Areas › Anger › What you are actually defending
A lot of angry certainty is frightened certainty. Needing to know exactly what is going on, and exactly who is at fault, is more comfortable than admitting the situation cannot be fully read.
From the outside it looks like arrogance, and from the inside it feels like clarity. Underneath it is usually the same discomfort as any other anxiety: not knowing feels dangerous, so a firm answer gets manufactured. Treating it as fear rather than as ego changes how you go at it, in somebody else and in yourself.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Do not follow blindly what you do not know to be true (Quran 17:36). Holding back from claiming knowledge you do not have is what is asked, and it is the opposite of what anger wants.
وَلَا تَقۡفُ مَا لَيۡسَ لَكَ بِهِۦ عِلۡمٌۚ إِنَّ ٱلسَّمۡعَ وَٱلۡبَصَرَ وَٱلۡفُؤَادَ كُلُّ أُوْلَٰٓئِكَ كَانَ عَنۡهُ مَسۡـُٔولࣰ ا
Do not follow blindly what you do not know to be true: ears, eyes, and heart, you will be questioned about all these
Qur’an 17:36read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
In two longitudinal samples of crime victims, post-traumatic stress symptoms predicted later anger more strongly than anger predicted later symptoms, which suggests anger can sit downstream of threat that has not been worked through. Anger following fear rather than causing it is at least consistent with what is described here. In a separate cross-sectional sample of inpatient substance users, particular kinds of childhood abuse were linked to aggression and to difficulty handling emotion, though cross-sectional data cannot establish the order.
Orth U, Cahill SP, Foa EB, Maercker A. (2008). Anger and posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms in crime victims: a longitudinal analysis.. Journal of consulting and clinical psychology doi
Banducci AN, Hoffman EM, Lejuez CW, Lejuez CW, Koenen KC, Koenen KC. (2014). The impact of childhood abuse on inpatient substance users: specific links with risky sex, aggression, and emotion dysregulation.. Child abuse & neglect doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Certainty feels like control, and control is what fear is looking for.
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
A small child works out how to feel about itself by looking at its parents' faces. If that face was missing, or busy, the looking does not stop, it just moves on to teachers, coaches, friends and strangers.
Giving up certainty is a loss, and it is fair to treat it as one. People do grieve the version of themselves who knew exactly what was going on.
A cold-blooded animal that catches its dinner after dark cannot digest it until the sun comes back. It has the meal and it cannot use it.