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Areas › Anger › When anger turns to harm
People tend to collapse this in one direction or the other. Either the frightening one is the truth and every kind thing was an act, or the kind one is the truth and that night did not really count. Holding both is harder, and it is the only version that allows honest accountability, because someone can own what they did without having to accept that it is the whole of who they are. Nobody is exempt from this either. Push anyone far enough and there is somebody in there they have not met.
If anger in your home has become frightening for anyone, self help is not the right tool. Please reach for real help.
Anyone who does evil or wrongs his own soul and then asks God for forgiveness will find Him most forgiving and merciful (Quran 4:110). The deed is called what it is, and the person is still addressed as someone with a way back.
النساء
وَمَن يَعۡمَلۡ سُوٓءًا أَوۡ يَظۡلِمۡ نَفۡسَهُۥ ثُمَّ يَسۡتَغۡفِرِ ٱللَّهَ يَجِدِ ٱللَّهَ غَفُورࣰ ا رَّحِيمࣰ ا
Yet anyone who does evil or wrongs his own soul and then asks God for forgiveness will find Him most forgiving and merciful
Qur’an 4:110read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A cluster randomised trial with 1,345 children tested a whole school approach built on mentalisation, the skill of reading what is going on in another mind, against psychiatric consultation and usual care for reducing aggression and victimisation. That such an approach was worth testing at that scale reflects how central this capacity is thought to be. It was a school trial with children, so it speaks to the idea rather than to what happens between adults at home.
Fonagy P, Twemlow SW, Vernberg EM, Nelson JM, Dill EJ, Little TD, Sargent JA. (2009). A cluster randomized controlled trial of child-focused psychiatric consultation and a school systems-focused intervention to reduce aggression.. Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
A person can face what they did when facing it does not require giving up their entire sense of themselves.
Harm that comes out of feeling threatened and harm that is done coldly, to get something, are not one problem wearing two faces. Before deciding what would help, work out which one you are looking at.
When someone introduces themselves as an abuser, take the word seriously without treating it as the finding. A label names a category of offence, not what is actually going on in them.
Some of what a person does to a partner is not defence and not temper. It is a script they watched at home, absorbed as ordinary, and never once held up to the light.