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Areas › Anger › The fear underneath anger
If you believe the shouting protects you, follow it all the way to the end of an evening and see what it protected. Usually the other person hardens, the row grows, and the thing you were actually afraid of never gets tested. A fair question to sit with: over the past year, what has the anger kept safe?
Speak to him gently so that he may take heed (Quran 20:44). The instruction for the frightening confrontation was gentleness, which is the opposite vector to the one anger offers.
طه
فَقُولَا لَهُۥ قَوۡلࣰ ا لَّيِّنࣰ ا لَّعَلَّهُۥ يَتَذَكَّرُ أَوۡ يَخۡشَىٰ
Speak to him gently so that he may take heed, or show respect.’
Qur’an 20:44read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
In a fear conditioning experiment, people who were allowed to make a protective response while facing a feared cue kept believing the cue was dangerous, while those who could not do anything went on learning it was safe. The protection preserved the fear. It was a controlled laboratory setup with artificial cues, so the mechanism is clean but the setting is nothing like an argument at home.
Lovibond PF, Mitchell CJ, Minard E, Brady A, Menzies RG. (2009). Safety behaviours preserve threat beliefs: Protection from extinction of human fear conditioning by an avoidance response.. Behaviour research and therapy doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Going in hard stops you ever finding out whether you were in real danger to begin 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.
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.
If anger runs on the fear system, then the things that settle fear are worth trying on anger: staying in the room a bit longer, letting your body come down before you speak, going back over the story you told yourself about what was happening.