The Advantage of Anger
Lately, I’ve been thinking about anger.
More to the point, I have a big problem with the negative stigma around feeling angry.
I’ve spent the last couple of years in a nearly perpetual state of self-reflection. I know I’m not alone in this: globally, the self-improvement industry was worth an estimated $38.28 billion USD in 2019.
And that was before the pandemic happened. Since everything’s shifted online, the Internet is flooded with people calling themselves ‘self-improvement gurus’, selling everything from courses to ebooks on how to make money, get healthy, and be happier.
And boy, have we lapped it up. I’m as guilty as anyone for downing the self-improvement Kool-Aid. Maybe it was because we suddenly had so much free time on our hands, or maybe it was because we were lonely, scared and confused, but for many, the lockdown was spent taking stock of our lives and making some serious changes.
Obviously, that’s not a bad thing. It’s great when we can engage in global conversations about well-being, and I personally don’t think any reading is a waste of time. The issue with the self-improvement market being overly saturated in opinions is that some of them are just plain harmful. Many contain messages of toxic positivity.
I was struck by the title of an article I read last week. ‘Anger is Often Pointless’, the author proclaimed. Setting aside how invalidating that message is, I wondered why would we be able to feel anger if it is, in fact, useless.
Our emotions, good and bad, exist because they tell us something. If anger were truly useless, we would have left it behind long ago, rather than it coming along with us for the evolutionary ride. For example, fear, unpleasant as it is, teaches us to avoid something harmful, and shame lets us know that we’ve crossed a social boundary. We don’t see shame or fear as useless because they’ve served an important evolutionary purpose.
On the flip side, we feel happy and content when we are engaging with what’s important, and trust is fostered when we form connections with people who help us. What’s more, we wouldn’t appreciate the positive emotions as much if we never felt the negative ones.
So, I started to ask myself why anger was being singled out as ‘useless’.
My quest to better myself led me to start trying to suppress my anger. I’ve always been ‘passionate’ (my polite way of saying I have a bit of a temper). It’s been a source of embarrassment on more than one occasion. So, in an effort to find some peace, I decided to try to confront my anger issues head-on, diving head-first into the self-improvement industry. I digested western interpretations of Buddhist doctrines. I started learning how to meditate (I’m still not very good at it) and I read book after book and article after article that demonized anger, describing it as a waste of energy.
The idea that society could be better if we were less angry is nothing new. Taking deep breaths during a moment of anger helped a bit, but it didn’t suddenly make me a happier person. In fact, it had the opposite effect. I noticed that the more I tried to ignore my anger, the easier I became angry. I realized I wasn't really dealing with my anger, I was pretending it wasn’t there. I was essentially rejecting the emotion as a whole.
As I tried (and failed) to suppress my anger, I became judgmental of myself whenever I felt angry. Whenever I felt anger rising, it felt like a personal failure. Why couldn’t I just smile, look on the bright side, let it roll off my back like the gurus said I should? After all, what do I have to be so angry about?
It’s funny how careful we are to avoid projecting toxic positivity on others, yet we so readily pile it onto ourselves.
Eventually, I finally started to question the premise that being angry was an inherently bad thing.
From an early age, many of us are discouraged from expressing our anger. Temper tantrums get shut down, and when we retaliate against what hurts us, we’re told to ‘be nice’. As we get older, many of us have (wrongly) learned that anger is no good, something private and shameful that we shouldn't let on that we feel. It certainly isn’t a pleasant emotion; along with sadness, grief, guilt, shame and other ‘negative’ emotions, anger isn’t something we particularly like feeling. Unfortunately, anger gets more of a bad rap than those other icky feelings, because, unlike sadness, grief etc. which are often internalized, or at least gain us some sympathy, we can usually experience some relief from anger once we ‘let it out’. It’s more of an outwardly expressed emotion. When we’re taught that anger ought not to be felt, we don’t learn how to let it out in a healthy way. What usually ends up happening is that we take our anger out on others (or worse), whether they are the direct source of our anger or not.
So, if we have emotions in order to learn from them, what can our anger tell us?
Anger is our ‘fight’ response, something we feel when our personal boundaries have been crossed, or when we experience or witness something that contradicts our values or the values we hold as a society. We get angry when we personally experience injustice and when we see injustices being perpetrated against people we care about. We even get angry when see injustice being inflicted on strangers. Anger is what inspired men to participate in the women’s rights movement, white people to march for the civil rights movement, and affluent Western societies to stand up and protest against wars being fought in other countries. Anger is what drives us to speak for people who don’t have a voice, or whose voice is being drowned out. When you think of it that way, you can start to appreciate the advantage of anger.
The trouble is that we’ve equated the emotion of anger to unacceptable behaviours expressed when we can’t control our anger, like aggression, physical violence or hostility.
Telling someone not to be angry is about as useful as telling them not to be hungry. When you’re hungry, you don't pretend you aren’t. Rather, you eat.
Similarly, when you’re angry, don’t push it down, pretend you aren’t, or try to shame it out of yourself. Acknowledge your anger, sit with for it a minute (or more), and let it out somehow.
The most useful first step is to calm down. That’s not the same thing as ignoring it. Take deep breaths, hit something (like a punching bag) if that helps, cry, scream into a pillow. From a calmer state, you are in a better position to move on to step two: investigating your anger.
Often, anger is accompanied by or masks other emotions, like shame, fear, or grief, for example. If you can get to the root of why the event or comment that made you angry was so triggering, you can better understand your own anger and express it clearly to the source of your anger.
Of course, not all of our anger has a direct source that you can deal with. Some things are just annoying at no fault of anyone else. However, if you can and need to express your anger against someone, try to approach them in an assertive, not an aggressive, way. Let them know the boundary they crossed why it makes you angry. You can also try writing it in a letter or in your journal, regardless of whether or not you intend to let them read it. Sometimes, just writing it down is good enough.
So let’s stop demonizing and shaming our anger and start treating it for what it is: a healthy, perfectly normal human emotion that serves a purpose. That one small shift in my approach to anger management has helped me deal with my anger better than any other. Maybe, hopefully, it can help you too.
