger got bottled up or came out destructively. It is a single cross-sectional workplace sample, so it shows the beliefs and the anger style sitting together rather than one producing the other. Even so, it points at the shoulds as something worth working on directly.
Ham EM, You MJ. (2018). Role of Irrational Beliefs and Anger Rumination on Nurses' Anger Expression Styles.. Workplace health & safety doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Anger works by narrowing what you can see, and certainty is what a narrowed view feels like from the inside.
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.
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.
The energy behind your anger is not waste. People who feel strongly about what is wrong are often the ones who end up changing something.