Being Gentle With Anger

"Anger is the roar of a lion, the cry of a universe longing to be born. It reminds you, when you have forgotten, that the power of life moves through you. That you have a voice."

--Jeff Foster

Anger often gets a bad rap. Sure, when a person acts out thoughtlessly from anger or impulsively without considering the impact of his/her actions on self or other, anger can be harmful personally and relationally. Becoming verbally or physically abusive is not okay. However, we often fail to make distinction between healthy, life promoting angry feelings and destructive expressions that may obscure deeper feelings and experiences underneath the anger.

Anger is a natural response to someone crossing your boundary in a way that is not okay for you, imposing their will on yours, treating you unfairly, breaking an agreement or breaking your trust. In these circumstances, your anger says, "what you are doing is not okay for me." "I matter." "I have rights and needs." Anger allows you to stand in your truth and your worth. And it tells the other person that what they have done is not okay.

If you fail to honor your anger in these kinds of circumstances--pushing it away, labeling it as "bad" or "negative," you do your heart and soul a disservice. On the other hand, if you act out from the anger, you may do yourself a disservice as well, and make the situation worse. Being able to "be with" anger--feeling its intensity, its power, and often the pain underneath it, allows you to stand in the value of your own experience.

Poet Jeff Foster writes, "Feel its pounding, its vibrations, its longing to be acknowledged, held. At its burning core, discover courage. The courage to be yourself. To hold your path fearlessly. To speak for those without a voice…. To roar with love."

Anger can be an affirmation of life. Anger can be an act of love for others or self-love. If we don't care, we don't get anger. What we do with anger is a choice and learning how to respond rather than react is an important skills and lesson.

If we suppress anger, it does not go away. Anger holds a lot of energy. It can eat away at us deep inside. It can haunt us. And it might pop up down the road when something unfair, or confrontational happens again. A woman I know noted that she became like a feral cat as a child to respond to feelings of unfairness and invisibility. Her power was in her anger, like a cat growling and swatting with her claws. So, when something felt unfair, she would get angry and confrontational. There was no room for her hurt and her pain. And sadly, there were things she needed then and now which required vulnerability that she could not access because anger had become her shield. She had never really gotten comforted when she needed comforting. And she had also never been able to express her anger in a way that felt healing, where she got heard. She found herself getting stuff in the growling, when she needed to find comfort. Learning how to hold her anger and pursue what she needed was a critical learning.

Even the worst criminals who act out of anger in unfathomable ways often have a painful context that fuels their unfathomable actions. I read an article in the Boston Globe today about the history of a man who shot a Boston Police Officer. What he did was horrible, for sure. But the author of the article asked, "what kind of life had this 41 year old man had that could have led him to do such a horrible thing?" It turns out that the shooter had a 23 year record with the law, including having been shot 13 times on two occasions himself. One time when he was being arrested, he told the arresting officer, "It's okay, just shoot me." The author of the article noted that this was not a normal response, but instead reflected the level of violence this man lived in and around since childhood. He posed the question: how scary must it have been to live in this kind of environment, and to have a gun in your possession at all times as a first line of self-defense against others with guns?

There is no arguing that shooting the police officer was wrong. And yet, recognizing the humanity in the "criminal" and what led him to behave the way he did is critical. If we found ways to intervene with compassion first, perhaps those most wounded could learn to be more gentle with their anger. And perhaps the difference between being with anger in a healthy embodied way and acting out of anger in a way that is destructive to self and others would be more commonly understood.

When Anger Becomes A Weapon

This past Sunday, my son Alex and I were getting out of our car in the driveway. It was mid-day, and the beautiful sunny day was suddenly interrupted by the skidding of tires and the eruption of a man with a loud voice at the intersection near our house.

The man was screaming at the driver in front of him, as they were stopped at a red light. Periodically, people display road rage in the most inappropriate places (is there ever an appropriate place for road rage?), and this was one of those moments. The poor man in the white car in front of this screaming man was trapped between a road rager and a red light. He had nowhere to go until the light changed.

The angry man got out of his car, slammed his door shut and taunted the man in front of him, "I dare you. Put it up. Put it up." The entrapped driver did his best to ignore the raging, fist wielding man behind him, and thanks to good luck, the light changed and he drove away.

Unsatisfied by his first encounter, our road raging protaganist pulled his car over, blocking the car in back of him, and went at him. I could not hear his initial screamings, but could feel the venom and contempt in whatever he uttered. The man in back of him, driving a green truck, yelled back, telling him to "shut up."

This only further inflamed the road rager, and he got out of his car, once again, and said, "I dare you. If you were a REAL man, you'd fight me." He said many other things, which I refrain from printing in this blog, including racist and sexist comments, a fine selection of swears and put downs, and about everything he could drag in to taunt the man behind him to engage in a fist fight. He then got back in his car.

The man in the green truck refused to take the bait, commenting that he would be put back in jail if he gave this man what he was asking for. The road rager chose to take this as fuel to his fire and then started verbally assaulting the man behind him about why he might have been in jail before and how worthless he must be to have ever been in jail. He got out of the car a second time, this time approaching the driver's window with his fists, and I am very impressed at the self-control the green truck's driver exercised in the face of this very direct threat.

Finally, the light turned green again, and the man in the green truck was spared further psychological abuse. The road rager decided he'd had his fill of raging at other drivers, got in his car, turned around awkwardly, and started driving down the street our driveway is on. I walked closer to the edge of the driveway to get a look at this man who felt such a need to verbally assault and taunt other drivers--just because they were there. I was a bit afraid myself, that if he saw I was watching, he might come after me with a vengeance. I tried to be inconspicous, hiding in the shrubs a bit, and he drove by.

All I could say was, "wow!"

Anger is a primal human emotion, and being able to feel and express appropriate anger is very important for defining our boundaries, defending our position when under attack, and having a sense of entitlement to take up space, have a voice or be treated with respect. Rage is different than anger, and most often appears when someone's boundaries have been violated and there is the need to "redraw the line" back, further away from the intruded upon or wounded party.

The image of having a neighbor throw their trash across the fence into your yard, and your politely, yet firmly, taking the trash and returning it to the source, is a healthy expression of anger. Anger need not be violent. Anger need not be cruel. Anger need not involve verbally hurtful statements. Anger can be clean, grounded and contained and deliver its message elegantly and even respectfully.

When anger becomes a weapon, as it was for the road rager at the intersection near my house, the person doing the raging is often taking a deep hurt from past experience and projecting it forth into the present. Sitting on a raging volcano, the slightest provocation unleashes the emotional lava which simmers just under the surface much if not all of the time. The rager does not think about the implications of his/her behavior on his/her target. The rager does not think about the consequences of his/her action. The rager just spews his emotional lava with great intensity, as though purging himself of a hot potato, without making the connection between the source of this anger and the incident in the here and now.

While the road raging man could greatly benefit from therapy, introspection and some anger management tools, I am afraid he is unlikely to encounter them unless he ends up in jail after "going off" on another innocent person at the wrong time. Would the road rager have behaved the same way in front of a police officer? Or is he smart enough to know that then he would likely be held accountable for his conduct and stopped?

Uncontained anger, sadly, is a weapon that is passed on from "victim" to "victim" in an unconscious chain of actions. Pain brings more pain. Victim becomes victimizer. Until one's wounds are held, honored and explored safely in a healing setting, it is very hard to put the "weapon" down.

I hope the road rager one day finds a healing place. But until then, I wouldn't want to be in front of him or in back of him at a traffic light!