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Areas › Anger › Choosing your response
Shame teaches badly here. Telling yourself you failed at the skill tends to produce more heat, and heat is the thing you were trying to leave behind. Ask instead what you were afraid of hearing if you had gone back in, because that is what the practice actually has to get around.
If Satan should prompt you to do something, seek refuge with God (Quran 7:200). When the urge to run arrives, the move is to turn towards God, not to turn on yourself.
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 controlled trial with forensic mental health patients, anger management built on acceptance and commitment therapy lowered scores for anger rumination and impulsivity. That is a particular and unusual group of people, so the size of the effect will not carry over neatly to anyone else. The direction is still worth having: an approach that asked people to face what they felt rather than fight it did shift anger.
Polat H, Asi Karakaş S. (2021). The effect of acceptance and commitment therapy orientated anger management training on anger ruminations and impulsivity levels in forensic psychiatric patients: A randomized controlled trial.. Perspectives in psychiatric care doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
You can look at something honestly once you are not busy defending yourself against it.
If vanishing is how most of your difficult conversations end, and has been for years, that is worth working through with someone rather than alone.
Thinking about your own thinking sounds abstract until you try it. It is the difference between being angry and noticing that you are angry.
If your whole plan is to keep your mouth shut next time, ask yourself how. Most of us go blank at that question, and the blank is worth more attention than another promise to try harder.
What changes things is what you actually rehearse. Advice you agreed with does very little on its own.