Areas › Anger › What you are actually defending
Feeling good about yourself is not the safe end of this. The high and the low come from the same borrowed source, which means the high can be taken back at any point.
You feel valuable while you are fitting in and worthless when you are not, and neither reading was ever yours. It is why an insult can go off like a bomb in somebody who seems perfectly confident. Self-acceptance is duller and steadier: no score to hold up, nothing to defend, nothing anybody can revoke.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Not Iblis, who refused and was arrogant (Quran 2:34). The first refusal in that story is a refusal to be lowered, which is worth remembering when being lowered feels unbearable.
وَإِذۡ قُلۡنَا لِلۡمَلَٰٓئِكَةِ ٱسۡجُدُواْ لِأٓدَمَ فَسَجَدُوٓاْ إِلَّآ إِبۡلِيسَ أَبَىٰ وَٱسۡتَكۡبَرَ وَكَانَ مِنَ ٱلۡكَٰفِرِينَ
When We told the angels, ‘Bow down before Adam,’ they all bowed. But not Iblis, who refused and was arrogant: he was one of the disobedient
Qur’an 2:34read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
Across four studies, rage, hostility and aggressive behaviour were driven by narcissistic vulnerability rather than grandiosity, suggesting explosive anger tends to sit on a fragile self-view rather than an inflated one. That fits the idea that the shakiness matters more than the height. The work combined correlational and experimental designs in mostly non-clinical samples, so the pattern is suggestive rather than settled.
Krizan Z, Johar O. (2015). Narcissistic rage revisited.. Journal of personality and social psychology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Anything given to you by other people can be taken back by them, and some part of you knows 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
Esteem shares a root with estimate, and estimating needs a measure. Look at what you are measuring yourself with and you will usually find it was handed to you: money, height, thinness, numbers on a screen.
A lizard's temperature is whatever the rock is. A mammal shivers, sweats and pants, and stays roughly the same whether it is a good day or not.
Not knowing is not a fault in you. It is the ordinary condition of being alive, and much of the distress comes from the belief that it ought to be otherwise.