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Areas › Anger › The moment before you snap
Losing yourself in the taste of a coffee is a lovely practice and it is not this one. Going all the way into a feeling makes it bigger, which is welcome for pleasure and unhelpful when your chest is tight and you are rehearsing what to say. Here you want the small distance instead: this is anger, it is here, I am watching it move.
who restrain their anger and pardon people (Quran 3:134). What is praised is restraint while the anger is present, which is a different thing from not feeling it.
آل عمران
ٱلَّذِينَ يُنفِقُونَ فِي ٱلسَّرَّآءِ وَٱلضَّرَّآءِ وَٱلۡكَٰظِمِينَ ٱلۡغَيۡظَ وَٱلۡعَافِينَ عَنِ ٱلنَّاسِۗ وَٱللَّهُ يُحِبُّ ٱلۡمُحۡسِنِينَ
who give, both in prosperity and adversity, who restrain their anger and pardon people- God loves those who do good
Qur’an 3:134read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
In a laboratory task with 69 couples, aggression was highest where dwelling on the provocation was high, reinterpreting it was low, and alcohol was involved, and those factors combined rather than acting one at a time. Sinking further into the feeling sits on the wrong side of that picture. It was a laboratory measure of aggression in a small sample, not behaviour observed at home.
Watkins LE, DiLillo D, Maldonado RC. (2015). The interactive effects of emotion regulation and alcohol intoxication on lab-based intimate partner aggression.. Psychology of addictive behaviors : journal of the Society of Psychologists in Addictive Behaviors doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Getting closer to a feeling turns the volume up, and with anger the volume is the problem.
Picture a quick accelerator and a sluggish brake. In the moment the useful question is not "am I right", it is "which pedal is my foot on".
Try sorting whatever passes through your mind into three: good for me, bad for me, or neither. That third option is real, and most of us forget it is there.
There was a moment when the urge came up and you watched it instead of acting. Notice that, mark the date if you can, because that is your proof it is possible.