Up: [[Anger]] Created: 2024-04-03 Updated: 2026-01-19 Karla McLaren has a really nice analogy for the relationship between fear and anger in her book *The Language of Emotions*. She says that fear and anger are a team. Imagine driving a car on a rainy night. Think of the car as representing your boundaries, what you value so, therefore, what is supported by anger. You, as the driver, represent fear. If your car/boundary is in good shape, you can use free-flowing fear, which she identifies as instinct, intuition and focus, to stay safe, to handle any conditions. But if your boundaries are insufficient, your car a clunker, you are going to have to be a hyper-vigilant driver, anxious and panicky, in order to make it through the storm. You will be less able to monitor your own behaviour or will be consistently unsettled by the behaviour of other people, so your fear will have to work overtime. Then you will experience exactly what I felt yesterday when H. had her episode — that you have *no privacy and no sacred space in which to regulate my emotions* because you don’t know where I begin or end so that everything that comes near you is perceived as a threat.