Areas › Anger › The fear underneath anger
If anger runs on the fear system, then the things that settle fear are worth trying on anger: staying in the room a bit longer, letting your body come down before you speak, going back over the story you told yourself about what was happening.
Most anger advice is about clamping down, and clamping down on something frightened rarely holds for long. Treating it as fear gives you gentler routes with a longer reach, and it changes the goal from never feeling it to being able to stay put while you do. It also means progress looks like smaller reactions rather than perfect silence.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Do not be afraid, you have the upper hand (Quran 20:68). The answer given to that inward alarm went to the fear rather than to the situation.
قُلۡنَا لَا تَخَفۡ إِنَّكَ أَنتَ ٱلۡأَعۡلَىٰ
but We said, ‘Do not be afraid, you have the upper hand
Qur’an 20:68read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
In a cohort of 103 veterans, high anger at the start of treatment predicted a poorer response to post-traumatic stress therapy nine months later. Anger left out of the picture seems to get in the way of the trauma work rather than sitting beside it. This was an observational study in one group of men, so it shows the link without proving what causes what.
Forbes D, Parslow R, Creamer M, Allen N, McHugh T, Hopwood M. (2008). Mechanisms of anger and treatment outcome in combat veterans with posttraumatic stress disorder.. Journal of traumatic stress doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
You get further calming a frightened system than fighting an angry one.
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
People do not only defend their bodies. We defend our reputations, our ideas, our sense of what is fair, and the body handles those as though something with teeth were on its way.
Your eyes flag a threatening shape before you have properly looked at it. By the time you are weighing up what is going on, the alarm has already gone off.
Nobody punches a cliff edge. Pure physical fear makes you back away, so when anger turns up instead, there is almost always a person or a meaning tangled into it somewhere.