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Areas › Anger › Making it stick
Ask for the mechanism in one plain sentence: this repeated thing grows that capacity. Write it somewhere you will actually see it. When the practice starts to feel like busywork, and it will, that sentence is what you argue back with.
Man will only have what he has worked towards (Quran 53:39). Understanding the mechanism matters only because it makes the work more likely to happen.
النجم
وَأَن لَّيۡسَ لِلۡإِنسَٰنِ إِلَّا مَا سَعَىٰ
that man will only have what he has worked towards
Qur’an 53:39read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
Among people who completed an intensive DBT outpatient programme, the amount of skills homework they actually did predicted how much they changed, though that was observed within a treatment group rather than tested by assigning practice at random. A separate randomised trial built a mobile app for veterans with dysregulated anger precisely because good treatments get undermined when people stop practising. Neither study measured belief in the rationale itself, so treat this as a reason to care about the reps rather than proof that a good explanation produces them.
Edwards ER, Kober H, Rinne GR, Griffin SA, Axelrod S, Cooney EB. (2021). Skills-homework completion and phone coaching as predictors of therapeutic change and outcomes in completers of a DBT intensive outpatient programme.. Psychology and psychotherapy doi
Mackintosh MA, Niehaus J, Taft CT, Marx BP, Grubbs K, Morland LA. (2017). Using a Mobile Application in the Treatment of Dysregulated Anger Among Veterans.. Military medicine doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
You keep doing things you can see the point of, and quietly drop the ones you cannot.
This goes the way learning a bicycle went. You could not, then you could but only with all of your attention, then one day you rode without thinking about it. The middle bit is the ugly bit.
If the word mindfulness makes you wince, leave the word out. Paying attention to your breath, or to the sounds in the room, is the whole of it.
Knowing something calmly and feeling it are two separate achievements, and the second takes longer. If you can say the reasonable thing but it does not touch how you feel, you are partway, not failing.