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Areas › Anger › What you are actually defending
Being seen properly by others is lovely, and it is also occasional, partial and outside your control. What you can do daily is notice what you did well, what you meant by it and what you stood by, even when nobody mentions it. Over time being misread stops feeling like a threat and starts feeling like an error of theirs, which is usually what it is.
The one who purifies his soul succeeds (Quran 91:9). The measure named there is inward work, not the verdict of the room.
الشمس
قَدۡ أَفۡلَحَ مَن زَكَّىٰهَا
The one who purifies his soul succeeds
Qur’an 91:9read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A systematic review and meta-analysis of compassion focused approaches found they improved self-esteem, while noting the evidence base was small and of mixed quality. There is some support, then, for building a kinder inward view rather than chasing a better outward one. Small and mixed means promising rather than proven.
Thomason S, Moghaddam N. (2021). Compassion-focused therapies for self-esteem: A systematic review and meta-analysis.. Psychology and psychotherapy doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
When your worth is something you can see for yourself, another person's opinion stops being a verdict.
A lot of angry certainty is frightened certainty. Needing to know exactly what is going on, and exactly who is at fault, is more comfortable than admitting the situation cannot be fully read.
Your mind is always slightly behind what is happening. Reality moves and you are the response, which leaves you permanently a step late and permanently not quite sure.
Feeling good about yourself is not the safe end of this. The high and the low come from the same borrowed source, which means the high can be taken back at any point.