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Areas › Anger › Righteous anger and perfectionism
Usually it is some form of leverage: people move faster, back down, stop asking. Sometimes it is plainer than that, a way to feel like something rather than nothing. None of this makes you a bad person, but if the anger goes and the need stays, it will come back at the next opportunity. Name the payoff, then work out what else could deliver it, because that is the part that has to be built.
Take action! God will see your actions (Quran 9:105). The attention is turned to what you yourself are doing, which is where an honest look at your own payoff begins.
التوبة
وَقُلِ ٱعۡمَلُواْ فَسَيَرَى ٱللَّهُ عَمَلَكُمۡ وَرَسُولُهُۥ وَٱلۡمُؤۡمِنُونَۖ وَسَتُرَدُّونَ إِلَىٰ عَٰلِمِ ٱلۡغَيۡبِ وَٱلشَّهَٰدَةِ فَيُنَبِّئُكُم بِمَا كُنتُمۡ تَعۡمَلُونَ
Say [Prophet], ‘Take action! God will see your actions- as will His Messenger and the believers- and then you will be returned to Him who knows what is seen and unseen, and He will tell you what you have been doing
Qur’an 9:105read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A meta-analysis of 53 post-treatment effect sizes found that programmes designed to help people forgive a particular hurt did help them do so, and that longer programmes achieved more. So there are alternatives to holding on, and they run on time rather than on a single decision. Those trials targeted forgiveness for a specific event, not anger as a standing habit.
Wade NG, Hoyt WT, Kidwell JE, Worthington EL. (2014). Efficacy of psychotherapeutic interventions to promote forgiveness: a meta-analysis.. Journal of consulting and clinical psychology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Behaviour that keeps getting a result keeps happening, whatever you have resolved about it.
If you are simmering most days and cannot point to what set it off, look at the standards you are running rather than at the day itself. A rule that is never quite met keeps producing small failures for you to react to.
Some of what makes people angry is far bigger than any one conversation can settle. Saying that plainly is not giving up, it stops you carrying what was never yours.
That flash of temper when someone meets a fact that undoes their story is not stupidity. It is a mind defending its own shape, which is a real need rather than a shameful one.