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Areas › Anger › Choosing your response
Treat a hard evening as a run of small forks rather than one big test you pass or fail. Reply now or in an hour. Say the sentence or leave it. Stay in the kitchen or step outside. Each fork you actually notice hands you the steering for a second, and going the wrong way at one of them is not the end, because another is coming.
Repel evil with good (Quran 23:96). It is put as one move to make at the time, and it is there again the next time, and the time after that.
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.
In a randomised laboratory experiment, people who recalled an anger provoking event ended up in quite different places depending on how they thought about it, with reinterpreting bringing anger down and going over it keeping anger up. What you do with the memory mattered more than whether it turned up. It was a single session with a recalled event in volunteers, so it is a demonstration rather than a treatment.
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.
More forks noticed means more chances to go a different way.
Knowing you have other options and taking one are different things. Somewhere in there is the moment the choice actually gets made, and that moment is what you want to train.
The circle was never the point. Any break in a running routine will do, because the break itself is what puts you back in the driving seat for a moment.
Not taking things personally is a question rather than a personality. The question is short: was that aimed at me, or was I simply standing there?