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Areas › Anger › The fear underneath anger
The word you reach for decides what happens next. Aggressive is a verdict on your character, and verdicts send people into hiding. Defending yourself raises a question instead: against what? That question has an answer, and the answer is something you can work with.
Moses was inwardly alarmed (Quran 20:67). The man walking into the confrontation was frightened inside, which is often what sits behind a front foot.
طه
فَأَوۡجَسَ فِي نَفۡسِهِۦ خِيفَةࣰ مُّوسَىٰ
Moses was inwardly alarmed
Qur’an 20:67read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A meta-analysis of youth aggression found that empathy had only a small inverse relationship with aggressive behaviour, while callous and unemotional traits predicted it more strongly. So the simple reading, that people who lash out are people who do not care, holds up poorly. It was a pooled review of young people, so it maps that one population rather than everybody.
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.
A word that describes what your body was doing points you at the cause, while a word that judges you only points you back at yourself.
Renaming it is not excusing it, since what you did still landed on somebody who has to live with it.
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.
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.
Keep one word ready for when the heat arrives: danger. Asking what feels dangerous here gives you something to answer instead of somebody to beat.