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Areas › Anger › What anger actually is
The giveaway is that it happens with the same one or two people, the ones whose closeness you rely on. Anger skills alone do little here, because the trigger is the relationship itself. What tends to help is saying the frightened thing directly: I noticed you have been distant this week and it worried me, rather than opening with what they always do.
He went off angrily, thinking We could not restrict him (Quran 21:87). Leaving in anger was the move, and the darkness afterwards was where it led.
الأنبياء
وَذَا ٱلنُّونِ إِذ ذَّهَبَ مُغَٰضِبࣰ ا فَظَنَّ أَن لَّن نَّقۡدِرَ عَلَيۡهِ فَنَادَىٰ فِي ٱلظُّلُمَٰتِ أَن لَّآ إِلَٰهَ إِلَّآ أَنتَ سُبۡحَٰنَكَ إِنِّي كُنتُ مِنَ ٱلظَّٰلِمِينَ
And remember the man with the whale,when he went off angrily, thinking We could not restrict him, but then he cried out in the deep darkness, ‘There is no God but You, glory be to You, I was wrong.’
Qur’an 21:87read 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 towards a partner was highest when dwelling on the provocation was high, rethinking it was rare and alcohol was in the picture, so these things stacked rather than acting alone. It shows how much the relational setting shapes what anger does. It was a single lab study with a small sample and does not speak to fears of abandonment directly.
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.
Anger protests the distance, but only the fear said plainly can close it.
If the relationship itself is not safe, this is not the advice for you, and safety comes before honesty.
Not every bit of anger is a problem to be solved. Two people squaring up over something that matters, or a mother going hard at whatever threatens her child, is anger doing exactly what it is for.
Anger that shows up when you are running late, when plans change, or when somebody will not do it your way is usually anxiety in a louder coat.
The hardest anger to put down is the kind that feels morally correct. It arrives with a rush of certainty and the sense of being on the right side, and that combination is very hard to argue with.