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Areas › Anger › Anger, alcohol and the body
Write anger into the relapse plan by name, alongside the parties, the old friends and the difficult anniversary. Then when you look at the anger, ask what had been drunk or taken in the days around each flare. Both questions belong on the same page. It is rarely that someone lacked willpower on the day, it is that each half of the loop keeps quietly restocking the other.
Do not follow Satan's footsteps, for he is your sworn enemy (Quran 2:168). Footsteps is the right word for it, since neither of these ever arrives all at once.
البقرة
يَٰٓأَيُّهَا ٱلنَّاسُ كُلُواْ مِمَّا فِي ٱلۡأَرۡضِ حَلَٰلࣰ ا طَيِّبࣰ ا وَلَا تَتَّبِعُواْ خُطُوَٰتِ ٱلشَّيۡطَٰنِۚ إِنَّهُۥ لَكُمۡ عَدُوࣱّ مُّبِينٌ
People, eat what is good and lawful from the earth, and do not follow Satan’s footsteps, for he is your sworn enemy
Qur’an 2:168read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
In a laboratory aggression task with 69 couples, intoxication acted as a disinhibitor and amplified the effect of anger rumination on aggression towards a partner. The two did not merely add up, one made the other bigger. It was a lab task with a modest sample, so it supports the shape of the loop rather than telling you how tight it gets in a real household.
Watkins LE, DiLillo D, Maldonado RC. (2015). The interactive effects of emotion regulation and alcohol intoxication on lab-based intimate partner aggression.. Psychology of addictive behaviors : journal of the Society of Psychologists in Addictive Behaviors doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Each of the two makes the other more likely, so working on only one leaves the wheel turning.
If use is heavy or daily, treat it as a medical matter first and get proper advice before changing anything.
Alcohol does not add anger. It takes off the brake. Stimulants do the opposite job and press harder on the accelerator, and having both in you at once is the worst arrangement of the two.
You are right that the first drink takes the edge off. That is exactly what makes it hard, and pretending otherwise would only be untrue.
Sleep, food, illness and the run of stress you have been carrying set the height of your fuse before anything has even happened. Sort those out and you are simply a calmer person that week, with no insight required.