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Areas › Anger › Equanimity and perspective
Reaching for warmth toward someone who did real harm can bring shame, or a flood of the original event, or the queasy sense of having been talked into forgiving. None of that is progress. If you ever want to go there, it belongs after safety and steadiness, it is your choice and not the practice's, and it is not the same thing as going back to them.
I plead my grief and sorrow before God (Quran 12:86). Ya'qub takes the weight to God rather than to the people who caused it, which is a real option when warmth is not available.
يوسف
قَالَ إِنَّمَآ أَشۡكُواْ بَثِّي وَحُزۡنِيٓ إِلَى ٱللَّهِ وَأَعۡلَمُ مِنَ ٱللَّهِ مَا لَا تَعۡلَمُونَ
He said, ‘I plead my grief and sorrow before God. I have knowledge from God that you do not have
Qur’an 12:86read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
The clearest anger result in this area comes from a pilot randomised trial where an eight week loving kindness programme reduced both pain and anger in people with chronic low back pain. That was a small pilot with people who chose to take part. It is a long way from evidence that anyone should be steered toward warmth for a person who harmed them.
Carson JW, Keefe FJ, Lynch TR, Carson KM, Goli V, Fras AM, Thorp SR. (2005). Loving-kindness meditation for chronic low back pain: results from a pilot trial.. Journal of holistic nursing : official journal of the American Holistic Nurses' Association doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Forcing a feeling you do not have teaches you to distrust your own signals, which is the opposite of what this work is for.
If you are a survivor of abuse or of a violent relationship, do not attempt this without a therapist who knows your history.
People have held themselves still through pain most of us cannot imagine. That does not make your Tuesday easier, but it moves the question from whether restraint is possible to how much you have trained.
Try putting a qualifier on the front of your strongest claims. In some ways this is true. In some ways it is not. In some ways I cannot tell from here.
The real skill is not spotting the hole in their reasoning. It is running the same test on the belief you hold most tightly.