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Areas › Anger › The fear underneath anger
Two things stay true at the same time here. The learning was not your fault, and the response is still yours to handle. Holding both keeps you out of the two ditches, blaming yourself for the whole of it or treating your history as a permit.
I do not pretend to be blameless, for man's very soul incites him to evil unless my Lord shows mercy (Quran 12:53). Honesty about the pull and mercy over it arrive in the same sentence.
يوسف
۞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.
Among inpatients with substance use disorders, different kinds of childhood abuse were linked to different adult difficulties, with physical abuse in particular associated with aggression and problems regulating emotion. What is learned early does seem to leave specific marks rather than general damage. It was a cross-sectional clinical sample, so it shows the link without establishing that one produced the other.
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.
Knowing where an alarm came from makes it feel less like your character and more like something you can actually change.
Stay a beginner on purpose. If you are still learning, being corrected costs you nothing, because you never claimed to be finished.
When your reaction is far bigger than the thing that set it off, the honest conclusion is not that you are losing your mind. Something in you learned this response somewhere, quietly, and you were never consulted about it.
When somebody's anger is filling the room, the bravest sentence available is usually the plainest one: you are frightening me right now.