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Areas › Anger › Choosing your response
Anger work arrives with a lot of moralising attached, and most people have had their fill of being told what sort of person to be. A lighter framing gets done more often and comes back to you more readily under pressure. Nothing about the playfulness makes the practice less serious, it only removes a reason to resist it.
A kind word and forgiveness is better than a charitable deed followed by hurtful [words] (Quran 2:263). The manner a thing is done in is treated as part of its substance, not as decoration laid on top.
البقرة
۞قَوۡلࣱ مَّعۡرُوفࣱ وَمَغۡفِرَةٌ خَيۡرࣱ مِّن صَدَقَةࣲ يَتۡبَعُهَآ أَذࣰ ىۗ وَٱللَّهُ غَنِيٌّ حَلِيمࣱ
A kind word and forgiveness is better than a charitable deed followed by hurtful [words]: God is self-sufficient, forbearing
Qur’an 2:263read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
In a laboratory study, going over an angry episode repeatedly kept cardiovascular arousal raised, while a competing visual and spatial task cut across the imagery and the physical load with it. What the interrupting task never needed was any seriousness of purpose. It was a short study of induced anger, so it speaks to the mechanism of interruption rather than to the value of a light touch.
McClelland AB, Jones KV, Douglas Gregg ME. (2009). Psychological and cumulative cardiovascular effects of repeated angry rumination and visuospatial suppression.. International journal of psychophysiology : official journal of the International Organization of Psychophysiology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
You keep doing the things that feel light and quietly drop the things that feel like a telling off.
Put your small interruption right before the moment you already know is hard. If it is the drive home, do it as you get into the car.
No medicine installs a skill. Staying steady when you are provoked is closer to a language you practise than to something anyone can prescribe you.
What changes things is what you actually rehearse. Advice you agreed with does very little on its own.