Areas › Anger › The fear underneath anger
Fight and flight have been hyphenated together for a reason. It is one system with two exits, and which exit you take depends on how you rate yourself against whatever is in front of you.
Which means the fighting is not a fixed feature of your character. Change your sense of what you can handle and the branch changes with it. In practice that looks like knowing what you are going to say, having somebody with you, or simply having done the thing once before.
Qur’an and Sunnah
If God helps you, no one can overcome you (Quran 3:160). The question of what you can withstand is answered somewhere other than in your own size.
إِن يَنصُرۡكُمُ ٱللَّهُ فَلَا غَالِبَ لَكُمۡۖ وَإِن يَخۡذُلۡكُمۡ فَمَن ذَا ٱلَّذِي يَنصُرُكُم مِّنۢ بَعۡدِهِۦۗ وَعَلَى ٱللَّهِ فَلۡيَتَوَكَّلِ ٱلۡمُؤۡمِنُونَ
If God helps you [believers], no one can overcome you; if He forsakes you, who else can help you? Believers should put their trust in God
Qur’an 3:160read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A review of imaging research found that adult attachment style is associated with differences in how threat and reward are processed during social interaction. How a situation gets appraised, and therefore what follows, differs between people according to what they have lived. It is a narrative review of imaging studies, so it gathers the picture rather than establishing the mechanism.
Vrtička P, Vuilleumier P. (2012). Neuroscience of human social interactions and adult attachment style.. Frontiers in human neuroscience doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
The choice between running and fighting is settled by your reading of your own resources, and that reading can be improved.
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
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.
Anger is often a bluff, a show of size put on by something that feels small. Knowing that is not an insult to you, it is probably the most useful thing you can know about it.
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.