Areas › Anger › What anger actually is
Some anger fires when your image takes a knock: your child playing up in a shop, your name left off something, a correction in front of other people. What got punctured was the picture of yourself.
The tell is the phrase, said or unsaid, that this reflects badly on me. Managing the triggers will not help much, because they are endless and small. The work is on how much of your worth is riding on how things look, and on moving from needing to feel good about yourself towards being able to accept yourself without the vote.
Qur’an and Sunnah
I do not pretend to be blameless (Quran 12:53). Letting go of a spotless image is put there as honesty rather than as loss.
۞وَمَآ أُبَرِّئُ نَفۡسِيٓۚ إِنَّ ٱلنَّفۡسَ لَأَمَّارَةُۢ بِٱلسُّوٓءِ إِلَّا مَا رَحِمَ رَبِّيٓۚ إِنَّ رَبِّي غَفُورࣱ رَّحِيمࣱ
I do not pretend to be blameless, for man’s very soul incites him to evil unless my Lord shows mercy: He is most forgiving, most merciful.’
Qur’an 12:53read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
Work developing the standard measure of guilt and shame proneness separates guilt about something you did from shame about who you are, and shows the two lead to different behaviour. Anger of this kind generally sits on the shame side, where the self rather than the act is what feels exposed. That research was about building a measure, so the link to this particular pattern is reasoning rather than a tested finding.
Cohen TR, Wolf ST, Panter AT, Insko CA. (2011). Introducing the GASP scale: a new measure of guilt and shame proneness.. Journal of personality and social psychology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
If your sense of self is on loan from other people's reactions, every reaction becomes a threat.
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
Defence starts at a boundary. When anger flares, something has been read as crossing a line, so the question worth asking is which line.
The speed of your reaction says something about how humans are built. It is not a report on how bad you are, and that difference is worth holding on to.
The part of you that detects threat is very old and does not take instructions in words. Telling yourself to calm down mostly demonstrates that.