Areas › Anger › The fear underneath anger
After a flare, the more useful question is not why you got angry. It is what felt at risk in that moment.
Answers tend to be smaller and more embarrassing than the row that followed. Being made to look a fool in front of your kids. Being left. Being taken for a mug again. Write the one line down without arguing with it, and if the first answer is vague, leave it vague for now and come back.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Lord, we fear he will do us great harm (Quran 20:45). The fear was said out loud before the confrontation, not smuggled in behind it.
قَالَا رَبَّنَآ إِنَّنَا نَخَافُ أَن يَفۡرُطَ عَلَيۡنَآ أَوۡ أَن يَطۡغَىٰ
They said, ‘Lord, we fear he will do us great harm or exceed all bounds.’
Qur’an 20:45read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A meta-analytic review across 75 studies found that heightened sensitivity to rejection was moderately associated with depression, anxiety, loneliness and borderline features. Being cast aside is one of the things that most reliably sits under a strong reaction, which is why it is worth naming. The studies were mostly measuring things at one point in time, so the association is clearer than the direction.
Gao S, Assink M, Cipriani A, Lin K. (2017). Associations between rejection sensitivity and mental health outcomes: A meta-analytic review.. Clinical psychology review doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
The fear tells you what needed protecting, while the anger only tells you that something did.
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
Think of the anger as a creature with a parent, and the parent is fear. Nearly everybody is keeping one, and because nobody mentions theirs, each person quietly assumes they are the only one.
When someone comes at you angry, listen for the fear in it. It changes what you say next, and it changes what their anger does to you.
Fear explains a great deal of anger, but not all of it. Sometimes you are simply blocked from something you wanted and nothing is threatening you at all.