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Areas › Anger › The moment before you snap
The point of the image is that it gives you somewhere to sit. Being told to observe your thoughts is abstract, while a bank and a river gives your attention an actual place to stand and a direction to look. Nothing in the water has to change. You are only practising being the one who watches it, which is much easier than it sounds when nobody has given you a spot.
Against the harm of the slinking whisperer (Quran 114:4). The whisperer is described as something that slinks in and away again, which is a useful reminder that what passes through you is not the same as you.
الناس
مِن شَرِّ ٱلۡوَسۡوَاسِ ٱلۡخَنَّاسِ
against the harm of the slinking whisperer––
Qur’an 114:4read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
In a randomised controlled trial, brief internet delivered treatments teaching mindful awareness of emotion reduced problematic anger, and so did treatments teaching reinterpretation, with no clear advantage to combining the two. Learning to stand back and notice was enough to shift the anger for a fair number of people. It was a short therapist supported programme, so it supports the direction rather than promising a particular result.
Bjureberg J, Ojala O, Berg A, Edvardsson E, Kolbeinsson Ö, Molander O, Morin E, Nordgren L, Palme K, Särnholm J, Wedin L, Rück C, Gross JJ, Hesser H. (2023). Targeting maladaptive anger with brief therapist-supported internet-delivered emotion regulation treatments: A randomized controlled trial.. Journal of consulting and clinical psychology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Once you have a place to watch from, a thought becomes something passing by rather than something you are inside.
That small press of your own finger does two jobs. It marks the thought, and it gives you a bit of contact with yourself while everything around you is loud.
If you want to start noticing what goes on inside you, start with the urges. The pull to speak, to stand up, to say the cutting thing: those have a push behind them that thoughts and moods do not.
The part of you that reacts can be trained. The figure usually quoted is around eight weeks of small daily practice, not one weekend of good intentions.