Areas › Anger › The fear underneath anger
Every incident you get through without looking at it leaves something behind, a charge that goes off a bit quicker next time. Asking for help early is not making a drama of it, it is cheaper than the version that comes later.
People assume an escalating pattern means they are becoming a worse person. More often it means the same route has been practised a few more times and has got faster. Early means after the second or third time it frightened you, not after somebody involves the police.
Qur’an and Sunnah
I am near. I respond to those who call Me (Quran 2:186). Help is described as already close, which makes early asking the natural thing rather than the dramatic one.
وَإِذَا سَأَلَكَ عِبَادِي عَنِّي فَإِنِّي قَرِيبٌۖ أُجِيبُ دَعۡوَةَ ٱلدَّاعِ إِذَا دَعَانِۖ فَلۡيَسۡتَجِيبُواْ لِي وَلۡيُؤۡمِنُواْ بِي لَعَلَّهُمۡ يَرۡشُدُونَ
[Prophet], if My servants ask you about Me, I am near. I respond to those who call Me, so let them respond to Me, and believe in Me, so that they may be guided
Qur’an 2:186read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A prospective study of adolescents found that difficulty regulating emotion predicted later increases in symptoms, and that symptoms also predicted later difficulty regulating. The relationship ran in both directions, which is how these things compound when left alone. It followed young people rather than adults, and it observed rather than intervened.
McLaughlin KA, Hatzenbuehler ML, Mennin DS, Nolen-Hoeksema S. (2011). Emotion dysregulation and adolescent psychopathology: a prospective study.. Behaviour research and therapy doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
An unexamined blow up teaches the same lesson again, so the next one arrives with a shorter fuse.
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
Anger makes a convincing costume for insecurity, and the person most often taken in by it is the one wearing it.
If anger is fear in armour, then what works on fear is what works on anger: go towards the thing in small doses, stay a little longer each time, and let your body collect evidence.
The part of you that flares learned to do it without a teacher, at a time when reading danger fast actually mattered. It is out of date now. It was never stupid.