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Areas › Anger › Making it stick
Brain language feels solid and permanent, so a person can lean on it. That same weight is why it should not be stretched: promising rewiring you cannot deliver sets someone up to feel cheated the first time the old temper shows up. Say what is honest about repetition and let that be enough.
Take action! God will see your actions (Quran 9:105). The doing is what registers, so the talk around it only needs to be enough to get someone there, and true.
التوبة
وَقُلِ ٱعۡمَلُواْ فَسَيَرَى ٱللَّهُ عَمَلَكُمۡ وَرَسُولُهُۥ وَٱلۡمُؤۡمِنُونَۖ وَسَتُرَدُّونَ إِلَىٰ عَٰلِمِ ٱلۡغَيۡبِ وَٱلشَّهَٰدَةِ فَيُنَبِّئُكُم بِمَا كُنتُمۡ تَعۡمَلُونَ
Say [Prophet], ‘Take action! God will see your actions- as will His Messenger and the believers- and then you will be returned to Him who knows what is seen and unseen, and He will tell you what you have been doing
Qur’an 9:105read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A Cochrane review of relapse prevention for smoking is a useful humbling here. Extra support after quitting seemed obviously helpful, and yet most of those specific additions did not reduce the return to smoking. The review says nothing about anger or about brain language, only that intuitive appeal and real effect are different things.
Hajek P, Stead LF, West R, Jarvis M, Lancaster T. (2009). Relapse prevention interventions for smoking cessation.. The Cochrane database of systematic reviews doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
A reason that turns out to be true keeps working after the excitement of hearing it has worn off.
Nobody sees the times you did not say the cutting thing, including you a week later. Put them somewhere you can look at: one sticky note on the wall for each.
Pick the news channel you cannot stand and watch ten minutes of it on purpose. The only job is to notice what rises in you and let it go by.
The work you are doing on anger does not stay in the anger box. Learning to hold an unanswered question, or to sit with what you cannot change, turns up in worry and in low patches too.