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Areas › Anger › Choosing your response
Under threat, attention narrows onto the person in front of you and everything else falls away: what happened before you walked in, who else is in the house, what sort of week it has been. Widening it is not a trick for feeling better. It puts back the information a fair reading needs.
Repel evil with good (Quran 23:96). The verse adds that what people really say is known to God anyway, so you are free to look wider than the person in front of you.
المؤمنون
ٱدۡفَعۡ بِٱلَّتِي هِيَ أَحۡسَنُ ٱلسَّيِّئَةَۚ نَحۡنُ أَعۡلَمُ بِمَا يَصِفُونَ
Repel evil with good- We are well aware of what they attribute to Us
Qur’an 23:96read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
The alcohol myopia account, set out in a theoretical review, holds that alcohol narrows attention onto the most obvious provoking cues at the expense of the ones that would hold a person back, which is why intoxicated people act on anger they might otherwise contain. Narrowed attention and lost restraint travel together. It is a proposed explanation drawn from a body of work rather than one decisive test.
Giancola PR, Josephs RA, Parrott DJ, Duke AA. (2010). Alcohol Myopia Revisited: Clarifying Aggression and Other Acts of Disinhibition Through a Distorted Lens.. Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
A narrow view leaves you with nobody but the person in front of you to blame.
It is less anger management than learning to hold an impulse without acting on it. That is a skill, and skills can be learned in a way that characters cannot.
None of this is thought stopping. You are learning to let an angry thought pass through you, not to crush it before it finishes forming.
You will hear that this training gets your thinking brain talking to your alarm brain and widens your margins. That story is reasonable, and it is still a story, so judge the method by what changes in your week.