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Areas › Anger › Righteous anger and perfectionism
Watch for it in small moments. You snap at someone for being slow, and if you are honest you would have flayed yourself for exactly the same thing. There is rarely a second, kinder rulebook kept in reserve for other people. So pick one thing you would forgive in a friend, practise forgiving it in yourself, and then see whether your patience with them shifts.
God wishes to lighten your burden; man was created weak (Quran 4:28). Weakness is written into the design, yours as much as theirs.
النساء
يُرِيدُ ٱللَّهُ أَن يُخَفِّفَ عَنكُمۡۚ وَخُلِقَ ٱلۡإِنسَٰنُ ضَعِيفࣰ ا
God wishes to lighten your burden; man was created weak
Qur’an 4:28read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A systematic review and meta-analysis of trials found that interventions built around self-compassion do reduce self-criticism. That matters here because it means the inner harshness can be trained down rather than being fixed. What was measured was self-criticism itself, so reading it as evidence about your temper with other people goes a step past the data.
Wakelin KE, Perman G, Simonds LM. (2022). Effectiveness of self-compassion-related interventions for reducing self-criticism: A systematic review and meta-analysis.. Clinical psychology & psychotherapy doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
You measure other people with the same instrument you use on yourself, so softening it softens both.
Anger runs on the word should, and should is a word about debt. Write out what you believe this person owes you, then mark which of those they ever actually agreed to.
If you carry a firm picture of how the world is supposed to work, the world will break it several times a day. No coping skill outpaces a supply of grievance that never runs out.
Anger sticks around because it works, at least in the short run. Before trying to put it down, be honest about what it has been buying you.