An Ode to Anger

Anger is good. Anger is bad. Anger can really make others feel sad.

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When I look around me the country seems to be throbbing with rage and the potential for violence always lurks close to the surface, breaking through via the actions of despondent lone committers of gun violence. It’s also embedded in our rhetoric of political resentment, cruelty, dismissal, diminishment and ultimately dehumanization. It shows up in the slow disappearance of courtesy, friendliness and idealism.

It was idealism after all that brought us democracy, the language of fundamental human rights, public education, and free market economics to begin with.

Generalized and political anger don’t exist in a separate system in our bodies. Multiple kinds of anger impact and often collude with one another, amplifying the signal. Frustrations with family, partners, children, work, finances, OTHER DRIVERS, health, etc. all go into the same hopper. And so the feelings of anger one might discuss with a therapist are relevant to your politics and vice versa.

For as much as anger is truly fundamental, it also takes many different forms. I’ve referred to the atmospheric anger of our times as “rage,” a word I reserve for anger that has become all-consuming. Sometimes that consumption masquerades as a functioning personality or even a political posture.

It’s close cousin is resentment. To me resentment is anger that has congealed enough to be ever-present in a person’s thinking and emotional processing, but it hasn’t yet become entrenched. Resentment, I was taught, is the antecedent and the driver of addiction and many forms of relational dysfunction.

Then there’s immature anger. This is the anger a child expresses overtly when they can’t have what they want or something they value is taken away. Adults feel this kind of anger too, and it is natural. Maturity means learning how to acknowledge that anger and let it flow through so it can be replaced by agency or gratitude.

But sometimes the anger is closely tied to a strongly held belief or moral stance. I call this righteous anger. It says the thing that is being denied is rightly our own (dignity, agency, autonomy, to name a few). Or, the thing we fear will be taken away is similarly precious and something we feel a moral right to possess.

It’s in this space that a lot of social maneuvering and angst take place. My idea of what is a righteous anger may differ from yours. The stakes are high. An anger in someone that appears immature or unjustified is universally unacceptable.

Anger is also a signal. When I am angry it can alert me to something else that I may be feeling. It can clarify a need that I have or which is being denied or is at risk. It can prompt me to defend the things I value. It is incredibly activating.

And anger is also widely feared and dismissed. It’s dangerous, because angry people can and do hurt others with their words or their actions. The expression of anger is seen as evidence that someone does not manage his or her emotions well enough. It can be a reason to avoid listening to a person or group of people. To me, this last phenomenon creates more problems than it resolves—because anger has a way of sticking around or deepening if it is not validated.

One way of understanding many of the worst social issues is by examining the role of free-floating anger. Anger that has maybe not been acknowledged, expressed or validated. Righteous anger is easily mistaken for immature anger. And differences in values challenge what anger people are capable of understanding.

And a personal note: I’m just as susceptible to anger as anyone else, and I write from the perspective of someone who has been victimized by anger, who in some ways finds anger to be normal due to his upbringing, who has said hurtful things, who has worked for many years to identify and amend the sources of his anger, and who has worked with other people to process and manage or overcome their anger.

It’s a subject that’s very important to me.

I guess what I’m saying here is that anger is subtle rather than simple. It is something we all experience, and so it is worthy of attention, respect, and mindful expression at times. What we can’t afford to do is dismiss it, in ourselves or in others. It may be that by reconsidering this maligned emotional state and identifying its inherent value, we can better understand ourselves and how to move forward as a species.

“Anger is a tool for change when it challenges us to become more of an expert on the self and less of an expert on others.”

- Harriet Lerner

Well you made it this far. I write things like this, sometimes integrating personal stories and experiences, because I want to know what other people think. I want to co-evolve with you, learn from you. What do you think?