Loading practices
Loading practices
Areas › Anger › What anger actually is
A dog growling at something it is unsure about is doing the same job. The useful part is that the mutter arrives early, well before any shouting, which makes it a good tripwire. Catch yourself doing it and you have found the moment where there is still room to choose.
God inspired it [to know] its own rebellion and piety (Quran 91:8). You are given the capacity to read your own state honestly, and the mutter is one of the easier things to read.
الشمس
فَأَلۡهَمَهَا فُجُورَهَا وَتَقۡوَىٰهَا
and inspired it [to know] its own rebellion and piety
Qur’an 91:8read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
In a brain stimulation experiment, damping down a region involved in holding back impulses increased both impulsive movement and retaliation after a provocation. That supports the idea of a narrow window in which restraint is still possible, which is an argument for catching anger at the muttering stage rather than the shouting stage. It was a small laboratory study, and the window it implies has not been measured in ordinary life.
Dambacher F, Sack AT, Lobbestael J, Arntz A, Brugman S, Schuhmann T. (2015). Out of control: evidence for anterior insula involvement in motor impulsivity and reactive aggression.. Social cognitive and affective neuroscience doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
The early signals come while you can still act on them, and the later ones mostly do not.
Being late on purpose, the joke with an edge, the job done just badly enough: that is anger at full strength, only sent by a quieter route.
Your family had its own rules about anger, quite apart from anything cultural. Those are the ones that shaped you, and they can be renegotiated.
Anger turned inwards covers two very different things. One is turning on yourself, the other is suffering where somebody can see it so that they feel the weight of it.