Areas › Anger › The fear underneath anger
When your reaction is far bigger than the thing that set it off, the honest conclusion is not that you are losing your mind. Something in you learned this response somewhere, quietly, and you were never consulted about it.
The fear of being unstable is what keeps these episodes hidden, and hidden episodes never get worked on. Try saying it plainly to yourself afterwards: that was a learned reaction, it was too big for this, and I would like to find out what it belongs to. Said in that order it stays a puzzle rather than a diagnosis.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Man was truly created anxious (Quran 70:19). An anxious baseline is described as part of the human make-up, not as evidence that something has gone wrong with you.
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A systematic review found that harsh self-criticism runs across many different conditions rather than belonging to depression alone, behaving as a general vulnerability. Turning on yourself for the reaction is therefore not a neutral act. An early review of compassion-focused therapy found it promising for exactly this group, people driven by shame and self-criticism, while noting the evidence base was still small.
Werner AM, Tibubos AN, Rohrmann S, Reiss N. (2019). The clinical trait self-criticism and its relation to psychopathology: A systematic review - Update.. Journal of affective disorders doi
Leaviss J, Uttley L. (2015). Psychotherapeutic benefits of compassion-focused therapy: an early systematic review.. Psychological medicine doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Calling yourself broken adds shame on top of fear, and shame is what keeps the whole thing out of sight.
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
When somebody manages a partner through anger, it is worth asking what the control is guarding. Very often the answer is a fear of being left.
Try swapping the word. Instead of I got aggressive, try I was defending myself, because that is much closer to what your body thought it was doing at the time.
Working out where your reaction came from will not switch it off. That is not a failure of your insight, it is simply how the two kinds of memory work.