Areas › Anger › The fear underneath anger
Keep one word ready for when the heat arrives: danger. Asking what feels dangerous here gives you something to answer instead of somebody to beat.
Answers are allowed to be small and unimpressive. Being seen as useless. Being talked over again. The value is in having a question short enough to remember while your heart is going. Some people hang it on how close the words anger and danger sound, and whether or not the two are really related, the hook does its job.
Qur’an and Sunnah
I will feel stressed and tongue-tied, so send Aaron too (Quran 26:13). The frightening thing is said plainly, which is a different move from bluster.
وَيَضِيقُ صَدۡرِي وَلَا يَنطَلِقُ لِسَانِي فَأَرۡسِلۡ إِلَىٰ هَٰرُونَ
and I will feel stressed and tongue-tied, so send Aaron too
Qur’an 26:13read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A study of anxiety sensitivity and intolerance of uncertainty found the two strongly related but separable, both sharing a core of fearing unknown harmful outcomes. Vague dread has an edge that comes from not knowing what exactly is coming, which is what naming the specific fear works on. The study measured everything at one point in time, so it describes the terrain rather than showing that naming helps.
Carleton RN, Sharpe D, Asmundson GJ. (2007). Anxiety sensitivity and intolerance of uncertainty: requisites of the fundamental fears?. Behaviour research and therapy doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
A question you can actually recall in the heat gives your mind something to do other than rehearse the attack.
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
Traditions that agree on very little agree on this. Contemplatives, evolutionary biologists and therapists all arrived separately at the same order of events: something feels threatened, then hostility arrives.
Anger makes a convincing costume for insecurity, and the person most often taken in by it is the one wearing it.
Never decide you are safe because the other person is scared. Frightened people are often the ones who go furthest.