Areas › Anger › The fear underneath anger
Never decide you are safe because the other person is scared. Frightened people are often the ones who go furthest.
Anger as fear is a useful way of understanding somebody and a useless safety assessment. If the voice is rising, if the space between you is closing, if you are being blocked from the door, the only question that matters is how you get out. Understand it later, from somewhere else.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Lord, we fear he will do us great harm or exceed all bounds (Quran 20:45). Fear of real harm from a frightened tyrant was taken seriously and answered, not corrected.
قَالَا رَبَّنَآ إِنَّنَا نَخَافُ أَن يَفۡرُطَ عَلَيۡنَآ أَوۡ أَن يَطۡغَىٰ
They said, ‘Lord, we fear he will do us great harm or exceed all bounds.’
Qur’an 20:45read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A meta-analysis of youth aggression found that low empathy was only weakly related to aggressive behaviour, while callous and unemotional traits predicted it much more strongly. Inferring what somebody will do from what you think they are feeling is unreliable. That review looked at young people, though the warning about reading behaviour off a theory carries further.
Ritchie MB, Neufeld RWJ, Yoon M, Li A, Mitchell DGV. (2022). Predicting youth aggression with empathy and callous unemotional traits: A Meta-analytic review.. Clinical psychology review doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Fear can make a person more dangerous rather than less, so a theory about their inner state tells you nothing about your risk.
When not to
If you are in danger, leave and contact emergency services or a domestic abuse helpline rather than trying to manage the situation yourself.
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
Triggers come in different kinds. Some are about life and limb, some are things you learned to dread such as criticism or being shown up, and some are abstractions like unfairness. What helps depends on which kind you are dealing with.
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.
People do not only defend their bodies. We defend our reputations, our ideas, our sense of what is fair, and the body handles those as though something with teeth were on its way.