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Areas › Anger › Choosing your response
The names differ: watching from the bank of a river, cognitive distancing, defusion, wise mind. Underneath them the step is the same, which is noticing the thought as something passing through instead of as an instruction. When methods built separately converge on one move, that move is worth learning properly rather than sampling.
Those who are aware of God think of Him when Satan prompts them to do something and immediately they can see [straight] (Quran 7:201). The prompting still arrives, and what changes is where the person is standing when it does.
الأعراف
إِنَّ ٱلَّذِينَ ٱتَّقَوۡاْ إِذَا مَسَّهُمۡ طَٰٓئِفࣱ مِّنَ ٱلشَّيۡطَٰنِ تَذَكَّرُواْ فَإِذَا هُم مُّبۡصِرُونَ
those who are aware of God think of Him when Satan prompts them to do something and immediately they can see [straight]
Qur’an 7:201read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A meta-analysis of how emotion regulation strategies relate to one another found that they cluster into broad families, so which technique you pick matters less than whether your overall stance is engaging with the feeling or turning away from it. That fits the idea that the shared move is the working part rather than any one brand of it. The analysis is about how measures group together, not a head to head test of which method helps most.
Naragon-Gainey K, McMahon TP, Chacko TP. (2017). The structure of common emotion regulation strategies: A meta-analytic examination.. Psychological bulletin doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Seeing a thought as a thought gives you somewhere to stand while it goes past.
Before you walk out, say three things: this is getting heated, I need a bit of space, I will be back and we will carry on. The sentence is the skill, not the walking.
There is no point reasoning with yourself while you are still lit up. Wake the part of you that does the reasoning first, then hand it the problem.
There are two ways to widen the gap between being provoked and responding: get better at noticing, and get better at choosing. They are separate skills, and having both means one can cover for the other.