Areas › Anger › The fear underneath anger
A colleague's frown is being read by very old equipment that is watching for something pointed coming towards you. The reaction it produces is not a judgement on you, and quite often the frown is not about you at all.
Before you answer the face, get one piece of actual information. Ask what is going on, or simply wait for their first sentence and listen to it. Most frowns turn out to be a headache, a message they just read, or plain concentration.
Qur’an and Sunnah
It is Satan who urges you to fear his followers; do not fear them (Quran 3:175). The dread of what others might do is described as something urged into you and blown up beyond its size.
إِنَّمَا ذَٰلِكُمُ ٱلشَّيۡطَٰنُ يُخَوِّفُ أَوۡلِيَآءَهُۥ فَلَا تَخَافُوهُمۡ وَخَافُونِ إِن كُنتُم مُّؤۡمِنِينَ
It is Satan who urges you to fear his followers; do not fear them, but fear Me, if you are true believers
Qur’an 3:175read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A systematic review of experimental exclusion found that being left out produced stronger and longer-lasting distress in people with psychiatric diagnoses than in others. Being shut out is a real injury, which is part of why an ambiguous face can land so heavily. The experiments used mild, artificial exclusion tasks, so they show the sensitivity rather than the full weight of the real thing.
Reinhard MA, Dewald-Kaufmann J, Wüstenberg T, Musil R, Barton BB, Jobst A, Padberg F. (2020). The vicious circle of social exclusion and psychopathology: a systematic review of experimental ostracism research in psychiatric disorders.. European archives of psychiatry and clinical neuroscience doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Faces get scanned for danger first and for meaning second, which is why the first read is so often wrong.
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
Treat a flare-up as a reading rather than a failure. It is telling you where something is sore.
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.
After a flare, the more useful question is not why you got angry. It is what felt at risk in that moment.