Though not mentioned in the paper, Lincoln was famously aware of this technique.
> "Whenever Abraham Lincoln felt the urge to tell someone off, he would compose what he called a “hot letter.” He’d pile all of his anger into a note, “put it aside until his emotions cooled down,” Doris Kearns Goodwin once explained on NPR, “and then write [on the rear side of the sheet of paper]: ‘Never sent. Never signed.’ ” Which meant that Gen. George G. Meade, for one, would never hear from his commander in chief that Lincoln blamed him for letting Robert E. Lee escape after Gettysburg."
According to the paper setting the letter aside did not subdue anger in the participants. The anger subsided in those who threw it away or shredded it.
I don't know, this is just speculation. Mainly because the cost of producing a duplicate letter (for ones actually sent, not this case) was sufficiently high that I assume there wasn't a culture that could make use of such duplicates.
I don't think this is a reasonable interpretation of an unsent later. The point of creating documents for the purposes of CYA requires them to be publicly recorded otherwise there will be accusations that the document was created after the fact.
There's really no reason to believe this was a motivation for Lincoln to write a letter, particularly because there is no clear reason for him to be concerned for CYA. The only people Lincoln would be accountable would be the voters, and I don't see producing a letter blaming Meade for letting Lee escape to be something that would pass muster. I mean, what's the argument here? "I was angry at Meade at the time, and here's the letter proving that I was angry"?
So it seems reasonable to conclude that this is an example of anger management, and not a political back up plan.
I have always found analog writing to be a powerful cognitive tool.
Writing changes your thoughts from abstract to concrete - and once a thought is "out of your head" on paper, it becomes an entity that you can perform additional thought operations on (which you can then write down...etc.).
Analog writing also leaves visual evidence of your thought process across a page. Most digital writing tools allow you to make the thought process disappear completely as you work. Having evidence of your thought process allows you to evaluate your thought process. Very important in any kind of problem solving exercise.
As a child, I found that writing down a thought that bothered me made it go away and freed my brain up to do kid stuff.
The study looked at keeping a paper around (underlying situation: a reminder active in a workspace) vs. throwing it away (underlying situation: removing a constant reminder).
They didn't study anything in-between, such as removing the reminder without throwing it away.
Yeah, to your point, I'm curious how writing about frustrations/anger in a journal that you never revisit would compare to their treatment. It seems to help me.
Not the original poster, but I do the same. I have a private "therapy/ranting journal" that I use to just write out all my negative thoughts and dump it in there. I find it extremely safe and refreshing to do so. It's mentally the equivalent to me as "throwing it away" because I don't keep my negativity journals. Even if you don't throw away the journal I still highly recommend the practice. It's honestly helped me get through so many difficult situations.
Has no one noticed that there seems to be no control group in this study? Every participant wrote a statement that got torn to shreds; every participant had to write their emotions about it.
It’s not outside the realm of possibility that watching cartoons for ten minutes or just sitting in silence would produce a comparable reduction in anger. Really disappointing that a pair of career academics could get away with such an astounding oversight (and get published in Nature, no less).
It got published in "Scientific Reports", not in "Nature". Scientific Reports is a journal that belongs to the Nature Publishing Group, *but* it is a known low-impact journal. When you get your acceptance-for-publication confirmation in that journal you are specifically told to never refer to it as "Nature's Scientific Reports", rather only as "Scientific Reports", so even their own publishing group does not want to associate too closely with it (to avoid risking its brand value)
Ouch, Nature publishing pop science. A few years ago my PhD/Academia Engineer path cousin validated if a study was 'real' by simply looking at the word Nature.
I thought this was absurd and scrolled down to methods/data. I had never heard of Nature before, or rather, I had no reason to trust it.
I find it interesting/unfortunate Academia can get away with being Authority based.
There’s no reason to throw away authority. Should something be not questioned because it was published in Nature? No, of course not. But should it be given the benefit of doubt? For sure. It’s extremely difficult to publish in nature, with a super rigorous process behind it. Peoples careers are made by publishing in such a journal, and extremely few are so lucky.
Not all journals or researchers are equal. Reputation is an important filter. In the very long run truth will emerge. In the short term, however, it’s one of our best signals.
As krastanov pointed out in the comment above you, "Scientific Reports" is not the same as publishing in "Nature" itself.
But about your cousin's method:
If you have never heard of "Nature" even though it is one of the biggest names out there, then you have no reason to trust it, of course.
On the other hand, if you have already read hundreds of papers published by them in your field, and those were above average in quality, trusting that name does make a lot of sense imho.
Everyone uses heuristics to save time and attention.
In theory, being published in a top journal means multiple specialists in the subject matter reviewed the paper and therefore it's more trustworthy than a random authority's assertion.
You made my entire week. Years ago, I stumbled on a song of theirs and could never find it again. After recognizing the voice, I went through the catalogue and there it was: Peach, Plum, Pear. Thank you!
Is there a reason why so many studies (this included) fail to report the effect size? The way "significant" is used in literature, readers (even the educated ones) interpret the research as suggesting some groundbreaking result.
Here, for example, only a 1-ish point change occurred on a six point scale from 3 to 2. I say 1-ish because the confidence intervals are rather wide and even intersect somewhat (see discussion.)
So anger is not eliminated rather you'll be somewhat less angry.
In my experience (10 years in academia), people who understand statistics enough do look at effect size rather than significance levels. But unfortunately, even in one of the top european universities, a lot of researchers (who are ~70% PhD candidates with only basic stats training) tend to misinterpret significance as meaning "large effect".
There is another cause, more pernicious, which is that in the absence of a big effect, "a significant effect of X on Y was found" sells better than "no large effect was found", because there is a bias towards reporting positive effects in the litterature. In my field, it is actually usual for people to take big surveys, iterate dozens of statistical models with any kind of interactions, and only report one where some interesting parameters end up being significant, and derive policy recommendations based on this. Which is a recipe for non reproducible results.
I feel this is one of the two basic tricks that many many papers do to preemptively justify their existence. The other being the shoehorning of the hotbutton issue of the day and imagining some way the study addresses that issue.
It was kind of weird watching the transition from when every second paper could obliquely assist in the fight against AIDS to now when they seem to assist in the fight against climate change.
I feel like it is a minor dishonesty committed to combat the unreasonable requirement for every scientific discovery to be immediately applicable.
There are at least two reasonable readings of "anger is eliminated", with one being true if anger is reduced at all, and both being true if anger is reduced to zero.
I wonder if that technique could apply more broadly.
For example, if a person suffering from a bout of depression, were to write their depressed feelings "there is no point, no hope" etc.. then rip the paper up and throw it away, might it have any effect on their mood?
Anecdotally, whenever I keep a journal through difficult times, my handwriting's so bad that I can't read it after a while, and the journal ends up being "write-only" as well. I wonder whether the ripping-it-up would be more cathartic.
Writing down “distorted thoughts” to visually recognize them as a bit out of whack (or not) and measure the level of distortion is the one of the premises of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT).
I've had times where I've written those sorts of thoughts on a small sheet of notepad paper, which I would then tear out and burn in the kitchen sink.
More frequently, I'll just write what I'm thinking into an empty, personal use chat window in lieu of venting to others. In either case, I think they definitely have some effect.
Thanks. My son committed suicide a bit over a year ago. I was in the room next to him. He did it very quietly. I was the one who found his body. Or our cat was. She kept trying to get into his room. I finally sought to help her and found him.
He was brilliant and a good person. No one ever had anything bad to say about him. I mean that literally. People liked him.
His life kind of stalled out. He was feeling his way back to normalcy, and then abruptly gave up. There were a lot of things I wish he had tried before he reached this point. Maybe writing things down and then symbolically burning them would have helped. Or psychedelics. Or just explicitly seeking help or accepting it when it was offered instead of just muddling through.
You can find his comments here if you search for jwmhjwmh.
That is truly chilling, man - I'm a father myself, and I just... oh man I'm so, so sorry. There aren't really words, but if I were in the same room as you, I would hug you.
I know HN is not the most tactful place all of the time, but that second question strikes me as unusually cruel to pose to the parent of a recently deceased son.
If you look at AlexeyBelov's other comments, it's clear he is trying to create conflict wherever, whenever, and however he can. He wants to get people shouting. I would just ignore him.
I remember a WAMU radio show talking about a woman who was abused by her father.
She wrote the 5 steps of forgiveness which as I more or less recall go something
like this:
The 5 steps of asking for forgiveness.
The offender to the offended should:
1. Describe in detail exactly what he/she/they did that cause the offense.
2. Describe in detail how those actions made the offended feel.
3. Explain in detail why he/she/they took such actions.
4. Describe in detail what corrective actions he/she/they should take.
5. Describe in detail what the offended could do to move forward.
Now the interesting part is that the woman's father was already dead
when she wrote the steps. She wrote a letter using the 5 steps as if she was her father, who denied to his death that the abuse ever happened, asking for forgiveness.
It helped her.
I wished I could remember the name of the book or the radio show but it was
years ago.
I get confused by the way people use the word "forgiveness".
For me, forgiveness can only occur when I understand someone's point of view and determine that there was information I wasn't aware of or they made a mistake and what they did isn't really who they are.
But when I read about forgiveness it seems like people also use the term to refer to a process of gaslighting yourself and/or making up a fake story to detach yourself from reality.
Frankly, I see a lot of therapy this way. Some people go through terrible things, and some people's lives suck, but a lot of therapy sounds like brainwashing yourself to deal with it.
The route of the word forgive is from early German, 'fragebaną'. Meaning to release or give up. Forgiveness is not about understanding the motivation of the person who's hurt you. Nor is it about their penitence - although both can make forgiveness easier. Forgiveness is about letting go of the anger and resentment that continue to cause pain, long after the offending action is over (and even after the offender is dead). The purpose of forgiveness is not 'brainwashing' or detachment from reality. It's about letting go of suffering to proceed through life with less pain. Which allows us to be kinder and more humane people, since we're no longer at risk of externalising our own suffering.
Forgiveness is about understanding the cause of the injury, correcting the damage, mitigating future risks, and restoring emotional stability /once those things are resolved/. The first three are necessary conditions for effective forgiveness.
For instance, it's ineffective to forgive a spouse who continually beats you. It may allow you to paper over your emotions and have a semblance of peace. However it doesn't prevent the next attack or correct the damages. You need to get to the bottom of why this person thinks it's okay to beat you, or you need to get to a place where you'll be safe. Delusional forgiveness can get you killed in this situation.
So please do not advise people to deploy forgiveness without the three necessary conditions: cause, correction, and mitigation. Your advice may cause them to ignore options for active forgiveness that will genuinely increase their safety and prevent future harm
Example: Someone you care for has been raped, and feels the need to seek justice. You tell them how that will just cause them more pain and probably lead to no conviction, and offer them the idea that they can simply forgive the attacker and move on, as the more mature and healthy alternative.
In that case you have not given advocacy to the person you cared for. You have advocated on behalf of the rapist.
I'll reierate my thesis. Effective forgiveness has 3 material parts required to make emotional release safe and effective:
1. Modelling the cause of harm
2. Compensating the harm done
3. Mitigating future harm
Please do not advocate for forgiveness without advocating for these three components. Forgiveness without material changes creates further harm.
What your describing isn't anything to do with what we traditionally consider forgiveness - either in Western or Eastern traditions of spirituality, or contemporary psychotherapy.
You're describing self protection. Which is an important set of skills for resilience and harm prevention, but has little to nothing to do with forgiveness. I'm afraid you're editorialising by creating a straw man rape victim argument. Just to be clear - although this is not the topic under discussion - I support rape victims attempts to obtain justice through the criminal justice system. And obviously agree that no one should stay in a situation where physical or sexual violence is threatened or likely.
To be clear I'm not advising people to allow themselves to continue to be harmed. I'm not engaging in prescriptive advice at all. Rather I'm describing the process of overcoming the pain of emotional (and sometimes physical) trauma.
Forgiveness is not about any of the above. It's about moving on (internally) from continual retraumatisation - after the source of trauma is no longer present. It's an internal emotional process for the most part. But one that cannot begin until the person engaging in it is physically and emotionally safe.
If your history was so traumatic that you cannot forget and you cannot move on, then your only option, assuming you want to salvage what remains of your life, is to change it. Change your history. Is it cheating? Yes. But what is the alternative? You want to continue to live with the misery and suffering? It's not ever going to go away. Those kinds of memories do not fade. Time alone does not heal anything, and you only get one life. Do whatever you can do to salvage it.
I would say that "brainwashing yourself to deal with it" actually is a useful therapeutic technique. Often the person who committed the offense can't be made to understand or care about the damage they've caused, and the next best thing then is to help the injured person move on as best they can.
And while "brainwashing" sounds like an intellectually dishonest technique, we need to remember that the brain is not a perfectly logical instrument. The trauma that people seek help for carries an emotional toll usually in excess of the simple logical "disagreement". Therapy for such trauma is usually an emotional process, not a logical one.
I would agree though that "forgiveness" is maybe not the best term for this.
I think part of the solution might be acceptance, that you can accept the situation and “forgive” the offender - which will relieve yourself of your feelings towards them, allowing yourself to let go and move on.
You can't change the past. The opposite of forgiveness is hanging on to a past hurt. Past hurt cannot be changed. Forgiveness isn't gaslighting, making up a fake story, or brainwashing. It's letting go of something you can't change.
You present a false dichotomy. And I think there’s a difference between letting go and forgiveness.
First of all, physical and temporal distance from trauma helps protect and heal from trauma.
Secondly, often trauma leaves people with a warped mental state that can be addressed on its own. For example, treating anxiety that was developed from trauma.
Thirdly, you can try to understand why your trauma occurred like “my dad beat me because his dad beat him”. Some might say this is part of forgiveness but imo there’s a big difference between understanding why someone did something and forgiving them.
I'm not really talking about trauma or anxiety. I'm talking about a feeling of resentment and anger directed at the other - the kindling for that flame of anger is past injustice. Letting go of this is forgiveness, I think.
It's specifically the injustice, rather than the hurt, that is keeps resentment alive. "It's not fair!" is the rallying cry. Hurt heals and lessens with time. But feelings can be nursed, indulged, prolonged, and inflamed.
Understanding operates on a different plane to emotions. Intellectually you can understand why something happened, but that doesn't necessarily have an effect on your emotions. Emotions seem to have a life of their own, if you don't take responsibility for them. And of course that's a key part of growing up, of maturity: emotional regulation.
You might use intellectual understanding as a rationale for regulating feelings of resentment, but it's neither necessary nor sufficient. You do need an act of will to let resentment go. And I think this is the core of forgiveness.
> Frankly, I see a lot of therapy this way. Some people go through terrible things, and some people's lives suck, but a lot of therapy sounds like brainwashing yourself to deal with it.
If it works, then who cares? Maybe you were wronged, but maybe you don't want to go through life feeling that way, so you let it go by sympathizing with the person who wronged you. And you move on. There's a limited amount of justice you'll be able to get in life, so it's a good idea to pick your battles and not stew on every single sleight because you want to avoid "brainwashing" yourself.
And you've been keeping these ways to address trauma from the rest of the world? If people could feel better without forgiving their trespassers don't you think they'd be doing that instead?
Are you a therapist, or are you acting like an armchair expert? Because my strategies come from an actual fucking therapist.
The first thing to note is that time itself has healing properties. Putting physical and temporal distance from your trauma is beneficial. For example, cutting people out of your life.
Beyond that treatment becomes more tailored to the individual. For example, I developed medically diagnosed "severe anxiety" from my childhood. So part of my healing process is learning to calm my nervous system because my default mode is hyper-vigilance.
Every 15 minutes I get a notification on my phone reminding me to do two things:
1. Take a deep breath. This engages the parasympathetic nervous system and teaches me to self-soothe.
2. I ask myself "Who is hurting your right now?" and 95% of the time the answer is "nobody, everything is fine". This helps keep me grounded in the present moment.
Note that NONE of this involves divorcing myself from reality. In-fact, it's the opposite.
This seems related to a much-replicated result from the practice of "expressive writing," also referred to informally as the "writing cure." Broadly, you feel better about things after having written about them. Remarkably, even physical ailments seem to be affected.
I thought this kind of small-sample, theory-free, tell-any-story-you-want statistical significance mining exercise was out of style! This study is like an unwelcome blast from the 2010's or earlier!
I not infrequently find myself prefixing my own code review comments with some variant of "I'm mostly asking this to make myself sound smart, but..." and then usually (not always) I delete the comment. But it's not a high proportion of my total review output, assuming I'm impartial enough to tell the difference.
My point is, it definitely happens, but if it applies to _most_ PR comments I think the code review practices of your project may need improving. My experience has been that most code review comments are either seeking to impart or gain knowledge that the commenter genuinely finds useful.
Most modern anger is derived from helplessness. I don't get angry when I spill my coffee or someone cuts me off on my commute, but I recently discovered that I've been overcharged for my cell phone plan for the last 18 months and it made me seethe, mostly because I know that it's going to take a half dozen phone calls over at least as many hours to come to any real resolution, and that millions of people are likely in the same predicament.
Writing all that down made me more, not less, angry.
Anger is only a problem when it shortcircuits logic and reason and makes you behave irrationally and in ways you later regret. But used effectively, it can give you the energy you need to get through all 18 of those really frustrating phone calls before you give up.
It happened to me, I called and talked for an hour and managed to get my money back. I finally got the person on the other side of the phone to agree to “discuss with my superior” after asking them to describe what the word theft means and explain me that adding a service without my request and charging me for a year did not fit in the description.
Then one day later I requested to move my phone number to a different company.
Then they called me back telling me they could permanently lower my bills, and made me even more angry :)
I’m still happy I never paid them another cent, but in the back of my mind I know the company I moved on is doing more or less the same tricks.
An exercise (whether writing or verbal) that helps me redirect or alleviate some of the anger is to simply ask "How do I imagine that person might be feeling?"
The trick is, when I'm feeling angry, I don't often want to answer. But when I do, it can help me realize that the current situation may also be hurting or frustrating the people who had been the targets of my anger, and then maybe we can work together to get rid of the problem. This seems to help me when calling customer service, because now I'm not fighting against them but fighting alongside of them.
I do this, both purposefully (on HN) and, in a manner, inadvertently.
Writing an email and saving it as a draft gives me a memory of having sent the message. Occasionally I get asked about emails I've committed to sending, felt certain I already did, and subsequently found them saved as unsent drafts (inevitably because I got interrupted while I was writing).
Yup, I do this thing where I imagine myself writing down the thought, but not actually the contents of what I am writing, and then throw it in the bin, and here I actually perform the action. It's a little hard to do the throwing away motion when others are around, but I can discreetly move my hand. For whatever reason this work very well for me.
It was published in "Scientific Reports", a known low-quality journal. They are not necessary predatory like some of the truly bad journals, e.g., work in this journal still is supposed to pass the "not a low effort triviality and not obviously wrong" check and there are even some really cool things published in this journal. However, I generally take publications in this journal with a significant grain of salt.
Also, just FYI, "Scientific Reports" is not in a specific subfield -- I have published on quantum computing in this journal. That is not too strange, there are plenty of "generalist" journals that are good, but I thought it could still be useful context to know.
Well, it's been hand wavily described on 50 students with similar socio-economical backgrounds how much more replication would you like? There are also some references to statistics terms so it must have statistical power.
I think this kind of tricks definitely work the first time. But my gut feeling is that if you do it several times the effect decreases as the mental image of throwing the thing in the bin becomes more familiar.
Always beware these type of Social Science studies that make for great popsci headlines.
The kind of result that makes careers: seemingly elegant and simple study design, common sense hypothesis and overall great marketability.
Diederik Stapel was one of the largest science fraudster in history and this kind of stuff was his bread and butter. More recently Francesca Gino was caught falsifying the data of the "honesty pledge at the top of form" that is highly similar in concept to this.
Now for the career-ending question: Will it replicate?
It doesn't appear that they separated those who believe it would work from those who didn't, to see if there was a placebo effect. That would have been useful.
Haven't read the paper but it reminds me of a popular scene in a Bollywood movie where the leading lady tells her acquaintance to physically burn the picture of his ex and flush it down the toilet. To which the guy says it is silly but still does it on insistence from the lady. After the act, he says he actually felt better doing what felt silly at first!
I have found that some of the things people did that made me angry were very wrong and I should not have forgiven them, I should have moved on with my life in directions that minimized my exposure to them (as opposed to bending over backward to maintain a friendship.) How does one apply the letter method without becoming a doormat?
Managing your anger does not mean forgiving or not taking action, it just means you have freedom to do it so on a rational basis rather than emotional.
So you write your angry letter, burn it, then do what needs to be done, free from angry.
It could be from a place of empathy: I wish you to be happy, but I wish you to be happy very far away from me.
Or from a more selfish perspective, you simply want to know you did the best you could so that you don’t need to have any guilt on it.
I don’t know about that, I personally suppressed my anger with some individuals and they took it as a sign of weakness, looking back, I don’t regret it, despite setting boundaries, I feel like sometimes and with certain type of people, you should show them some anger as a deterrent.
While I agree that people who take goodwill as a sign of weakness should be deterred, I think that anger as a means to achieve that is a double-edged sword. Perhaps a good method is to use the paper trick and dispose of the anger after it has served its purpose ...
> Anger suppression is important in our daily life, as its failure can sometimes lead to the breaking down of relationships in families. Thus, effective strategies to suppress or neutralise anger have been examined
This attitude is a problem in our society. Anger ends up being destructive because we think we have to suppress it or neutralize it. This just increases its strength over time until it explodes out violently. I doubt the strategy in the paper is any more than a temporary suppression of the emotion.
We need to recognize that anger is a valid emotion just like any other. Anger becomes dangerous because we demonize it without trying to understand it, which just gives it strength in the long run.
Often it is simply impossible to do anything constructive with anger. So techniques like the one in the article are useful, it's not a dismissal of anger as a valid emotion. The goal is to reduce redirected aggression.
Anger becomes unproductive because we shame it and suppress it over and over and over. If we knew how to express anger in a healthy way, we wouldn't need to do that (with the exception of edge cases, like a physical hormonal imbalance)
Anger can give you the energy to address an uncomfortable issue that would otherwise remain suppressed. For example your partner doesn't do the dishes. You become angry and confront your partner on the subject.
Now there is an opportunity for you two to work through the issue, and the partner has to feel some of the emotional impact of their behavior, preventing them from dismissing it.
If that issue remained unaddressed, you might deal with the stress by reducing your view of your partner as a capable thoughtful individual, which is a much harder situation to address than a difficult emotional conversation.
Not the person you replied to, but yes. "I feel angry that you keep touching my leg. Maybe you're even unaware that you're doing it, I don't know. Will you stop touching my leg?"
David Whyte has a excellent passage about anger, from his book "Consolations". I'm not sure if this is an excerpt or the full thing (don't have the book on me to check), but in either case it's worth reading: https://www.dannabeal.com/understanding-anger-david-whyte/
The world is nothing but edge cases. Expressing anger requires cooperation. If someone doesn’t want to listen, and you express anger at them anyway, is it not abuse?
I appreciate you pointing this out. If we force someone to listen to our anger, we can see it as abuse. If we force someone to suppress their anger, we can see it as normal. It's almost as if we might normalize suppression and demonize expression.
And it's not just anger. If I want to express verbal affection towards someone and they don't want to hear it, we often call it abuse. But if they want me to suppress verbal affection towards them and I don't want to, we celebrate it as them having boundaries.
And I think sometimes being forced to not say something can hurt as much as being forced to hear something, yet we don't seem to see how it harms people.
That depends on whether they're a legitimate object of your anger. If someone injures you and then ignores your complaints, no it's not abuse to be angry with them.
I mean I think it depends on how the anger surfaces to determine whether its abuse. Yelling and screaming and throwing things, absolutely. But the reason we're scared of anger is because we don't know how to communicate and express it in a healthy way.
But you can also process anger solo with the right tools, or with a good therapist that doesn't shame anger. It doesn't always have to involve another person.
I wish my computer understood this when I get angry at it. Unfortunately, many (most?) times that I get angry are because things outside my control aren't working the way I feel that they should, whether they're human, animate, or inanimate. Or even me.
Aside from academic interest, I struggle to see the practical benefit of this study. When I'm angry, in the heat of the moment, there's no way I'm going to stop and write an essay about my feelings. By the time I am in a frame of mind to do so, the anger has passed and not a problem anymore.
I strongly agree. I don't think it's only anger that we suppress, but rather emotions in general, especially higher intensity ones. I think emotions are one of the most powerful tools we have for communicating with each other, especially when we pair the physical expression with words detailing the deeper contexts, and yet we seem to somehow think emotional expression is maladaptive. It confounds me and frustrates me and saddens me all at the same time.
Yes, strong emotions are almost always shamed. We need to learn to process those emotions and accept them, not suppress them. Suppressing never works forever, because the emotion is still there, and it will surface one way or another eventually.
And also to express them to others. This is where I think it gets tricky, or has for me. I built an app for micro-journaling how I felt and I got really good at answering "How do I feel?" "What's happening?" And yet when I say these things to others, it can cause huge conflicts because they don't want us to talk about how we feel and I do. A suppression vs expression fight and it seems to happen with almost everyone I meet.
So for me, I feel confident to process and accept them by myself, it's when I communicate them with others it can bring lots of conflict, and yet, if I only express them to myself and not to others, they don't often achieve their function of communication, which I think may be one of the core functions of emotions.
> Anger ends up being destructive because we think we have to suppress it or neutralize it. This just increases its strength over time until it explodes out violently.
Dunno.
One are going to end up in alot of avoidable verbal and physical fights if ones anger is not suppressed.
Just such a simple thing as the comment answer timer on HN helps alot.
The very fact that you believe that anger leads to verbal and physical fights proves OP’s point. When anger can be let out without the culture at large thinking of it as a threat that needs to be neutralized, and instead a charge that needs to be addressed, anger isn’t harmful, it’s constructive and instrumental.
Anger normally points out a boundary that’s being breached in which valuable things to a self - like autonomy, comfort, connection - are compromised. That we have so many angry people and that our culture encourages anger management rather than anger processing points to its rejection writ large
And maybe it does lead to fights when it's let out but little and contextually appropriate fights, and then the people dig deeper and gain a better understanding of their situations.
Anger can tell people that we want them to stop doing an activity and sometimes people don't even know their behavior is breaching those boundaries. One time an ex visited me in a park. I juggled the soccer ball then kicked it to her. She rolled it back and said she didn't want to play. I juggled it for 15 more minutes and then kicked it to her again. She stood up and kicked it with me for like 5 minutes.
Three weeks later, she got angry and said "And you don't respect my boundaries!" And I was really confused. She said, "I TOLD you I didn't want to kick the ball and you still kicked it to me."
I wished she had expressed more anger when I kicked it the second time. I wasn't trying to make her angry. Kicking the ball with her wasn't that important to me. I just didn't know that it bothered her that much and if I did, I immediately would have stopped.
Exactly that, "keep people in connection." I love how you framed it. When we suppress the conflict, we distance more and more from each other and from ourselves, disconnecting more and more.
Yes possibly there will be more fights. Anger is a fighting emotion. But that doesn't mean fighting is bad either. We often suppress fights and conflict, especially verbal ones, and avoid them until they accumulate so many facets and get so loud that we can't ignore them and then hit each other with years of grievances.
I think it's not only ok to verbally fight but helps us resolve conflict instead of avoid it.
And I think if we can resolve it at the verbal level it doesn't have to become physical.
But I think the cultural suppression of fighting/conflict is even deeper than the suppression of anger. A friend just asked for our definitions of peace and I said I currently believe it's a mythical concept where conflict doesn't exist.
Anger results in verbal and physical fights because it gets suppressed and shamed for long enough until it explodes out. A better route is understanding the anger and the underlying emotion it's protecting (often shame) before it becomes a problem.
Well, I’ll take both fixing the symptoms ( loved one can’t control their anger and hurts everyone around them ) and the syndrom ( therapy sessions to understand the cause of the anger ).
Now, based on my experience dealing with such situations around me, some people have difficulties considering they should even talk to a therapist. They will violently reject the very idea they might have a problem, and will keep hurting people around them. Controlling anger allows having a discussion in the first place, which then can turn into the understanding you’re talking about.
The authors of this paper are Japanese, and the participants are local university students. I would assume suppression of anger is the norm for most people involved in this study, since Japanese culture generally aims to preserve harmony.
This is in contrast with some cultures that are more direct in their communications and perhaps not suppressing much at all. It's possible that they would see different results when the experiment is done with a more diverse group of participants.
If you wish to convince others of your views, you'll have to provide a lot more than assertions.
As per the article - [..] can sometimes lead to [..]. I don't know how clearer the article can be, there is no proposed "solution" here that solves everything in every scenario. Its simply testing a hypothesis.
A friend of mine went to a Zen Buddhist monastery for a month to start practicing to deal with his anger. After the month he told his teacher the reason why he came - to dissipate his anger - and his teacher told him that he had nothing to teach him because the fact that he was feeling his anger was the practice of mindfulness. The teacher told him he’d be better off leaving the monastery and working on the object of his anger (human-induced climate destabilization).
I think you’re appealing to the boiled down and stripped away “mindfulness” movement in the west that focuses on creating what I call “Vipassana Zombies” - people who can feel their sensations just enough to recognize and ignore them. A lot of Buddhist teachings are about empowerment and action, and they’ve been grossly misunderstood.
I am choosing to imagine that the monk called your friend to take up the battle of climate justice and revolutionary struggle, which is indeed a very mindful way to utilize anger over injustice.
"You will find peace in action. Join an eco-guerilla cell. Use your rage to guide your contribution to the cause - it is a valid emotion driven by a need for change. Long live the revolution! For Victory! For Justice! For Peace!"
haha not far off. He believes that we should be doing carbon capture by rebuilding our top soil, as that's the most sustainable way of pulling it down while continuing to feed people. He's starting a school to teach regenerative techniques to farmers.
I see it exactly opposite. A Buddhist monk would learn to experience, feel, observe, and detach from their anger, not suppress it or shame it. This is more in line what what I think we need to do.
The more you resist the anger the more it will persist.
There are neurological studies that show that anger cycles can escalate and become amplified with practice. That's not what we want.
Acknowledge your anger, yes. Then acknowledge your control, not only over how you express it, but even over whether you feel angry or not. It is possible to develop the skill to stop being angry. This is far more important than going with the flow.
It's often a bitter pill to swallow, because it means the people that act out of anger, or are always angry, are ultimately responsible for how they feel. It is not someone else's fault you feel angry.
Often that amounts to changing the people or circumstances in one’s life. That’s the point of therapy. A good therapist wouldn’t help a sexually abused child stay in a bad situation and just learn to suppress emotion. Well maybe a cbt therapist would. But a good therapist would try to help catalyze a change in the situation causing the trauma.
The neurological studies to which you refer point to the neurological phenomenon, but you’re mapping that to a single possibility for the psychological process that is coupled with the physical phenomenon, namely, that anger monotonically amplifies over time when reinforced, perhaps to some asymptotic steady state that’s greater than a normative baseline
An equally valid narrative is that, especially in our society where most people have repressed anger, once anger is tapped into, there’s an overwhelm of backlogged emotion that is also released. Anger as an emotion is energetically expensive for a biological system, and it doesn’t make any sense that it would continue to be reinforced indefinitely.
It's a lot more nuanced than that. You can't just "control your anger". You can layer a controlling part of your mind on top of the anger to try to swat it down every time it surfaces, but this is a temporary solution. Especially when the anger is rooted deeply in things like trauma or shame.
The path forward is to understand the anger with compassion, and the trauma or painful emotions below it, or the boundaries that are being crossed. Rather than just trying to force yourself not to feel it.
It's not that different from telling a depressed person that they should just think positively to cure themselves.
Monks are doing it on easy mode. They have nothing to anger them, zero triggers. It’s the whole point of hermeticism. Remove all sources of stress. Desire nothing. Of course they aren’t angry, they have nothing; nothing to feel angry about.
Totally agree, and I’d go further to say that the reason we don’t want to go near anger as a society is because we don’t know how to grieve. To tap into grief means allowing people to need resources like time and human attention that we’ve over leveraged into economic activity.
My mom passed away about 15 months ago, and while I have worked in emotional expression for 12 years, her passing had me feeling the most raw. I think one main thing that happened with grief for me is that I felt things so intensely, the full spectrum, and it became really hard to not suppress those feelings.
So I think the broader picture is not just grief, but feelings, especially intense feelings. If I feel sad, I want to cry, not work. If I feel tired, I want to sleep, not work. If I fall in love, I want to be with that person, not work. I think many if not most feelings can get in the way of our maximum productivity states. Maybe low level anger and focus, with a little bit of playfulness, can keep us productive, but stray too far outside of that and we don't look as productive.
I would argue, however, that we might be more productive in the long-term, because otherwise we may burn out, communicate less effectively, and become more desensitized to what people need and want, both from consumers and fellow producers.
Why does anger become so bad that it results in road rage? Because we suppress it and shame it, until it has no choice but to surface destructively. And then rather than try to understand the anger, we just double down on suppressing it more, which leads to ever increasing levels of explosive anger
I think road rage is a prime example of what OP mentioned: anger bottling up because it repeatedly wasn't expressed and then it shoots out like a hose, 100% of the anger being directed at someone who maybe contributed 2% to the person's underlying anger.
I would say exactly the opposite, road rage is a classic example of what the parent comment means. Bottling up anger as if it's somehow wrong to feel angry or express it is exactly how you get to people blowing up in a colossal manner once the lid goes off. Road rage happens when someone overreacts to a small transgression which is exactly what you get with bottled up rage.
What if this is the basis of "magic"? The secret power of curses that were burnt or cast into a lake or cave that "worked" by diminishing the anger in the caster rather than cursing the target.
I suppose this method has its limits, but it is interesting to study ways that anger can be eliminated. I wonder if there are techniques for illuminating anger due to significantly injurious behavior.
"The great thing is to prevent his doing anything. As long as he does not convert it [his purpose] into action [...]"
"Let him, if he has any bent that way, write a book about it; that is often an excellent way of sterilizing the seeds which the Enemy plants in a human soul..." - Screwtape
> "Whenever Abraham Lincoln felt the urge to tell someone off, he would compose what he called a “hot letter.” He’d pile all of his anger into a note, “put it aside until his emotions cooled down,” Doris Kearns Goodwin once explained on NPR, “and then write [on the rear side of the sheet of paper]: ‘Never sent. Never signed.’ ” Which meant that Gen. George G. Meade, for one, would never hear from his commander in chief that Lincoln blamed him for letting Robert E. Lee escape after Gettysburg."
From: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/23/opinion/sunday/the-lost-a...