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Areas › Anger › Choosing your response
Arguments about whether people are ultimately free go nowhere you can use. What you can check is how often you used the choice you had this week and what conditions helped. Tired, hungry, drunk, rushing, or three messages deep into a row, the capacity is technically there and practically unavailable, and every one of those is something you can arrange differently.
Let harm be requited by an equal harm, though anyone who forgives and puts things right will have his reward from God Himself (Quran 42:40). The better course is set out for everybody, and it is the taking of it that ever distinguishes anyone.
الشورى
وَجَزَٰٓؤُاْ سَيِّئَةࣲ سَيِّئَةࣱ مِّثۡلُهَاۖ فَمَنۡ عَفَا وَأَصۡلَحَ فَأَجۡرُهُۥ عَلَى ٱللَّهِۚ إِنَّهُۥ لَا يُحِبُّ ٱلظَّٰلِمِينَ
Let harm be requited by an equal harm, though anyone who forgives and puts things right will have his reward from God Himself––He does not like those who do wrong
Qur’an 42:40read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
The alcohol myopia account, drawn together in a review of this literature, holds that alcohol narrows attention onto the loudest provoking cue and away from the reasons to hold back, so people act on anger they would otherwise contain. It is a review pulling experimental work together rather than a single study. It describes one state well, and stretching the same logic to tiredness or hurry is a reasonable guess rather than a demonstrated finding.
Giancola PR, Josephs RA, Parrott DJ, Duke AA. (2010). Alcohol Myopia Revisited: Clarifying Aggression and Other Acts of Disinhibition Through a Distorted Lens.. Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Capacity you never use may as well not be there, so the target is the using.
A new response cannot be laid on top of a cycle that is still turning. Break the circle first, even clumsily, and the room for something else appears.
If your break turned into disappearing for the night, look at it as fear rather than as a discipline problem. Anger is often a way out of feeling afraid, and so is running.
Whichever response you practise is the one getting stronger. Today's small choice is not a test you pass or fail, it is a deposit.