As the most common and least understood of all the emotions, anger seems like the right place to start. I was in a therapy session today discussing the concept of anger in the abstract and what it means, what its purpose is, etc. I came to realize in that conversation, and many in the previous couple months when I've discussed anger with my clients, that I may have a very different view on anger than many people in the world. Anger is largely destructive but it doesn't have to be. It does have a purpose, an incredibly important one when it comes to therapy and personal development. It has a place to be used in a healthy or unhealthy way, just like any other emotion. I want to discuss how it can be used in a healthy way.
Previous to addressing anger, I want to briefly put a plug in for the importance of emotions as a whole. They get a really bad reputation in our society but humans are biologically built to be emotional beings. We are essentially vegetables without emotions. They define what we do and why we do it. One of my favorite quotes says that:
"Until you make the subconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate."
Carl Jung
Carl Jung was one of the founders of modern psychology. He was an expert on the subconscious and a smart dude. Our emotions are almost entirely subconscious unless brought to the surface consciously. If you don't explore your emotions and work through them, they will have greater control over you. And no, it's not just him that thinks that. It's actually been proven many times over that we do what we do because of our emotions. One of my favorite books is "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided By Politics And Religion" by Jonathan Haidt. He is a researcher that does academic studies comprised of tens of thousands of people to see if logic or emotion rules human behavior and he repeatedly finds that emotion does. This book completely changed my view on whether I operated from a place of emotion or cold, hard reason and logic (like I had assumed). I recommend reading it. Or you can ignore science. You do you.
I'll do a much longer discussion/ rant on the importance of emotions in a very near post I'm sure.
Back to anger.
Let's start with discussing why it's misunderstood. We will go into how it's misused later. Anger's purpose is to protect us. From ourselves. Not from others, from ourselves. If you don't intrinsically agree, my goal is to show you that it's true.
We begin with the concept of primary and secondary emotions. A primary emotion is exactly what it sounds like, an emotion. It's an emotion that is your instinctive reaction to any given stimulus. A secondary emotion is a reaction... to your reaction, to your primary emotion. Anger is the only emotion that is always a secondary emotion. Any other emotion could be a secondary emotion, and in that way anger isn't special. It just can't ever be a primary emotion. It can NEVER be a primary emotion (which I say knowing I should never say never but in this case I believe it to be a fact, not something I take lightly).
So what does that mean practically? It means that anytime you are concentrating on your anger instead of whatever is driving it, you are trying to fix a problem that you don't know the source of. Or you are indulging in what David Schnarch, an expert on the theory of differentiation, calls "normal marital sadism", or normal sadism if you aren't married. We will discuss this later as well. So if you had a theoretical problem with your car, you are trying to fix a flat tire when the actual reason the car won't move normally is because your engine is fucked. In this example, the flat tire is the anger and your engine is whatever your primary emotion is. Anger is misdirection. Anger is self protection.
As long as you focus on your anger you will be stuck. The first step to overcoming anger, about anything, lies in this principle. You have to look for what drives the anger, your primary emotion.
So what is anger telling you then? It's telling you that you are feeling an emotion that feels more threatening than your anger so you are going to feel angry instead of whatever emotions is underneath it. It feels big, it feels threatening, and it will kill you. Or your subconscious decided that it was close enough anyway.
Think anger is strength? I'll prove it's not with one question. Is it easier to be angry or to be sad at equivalent levels of both? Unless you're a psychopath that lacks the ability to feel sad, then it's a pretty simple answer for everyone I've ever talked to. Most people automatically switch to anger in defense, a flat tire is way more preferable than paying $6,000 on a new engine! For most people, $6,000 and $150 are very different. Or whatever those costs are I have no fucking idea. I know nothing about cars. The point is that anger is easier to feel, so when our subconscious decides the underlying emotion is too threatening, we react with anger.
If we recognize that anger is meant to try to protect us from something perceived as more threatening, we have the power to make a change. We can change how we relate to anger. But it's the harder path. It's much easier to sit in that which is easy short term while ignoring the long term costs. But those long term costs will catch up. And eventually you would realize that it would've been advantageous for you to have tried to change it now as opposed to one day seeing the trail of damage you left in your wake and deciding then. I am guilty of that. You choose how long you hike that trail.
If you seek truth, like many of us do, and recognize the harm your own anger has caused the things and people you care most about, it's a damn easy choice. We choose our own suffering.
What does anger most likely protect us from? There are many things it could be protecting us from but I will name what I see as the most common things:
Insecurities and fears
Pain
Yup, only two as far as I see it. Insecurities and fears comprise most of it for sure. Could change in the future but that's what I see now.
Insecurities and fears is a very complicated topic. I will try and put it as succinctly as possible. David Schnarch wrote a book, "Intimacy and Desire", which discusses differentiation. It's one of the best books I've ever read and highly recommend it to everyone even though it's a couple's therapy book. I never read it in that context but it still shifted my paradigm about the necessity of personal accountability in healing. Differentiation is a therapy theory on how to solve your problems by resolving your own lack of emotional maturity.
One of the most important concepts of the theory is called a reflected sense of self. If you picture your ego as a giant balloon and you have a large pump to inflate it, a person with a reflected sense of self doesn't pump their own balloon. They could, but they don't believe they're strong enough or capable enough or worthy enough to do so. So they depend on others to inflate their ego balloon. In other words, if your balloon isn't being inflated by others, your ego balloon is deflating and that is very painful. You respond by taking that pain inward or reflecting it outward. Both categories may try to manipulate others, intentionally or unintentionally, to try and have them pump their ego balloon. One of my favorite quotes in the book says:
"People that can't control themselves, control the people around them."
David Schnarch
Anger is a way to manipulate the people around you. If someone doesn't do what you want them to do to inflate your ego balloon, you blame them for not pumping your balloon and absolve yourself from doing the work. If you are angry, 99/100 times it is a you problem, not a them problem. Truly understanding that principle, that you are in 100% control of your emotional response, at all times, no matter what, and that you can change it, is the foundation upon which differentiation is born. And it is the path to true freedom.
Perhaps the best explanation of fears and insecurities is found in the theory of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT). It uses an ABC formula to explain how problems occur and how change occurs. A stands for activating event. An activating event is any event that triggers an emotional response. But the event itself is always inherently neutral. It will never (yup, those words again) trigger a response in and of itself. Our belief (B) takes accountability for that. We see a neutral event and filter it through whatever our belief is about that event. Our belief determines what we think about if the event is a good or bad thing. "C" stands for consequence which is any reaction we have based on our belief.
So the theory states that if you have a problem with something in your life, it's not the situation that's the problem, it's your belief about it (barring extreme cases). Luckily, if you realize that you have the power to change your belief system, you also have the opportunity to change your belief, thereby changing your consequences, thereby resolving the problem. What I've realized through my own therapy journey is that I can change any belief that causes me suffering. Suffering is also a misunderstood concept for another time.
Our problems are primarily caused by our immature belief systems, those which we formed mostly during our formative, early years but still trust due to never examining them critically and working through them. These are called core negative beliefs.
We all have core beliefs, some positive, some negative, but they are our foundational beliefs that we believe at our core. Positive core beliefs could be "I'm funny", "I'm smart", "I'm capable", etc. while negative core beliefs are things like "I'm unloveable", "I'm not good enough", "I'm worthless", etc. Our negative core beliefs are what account for the vast majority, if not all, of our experience of suffering.
Anger protects us from facing our core negative beliefs by making the problem the people around us instead of ourselves. It protects us from having to face our deepest fears about ourselves. And it prevents us from conquering them.
Pain is more applicable when it comes to loss, either by death or choice. By our expectations. By our lack of taking accountability for our emotions, thoughts, and behaviors. Shame. Regret. Disappointment. Sorrow. Etc. When we are attempting to control the people around us as previously mentioned. Which would be a cop out from doing our own work, as also previously mentioned.
Anger is easier to feel than pain. It protects us from even deeper wounds. But in doing so, it prevents us from seeing our truth. And, subsequently, from the opportunity to take accountability and heal.
Many people use anger in another way, to feel understood. They engage in the "normal sadism" discussed earlier which is the idea that people may intentionally say something to hurt or control another person. They use anger as a weapon to make someone feel the way that that person made them feel. It's used in vindication of wrongs and only the other individual experiencing the full karmic effect of their actions is considered just (or more than the karmic effect so they will learn). This is unhealthy as well. Surprise! That was sarcasm, obviously.
What you are doing in this situation is not taking accountability for resolving your own insecurities that they have weaponized. How dare they make you face your own insecurities! They are the problem!
Wrong. You are. You are the problem for not fixing your own insecurities and taking that out on them. And making them responsible for your fragile ego that you haven't changed. They did something bad but they are only able to do so because of you. Someone who is completely healed does not have the desire to hurt others and others don't have the power to hurt them.
Don't mistake that last paragraph as condoning negative behavior. Everyone is accountable to themselves and to others for their behavior. But you can only be responsible for yours. So take accountability and let someone else take their own if they choose to. You can only control yourself.
Unhealthy anger is well known. Healthy anger is not.
The concept of healthy and unhealthy versions of emotions also stems from the theory of REBT discussed earlier. The manner of our reaction dictates whether or not the emotion is healthy or unhealthy. As mentioned earlier, our beliefs create our reality and our reactions. If we have an unhealthy reaction, then there is an unhealthy belief behind it. Whether or not an emotion is healthy or unhealthy is predicated upon the belief systems that underlay it. Here is a chart outlining the difference between healthy and unhealthy anger from a research article on REBT.
As you can see, a person who experiences healthy anger uses that as information but does not act in an unhealthy way. The emotion is still acknowledged and validated but the assumptions involved and consequent reactions are different. Healthy anger does not see threats where none exist and is non aggressive. It does not assume malintent. It does not seek revenge. You are still able to listen and assert yourself, both, even while angry.
Taken a step further, healthy anger is an unconditional taking of accountability of yourself and your reactions and recognizing that your anger is a protective mechanism that is no longer serving you and is, ironically, destroying that which you most desire. It is something to be explored and understood rather than something that is to be used against another person. It's just information about what you need to work on within yourself.
Anger is a tool. An incredibly beautiful tool if used correctly that can inform you of steps in personal growth that you need to take if you choose to take it that way. That's why it's misused. It's not understood as the tool that it is for self growth. But it requires a level of accountability that most will not readily take.
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