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Areas › Anger › The fear underneath anger
Which means the thing you have been calling a character flaw is closer to a skill nobody taught you. That changes the job: not becoming a person who never gets angry, but getting better at the ten seconds after it arrives. Skills improve with practice in a way that verdicts about your character never do.
Man was truly created anxious (Quran 70:19). The raw material is stated plainly, which leaves the work as work and not as evidence of something wrong with you.
المعارج
۞إِنَّ ٱلۡإِنسَٰنَ خُلِقَ هَلُوعًا
Man was truly created anxious
Qur’an 70:19read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A developmental study comparing people aged 10 to 23 found that raw emotional reactivity fell with age while the ability to rethink a situation improved, and sensitivity to rejection peaked in the middle teens. So the regulating side really does develop rather than arriving fully formed. It compared different ages at one time, which shows the pattern rather than any one person's path.
Silvers JA, McRae K, Gabrieli JD, Gross JJ, Remy KA, Ochsner KN. (2012). Age-related differences in emotional reactivity, regulation, and rejection sensitivity in adolescence.. Emotion (Washington, D.C.) doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Treating it as something you are learning keeps you working at it instead of hiding from it.
Losing your temper is the easy move. Staying with the fear underneath is the hard one, in the way that dropping something is easier than holding it steady on your fingertip.
Think of the anger as a creature with a parent, and the parent is fear. Nearly everybody is keeping one, and because nobody mentions theirs, each person quietly assumes they are the only one.
Not every threat needs answering. A knock to your pride is not a danger to your safety, and it does not require a defence.