Areas › Anger › What anger actually is
Some reactions are pure reflex, some are feelings, and some are really stories about yourself. What helps differs for each, so it is worth knowing which you are dealing with.
A startle cannot be reasoned with and does not need to be, since it passes on its own. A feeling like anger answers to the body and to attention. Something like humiliation is largely a story about how you are being treated, and stories can be examined and answered. Most wasted effort is the wrong tool aimed at the wrong level.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Be tolerant and command what is right: pay no attention to foolish people (Quran 7:199). Two quite different responses sit in one line, which is roughly the point.
خُذِ ٱلۡعَفۡوَ وَأۡمُرۡ بِٱلۡعُرۡفِ وَأَعۡرِضۡ عَنِ ٱلۡجَٰهِلِينَ
Be tolerant and command what is right: pay no attention to foolish people
Qur’an 7:199read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
One influential account of post-traumatic distress proposes that numbing and dissociation form a separate pathway from fear, with a different underlying brain pattern. It is a model offered in a theoretical review rather than a settled finding, though it shows the general shape: distress is not one uniform thing. Any tidy set of levels is a working map and worth holding as such.
Lanius RA, Frewen PA, Vermetten E, Yehuda R. (2010). Fear conditioning and early life vulnerabilities: two distinct pathways of emotional dysregulation and brain dysfunction in PTSD.. European journal of psychotraumatology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Different kinds of reaction are built differently, so what reaches one slides straight off another.
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
Defence starts at a boundary. When anger flares, something has been read as crossing a line, so the question worth asking is which line.
Anger works by sorting the world into me and not me. Once someone has landed on the wrong side of that line, everything they do starts reading as evidence.
Most anger episodes are over within minutes, which is no comfort at all. Nearly everything irreversible happens in the first few seconds.