Areas › Anger › The fear underneath anger
Anger and anguish grew from the same old root, and angst, anxiety and danger belong to the same family of words. The language has been saying this for about a thousand years.
Use it as a handle rather than as proof. Next time you catch yourself furious, try the word anguish instead and see whether anything in you agrees. If it does, you have found the layer that is worth attending to, and you found it with a word rather than an hour of analysis.
Qur’an and Sunnah
He is fretful when misfortune touches him (Quran 70:20). The fretting comes first, and the anger hardens over the top of it afterwards.
إِذَا مَسَّهُ ٱلشَّرُّ جَزُوعࣰ ا
he is fretful when misfortune touches him
Qur’an 70:20read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
In a placebo-controlled experiment, people with generalised social anxiety showed exaggerated amygdala responses to both fearful and angry faces, which oxytocin brought back towards normal. The same threat machinery was busy with both kinds of face. It was a small study in one diagnosis, so it supports the family resemblance without settling how deep it goes.
Labuschagne I, Phan KL, Wood A, Angstadt M, Chua P, Heinrichs M, Stout JC, Nathan PJ. (2010). Oxytocin attenuates amygdala reactivity to fear in generalized social anxiety disorder.. Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
A word that fits better than the one you were using shows you what you are actually dealing with.
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 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.
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.
There are two kinds of work on anger, and the order matters. Plain skills for the moment come first, and the larger questions about what your life is for can wait.