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| Venting anger w/o gheebat |
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| Muslimah17 |
| 05/21/02 at 19:02:56 |
| assalam-o-alikoum okay i just wanted to know let's say you are really angry at what someone did to you or said and you wanna tell someone how you feel, like to release your anger and just tell someone what happened. like when i am angry i tell my best friend what happened and all but sometimes i feel that's gheebat ( backbiting). i mean it's not like it's gossiping but i am talking about the person behind their back, but it's not like their a good person anyways! it's just telling my best friend what happend helps me feel better, but i am afraid that while i am telling her the whole story i might just say nasty things about the person who hurt me. i mean when your angry you don't really have control over you rmouth i don't know how to explain! it might be gheebat or it might not be? how do guys deal with this? do you tell your fights to your bestfriend? should i continue doing this or should i just keep all the anger/hurt inside me? |
| Re: Venting anger w/o gheebat |
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| bhaloo |
| 05/21/02 at 20:19:30 |
| [slm] What is the purpose of telling your friend? To seek advice as to what to do? Or just as a means of catharasis? If its just to vent, then it is ghibah and you shouldn't be doing that. This life is a test and we face challenges on a daily basis and controlling are emotions is one of them. If there are problems I have with someone I keep it to myself, unless I know there are people that can correctly advise me, and then I seek their help. |
| Re: Venting anger w/o gheebat |
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| Dawn |
| 05/22/02 at 07:32:51 |
| One option might be to write what you are feeling in a journal instead of telling your friend. My sister had another outlet. When she was feeling really peeved and needed to unload, but knew that what she said might not be nice, she pretended her tape recorder (one of those little ones that used to be used in business meetings or by the press at interviews) was her best friend, and she recorded it. She said it also helped her to realize exactly what it was she said sometimes when she was angry (a couple of times she shocked herself, even) and she was gradually able to better control her anger as well as her tongue. Dawn |
| Re: Venting anger w/o gheebat |
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| mwishka |
| 05/22/02 at 20:50:51 |
| muslimah 17, the first thing i would say to you is that there never is a situation in which it is right to say a nasty thing about anyone. you have to figure out where you picked up that idea or that habit, and understand that it has no place in your life. my next thought is that there are very few things that people can do "to you" that should be making you "really angry". of course, i don't know what happened to you or has happened to you, but since you gave this as a general example, i would say that you will not be unable to stop finding yourself in this situation until you gain some perspective on what is and isn't reasonable to be angry about. there are very few such things in most people's lives, and often when we find ourselves getting angry we have in reality lost perspective - we're no longer looking at things, or taking them in, on the proper scale, in the proper proportion to the rest of life. when you say that when you're angry you don't always have you rmouth under control, i'm afraid i'd have to say, yes, of course you do ALWAYS have control of what comes out of your mouth. everything you say is under your control, though sometimes you say things you wish later you hadn't said. all this means is that you have more work to do on how you think when you're NOT angry, so that you don't even think in the ways that can lead to saying hurtful things about other people, no matter who they are. and it's not a good idea for you to decide who is and who is not a good person. maybe they aren't so good, or maybe they're just very different from you, or someone you don't understand - i wouldn't know that either, but i do think that you have to separate what you do and say from anything around you. the people around you are not what decides what you're like inside. you have to take care of that for yourself. as far as the question of repressing or expressing anger, unfortunately, both are bad for you. i know you might just feel that i'm not telling you very practical things, but the truth is that the best course for you to take is to change yourself so that you aren't having to face a frequent question of what to do with your anger. for people who put their anger somehwere inside themselves, because they feel it's not good to be angry, they end up being those "volcanic" people who seem to be easy going, but blow up suddenly with seemingly small provocation. and all the time that anger is hidden inside its causing them damage. this is not good for them or for those around them. for people who decide it's better just to express their anger and "get it out", they're suffering physically by doing so - the harm to the body over time of periodically expressing strong anger has been well-documented in research. it's equivalent to being under great stress for long periods of time, and i think you would immediately recognize THAT to be harmful to someone. i suggest you find ways to take a step back from situations you think make you angry. what are you really reacting to? what does the "anger" you feel really feel like? what advantage do you seem to be thinking you are gaining from being angry at that time? you may merely be impatient - much of what gets called anger is actually degrees of impatience. learning patience just takes the same kind of stepping back and trying to gain a better perspective that i suggested to you above for learning from the situations in which you felt angry. when you feel impatient, for example with a particular person, it helps to think carefully what is making you edgy, and i think you will often feel that it is a deficiency you have judged that person to have. this is usually unfounded - just because someone is different from you, or does things in a different way, makes neither of those ways to be better than the other one. you must be generous, in a real way, with everyone you encounter. if you need to talk to someone about something that happened, what you need to talk about is how YOU feel, and if this brings you to tell the story of what happened, you can do this without slandering anyone else or saying anything bad about them. hopefully in doing this you will gain understanding about what happened inside you during the incident, and how you can learn from what happened so that you will better deal with a similar situation the next time you find yourself in it. i hope this helps you. mwishka |
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