Areas › Anger › The fear underneath anger
Think of the anger as a creature with a parent, and the parent is fear. Nearly everybody is keeping one, and because nobody mentions theirs, each person quietly assumes they are the only one.
Two useful things follow. If you want to do something about the creature, go upstream and deal with its parent, because fighting the thing itself is endless. And the silence around it is worth breaking with one trusted person, since half the weight of it is the belief that you are uniquely bad.
Qur’an and Sunnah
We shall certainly test you with fear and hunger (Quran 2:155). Fear is spoken of as something everybody is handed, not as a private defect.
وَلَنَبۡلُوَنَّكُم بِشَيۡءࣲ مِّنَ ٱلۡخَوۡفِ وَٱلۡجُوعِ وَنَقۡصࣲ مِّنَ ٱلۡأَمۡوَٰلِ وَٱلۡأَنفُسِ وَٱلثَّمَرَٰتِۗ وَبَشِّرِ ٱلصَّٰبِرِينَ
We shall certainly test you with fear and hunger, and loss of property, lives, and crops. But [Prophet], give good news to those who are steadfast
Qur’an 2:155read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A conceptual account of shame and guilt after trauma argued that shame in particular drives withdrawal and damage to a person's sense of self. Hiding is described there as part of the feeling rather than a separate choice, which is why disclosure is so hard and so useful. That account is theoretical rather than tested, so treat it as a well argued description.
Wilson JP, Drozdek B, Turkovic S. (2006). Posttraumatic shame and guilt.. Trauma, violence & abuse doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
What stays hidden cannot be corrected by anything, since nothing new ever gets near it.
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
Your eyes flag a threatening shape before you have properly looked at it. By the time you are weighing up what is going on, the alarm has already gone off.
Fear explains a great deal of anger, but not all of it. Sometimes you are simply blocked from something you wanted and nothing is threatening you at all.
Stay a beginner on purpose. If you are still learning, being corrected costs you nothing, because you never claimed to be finished.