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Areas › Anger › What anger actually is
Try naming what the anger is standing up for before deciding what to do with it. People are not angry about things they are indifferent to. Once you can say the caring part out loud, there is often a way to say it that gets heard, which the anger on its own rarely manages.
And defend themselves when they are oppressed (Quran 42:39). Standing up for yourself sits inside a list of the qualities of believers, which says something about anger having a job to do.
الشورى
وَٱلَّذِينَ إِذَآ أَصَابَهُمُ ٱلۡبَغۡيُ هُمۡ يَنتَصِرُونَ
and defend themselves when they are oppressed
Qur’an 42:39read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
In a randomised trial of skills training for people with borderline personality disorder, part of how the treatment worked was by shifting people away from destructive or bottled up anger towards assertive anger, meaning anger that states a need instead of attacking. That is one trial in one clinical group, so how far the shift carries elsewhere is unknown. It does suggest the target is the form the anger takes rather than the anger itself.
Kramer U, Pascual-Leone A, Berthoud L, de Roten Y, Marquet P, Kolly S, Despland JN, Page D. (2016). Assertive Anger Mediates Effects of Dialectical Behaviour-informed Skills Training for Borderline Personality Disorder: A Randomized Controlled Trial.. Clinical psychology & psychotherapy doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Anger that can name what it wants is able to ask for it, and asking works better than attacking.
Skills rehearsed in total calm tend to vanish at the moment you need them. Practise on something still slightly warm, a real incident from this week, close enough that you feel a little of it.
The cooler, story-shaped anger is not the safer one. It lasts, it gets rehearsed, and it has time to make plans.
What overpowered Darwin at that glass was not the snake. It was his picture of what the snake was about to do, and that is usually what overpowers you too.