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Areas › Anger › The fear underneath anger
Almost everybody has some marker that turns a stranger into an opponent: how they voted, how they pray, which end of the street they grew up on. Nothing in the marker justifies what it can set off. Spotting yours is more useful than being confident you have none, and drink tends to make all of it worse.
If God helps you, no one can overcome you (Quran 3:160). Safety is placed somewhere other than in winning, which is exactly what is at stake on the terraces.
آل عمران
إِن يَنصُرۡكُمُ ٱللَّهُ فَلَا غَالِبَ لَكُمۡۖ وَإِن يَخۡذُلۡكُمۡ فَمَن ذَا ٱلَّذِي يَنصُرُكُم مِّنۢ بَعۡدِهِۦۗ وَعَلَى ٱللَّهِ فَلۡيَتَوَكَّلِ ٱلۡمُؤۡمِنُونَ
If God helps you [believers], no one can overcome you; if He forsakes you, who else can help you? Believers should put their trust in God
Qur’an 3:160read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
In a laboratory study of 69 couples, aggression was highest when anger rumination was high, use of reappraisal was low, and alcohol was involved, with these factors combining rather than acting on their own. The drink is not the whole explanation, it stacks on top of whatever you were already chewing over. Lab measures of aggression stand in for the real thing, which is a real limit on what this shows.
Watkins LE, DiLillo D, Maldonado RC. (2015). The interactive effects of emotion regulation and alcohol intoxication on lab-based intimate partner aggression.. Psychology of addictive behaviors : journal of the Society of Psychologists in Addictive Behaviors doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
A marker turns a person into a category, and it is far easier to swing at a category.
When somebody's anger is filling the room, the bravest sentence available is usually the plainest one: you are frightening me right now.
Anger rescues you from an unbearable in between by handing you something to do. The relief is real, and that is exactly why it keeps coming back.
Keep a line ready for the moment somebody tells you something you did not want to hear. Something like: I did not know that, I would have had to learn it sooner or later, and now I do.