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Areas › Anger › The fear underneath anger
That kind of convergence is worth more than any single clever argument, though it is still worth testing on yourself rather than taking on trust. Try it on the next three flares: look for what was threatened before you look at what was said. If it holds up in your own life, you have something you can actually use.
Moses was inwardly alarmed (Quran 20:67). Even the man walking in to confront a tyrant is described from the inside first, and the inside was fear.
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 theoretical review of post-traumatic distress argued that fear is not the whole account, and that numbing and dissociation form a separate pathway with a different underlying pattern. So the tidy picture of one system behind everything needs some caution. It is a model assembled from other findings rather than a study in its own right, which is a fair reason to hold it loosely.
Lanius RA, Frewen PA, Vermetten E, Yehuda R. (2010). Fear conditioning and early life vulnerabilities: two distinct pathways of emotional dysregulation and brain dysfunction in PTSD.. European journal of psychotraumatology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
When people looking from completely different directions describe the same sequence, the sequence is probably in the thing rather than in the looking.
A small child is not humiliated by being ignored. The fear of looking foolish, of being criticised, of being misunderstood, all of that arrives later, which means you learned it and it is not a fixed part of you.
Think of the reaction as a small program sitting quietly, waiting for one particular condition. It is not running all the time, and which condition wakes it is a question with an answer.
Not every threat needs answering. A knock to your pride is not a danger to your safety, and it does not require a defence.