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Areas › Anger › Practising under provocation
It might be as ordinary as noticing that this person does not know you, or that none of this will matter next week. Write it down while you still remember the exact wording, because the exact wording is what you will reach for next time. Borrowed coping lines tend to evaporate under pressure. Yours tend to stay.
Those who are aware of God think of Him when Satan prompts them to do something and immediately they can see [straight] (Quran 7:201). One remembered thought at the right moment is enough to clear the view.
الأعراف
إِنَّ ٱلَّذِينَ ٱتَّقَوۡاْ إِذَا مَسَّهُمۡ طَٰٓئِفࣱ مِّنَ ٱلشَّيۡطَٰنِ تَذَكَّرُواْ فَإِذَا هُم مُّبۡصِرُونَ
those who are aware of God think of Him when Satan prompts them to do something and immediately they can see [straight]
Qur’an 7:201read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
In a laboratory experiment, how people mentally handled a recent anger provoking event, rather than simply whether they went back over it, determined how much anger stayed with them. What you do with the memory is the variable. It was a controlled study of a recalled event, so it points at the mechanism rather than measuring day to day life.
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.
A line you came up with yourself is already proven to work on you.
If you have someone safe to do it with, ask them to say the thing you dread being thought about you, on purpose, while you practise staying level.
The cure for feeling small is not winning the exchange. It is getting to a place where you no longer need to win it.
Ask yourself what you would least like the person in front of you to be thinking about you right now. Whatever surfaces is usually what your anger has been guarding.