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Areas › Anger › Choosing your response
This is why everything useful in this work sits early: noticing sooner, waiting before you answer, settling on your line before you knock on the door. After you have committed, most of the effort goes into damage limitation, which is a poor use of the same energy. If you are going to spend attention anywhere, spend it in the seconds before the commitment.
If Satan should prompt you to do something, seek refuge with God (Quran 7:200). The turn is placed right at the prompting, before anything has been done, which is where it costs least.
الأعراف
وَإِمَّا يَنزَغَنَّكَ مِنَ ٱلشَّيۡطَٰنِ نَزۡغࣱ فَٱسۡتَعِذۡ بِٱللَّهِۚ إِنَّهُۥ سَمِيعٌ عَلِيمٌ
If Satan should prompt you to do something, seek refuge with God- He is all hearing, all knowing
Qur’an 7:200read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
In a randomised laboratory experiment, how people thought about an anger provoking memory decided where they ended up, with reinterpreting bringing anger down and going over it keeping anger going. The handling came before the outcome, rather than the outcome being fixed by the event itself. It was a single session with recalled events in volunteers, so it demonstrates the point rather than proving what happens in a live quarrel.
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.
The cheapest place to change what happens is before it has started.
Choosing has two halves: seeing that there is more than one thing you could do, and then actually taking one. Failing at either looks identical from outside and needs quite different work.
You will hear that this training gets your thinking brain talking to your alarm brain and widens your margins. That story is reasonable, and it is still a story, so judge the method by what changes in your week.
Open with the difficulty instead of the accusation. "This is hard for me to say" and "I am worried you will not like this" buy you a hearing that "you always" never will.