Areas › Anger › What anger actually is
The speed of your reaction says something about how humans are built. It is not a report on how bad you are, and that difference is worth holding on to.
Shame is why people keep the incidents to themselves, and a hidden incident cannot be worked on. Understanding reactivity as inherited equipment lets you look at what happened without the whole of you standing trial. You are still answerable for what you did with it, which is a smaller and far more workable thing to face.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Man was truly created anxious (Quran 70:19). The restlessness that sits under the anger is described as part of the making, which takes it out of the category of personal disgrace.
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A case-control study found that people with depression showed a specific bias towards blaming themselves rather than others, rather than simply feeling more of everything negative. Self-blame can run as a habit of its own, separate from how much distress someone is in. It compared groups at a single point in time, so it describes a pattern in depression rather than telling you where your own blame is landing.
Green S, Moll J, Deakin JF, Hulleman J, Zahn R. (2013). Proneness to decreased negative emotions in major depressive disorder when blaming others rather than oneself.. Psychopathology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
You can examine something you are not busy defending.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
Darwin once stood with his face against the glass in front of a viper, quite determined not to move, and jumped backwards anyway when it struck. Deciding in advance does not govern a startle.
When somebody says they were not scared, they just do not like being disrespected, take the dislike seriously. We dislike what threatens us, and that is why we avoid it.
If you grew up where the threat was real, your reading of a raised voice is not a distortion. It is accurate to somewhere you used to be.