Loading practices
Loading practices
Areas › Anger › What anger actually is
It is why you can be perfectly reasonable about a broken arm and still be turning over what somebody said at a wedding a decade ago. The memory keeps getting reopened, and the reopening is what keeps it sore. So the thing to work on is not the original event, which is long finished, but how often you go back and press on it.
Those who came after them pray that God will leave no malice in our hearts towards those who believe (Quran 59:10). The prayer is about the residue rather than the incident, and the residue is where old anger actually lives.
الحشر
وَٱلَّذِينَ جَآءُو مِنۢ بَعۡدِهِمۡ يَقُولُونَ رَبَّنَا ٱغۡفِرۡ لَنَا وَلِإِخۡوَٰنِنَا ٱلَّذِينَ سَبَقُونَا بِٱلۡإِيمَٰنِ وَلَا تَجۡعَلۡ فِي قُلُوبِنَا غِلࣰّ ا لِّلَّذِينَ ءَامَنُواْ رَبَّنَآ إِنَّكَ رَءُوفࣱ رَّحِيمٌ
Those who came after them say, ‘Lord, forgive us our sins and the sins of our brothers who believed before us, and leave no malice in our hearts towards those who believe. Lord, You are truly compassionate and merciful.’
Qur’an 59:10read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
In three small experimental studies, people who dwelt on past provocations, guilt inducing events and sad times judged those events to have happened more recently than they really had. Dwelling seems to pull the past forward, which fits the sense that an old slight is somehow still live. The studies were small and run in a lab, so they describe a tendency rather than measure your particular grudge.
Siedlecka E, Capper MM, Denson TF. (2015). Negative emotional events that people ruminate about feel closer in time.. PloS one doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
The event ended a long time ago, and what keeps hurting is the returning to it.
The cooler, story-shaped anger is not the safer one. It lasts, it gets rehearsed, and it has time to make plans.
For most people anger is weather that passes. For some it is closer to climate: quicker to arrive, bigger when it lands, slower to leave.
Live under enough strain for long enough and anger stops being an event. It settles into a new normal, and it can feel as though your character has changed.