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Areas › Anger › What anger actually is
The difference is not how hot it gets but what happens afterwards. For the quick one, the work sits in the seconds before it goes. For the slow one, the flare was never the issue, and the effort should go on why it will not come down. If you have been handed tips meant for the other kind, that is probably why none of it has helped.
When Moses' anger abated, he picked up the Tablets (Quran 7:154). A downslope is assumed there, and the brooding sort of anger is the one where the downslope never quite arrives.
الأعراف
وَلَمَّا سَكَتَ عَن مُّوسَى ٱلۡغَضَبُ أَخَذَ ٱلۡأَلۡوَاحَۖ وَفِي نُسۡخَتِهَا هُدࣰ ى وَرَحۡمَةࣱ لِّلَّذِينَ هُمۡ لِرَبِّهِمۡ يَرۡهَبُونَ
When Moses’ anger abated, he picked up the Tablets, on which were inscribed guidance and mercy for those who stood in awe of their Lord
Qur’an 7:154read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
Laboratory work found that recalling an anger provoking event was not itself the problem: going back over it kept the anger going and kept blood pressure raised, while rethinking the same memory brought both down. That is direct support for treating the dwelling as its own target rather than as a milder version of exploding. The studies were small and done in a lab, with the usual gap between that and a bad week at home.
Ray RD, Wilhelm FH, Gross JJ. (2008). All in the mind's eye? Anger rumination and reappraisal.. Journal of personality and social psychology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
One kind of anger has trouble starting and the other has trouble stopping, and the fixes are not the same.
Anger is something you feel. Aggression is something you do. Keeping those apart is what makes the rest of this possible.
Anger works by sorting the world into me and not me. Once someone has landed on the wrong side of that line, everything they do starts reading as evidence.
A lot of anger carries a hidden demand: you damaged how I feel about myself, so now you restore it. That leaves your steadiness in somebody else's hands.