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Areas › Anger › The moment before you snap
Holding it in has you clamped shut and seething. Letting it out has you saying things you will be repairing for weeks. The third one feels like doing nothing and is not: you are awake, you are watching, you are simply not moving yet. Most people have never been shown that it exists, which is why they keep choosing between the two that do not work.
repel evil with what is better and your enemy will become as close as an old and valued friend (Quran 41:34). Something better than both silence and retaliation is named as available, not merely wished for.
فصلت
وَلَا تَسۡتَوِي ٱلۡحَسَنَةُ وَلَا ٱلسَّيِّئَةُۚ ٱدۡفَعۡ بِٱلَّتِي هِيَ أَحۡسَنُ فَإِذَا ٱلَّذِي بَيۡنَكَ وَبَيۡنَهُۥ عَدَٰوَةࣱ كَأَنَّهُۥ وَلِيٌّ حَمِيمࣱ
Good and evil cannot be equal. [Prophet], repel evil with what is better and your enemy will become as close as an old and valued friend
Qur’an 41:34read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
Laboratory experiments found that bringing an anger provoking memory to mind was not itself the problem. Chewing it over kept the anger going and pushed blood pressure up, while reinterpreting the same memory brought both down. That is two quite different things to do with the same material, and neither is pushing it away. These were brief studies using recalled events rather than live arguments.
Ray RD, Wilhelm FH, Gross JJ. (2008). All in the mind's eye? Anger rumination and reappraisal.. Journal of personality and social psychology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Watching a feeling gives it somewhere to go that is neither pushed down nor acted out.
In a bad moment your attention, your seeing and your remembering all narrow onto the threat. So your memory of the row is a partial recording, and so is theirs.
Sometimes you dislike a person or a room before you can say why. The fast part of you stores feelings, not explanations, so the reaction arrives whole and wordless.
Your body knows before you have words for it. A tightening jaw or a hot face is the first news, and it arrives well before any thought about what they meant by that.