Issue #44: Your Anger

Humans experience anger.

Arseholes choose to be violent.

To deny anger is to deny a normal part of being a human.

To suppress it is to suppress a natural function.

What happens if you suppress all of your farts?

Soon enough, they seep out when you don’t want them to. Your gut bubbles away. You might even shit yourself. It takes more and more energy to keep them at bay.

It’s not healthy.

Of course, there is also a time and place to let it out. In important conversations, you’re likely not going to let rip.

The same goes with anger.

Don’t let the energy of it out mid-conversation. But listen to it. It has a message for you. Just like any emotion.

Anger is a necessary human function. It has a message to tell you. In a broad sense, usually something like “A boundary has been crossed, your personal safety/space is being threatened - here is a giant and obvious sign to indicate that and some energy to do something about it.”

"Anger is Sad’s Bodyguard"

Said differently, anger and other similar emotions like rage, fury, and irritability tend to guard or ‘protect’ more vulnerable and weaker feeling emotions like sadness, grief, powerlessness, hopelessness, and disappointment.

Anger is an energetic emotion. It is designed to make us feel powerful so that we can take a suitable action against something that threatens us or our kin.

It is there to protect us. However, if we haven’t developed a decent emotional literacy where we are comfortable enough facing sadness and weaker emotions, then all we do is let anger win.

Hence, some guys struggle to let go of their anger even though they see how it hurts others or themselves. It’s too hard to let go of the only source of power you have.

And if you can only empower yourself through anger, then it shows us the inherent weakness just beneath the surface, the powerlessness that only anger can be the balm for.

Examples

If someone breaks into your house in the night - they cross the boundary of your home - you’d better activate some anger if you want to protect yourself and your family.

The energy in anger helps give you the power to do something that you might not have felt powerful enough to do with it.

Same if someone cuts you off in traffic. Or you have to deal with an incompetent tech support operator.

Whatever it is that usually activates your anger response is unlikely in need of that physical energy.

It needs a mature and grounded response to the thing that spiked the anger initially. It needs you to be curious enough to ask yourself, “What is this anger telling me and how can I respond from that place?”

Anger needs to be listened to and processed.

Your task is to be a responsible, mature steward of it. Welcome it in, get the message it has for you, process it, and then respond from that place.

Respond to what the anger tells you (after you’ve listened to it) - instead of reacting in the heat of the emotion.

Processing Anger

Next time anger visits, stop for a moment. Feel the heat of it. And take five deep breaths.

Then ask yourself:

• “If this anger could talk, what would it say?”
• “Is there anything beneath this anger - something weaker - that it’s here to protect me from feeling?”
• “If that could talk, what would it say?”
• “If I were to honour that, how would I communicate in this moment?”

My advice to you, is that no matter how tough it might be to communicate that weaker, more vulnerable truth, that is the thing in need of expressing.

Of course, it’s not always the appropriate person to hear it. Just because we get to the more accurate root of the anger, doesn’t mean the person can handle hearing what we have to say.

That is more of a practise that takes time to improve at.

The ‘Controlling’ of Anger

Many guys desire to ‘control their emotions’ - regardless of what they are. Although anger sits pretty squarely in that spot.

The issue with ‘control my anger’ is that it creates a black-or-white approach; it’s ‘I control it, or it controls me’ - which is profoundly ineffective.

One invites suppression and ignorance. The results are many, but they range from becoming a wound-up ball of tension, irritated at the slightest thing, to being overly positive and ignoring/bypassing real shit that needs to be faced and dealt with.

The other means the anger wins. It runs my behaviours. I weaponise it against myself or others. I treat myself like shit, I sabotage my life, I have terribly negative inner dialogue, I make life hard for myself.

Or I hit others with a vomit of righteous words or with my fists as my internal anger becomes external violence.

The desire for control implies no trust - it says, “If I don’t control my anger, I don’t trust that I can control my behaviours”.

When we get to know our anger, we get to know ourselves better. We start to be able to trust ourselves when a powerful emotion such as anger arrives.

To ‘process anger’ isn’t to push it away and control it, nor is it to be controlled by it. It is to let it through you and out in a healthy and safe way.

Violence is an ineffective, inappropriate and irresponsible outburst of the energy anger brings. Or an equally violent and abusive internalising of anger towards self.

Processing anger means choosing to be responsible for owning the energy needing release. It also means listening to the message being sent and addressing that message.

It might also mean the healthy and safe releasing of that energy at a later, more appropriate time; hit a punching bag, scream to some loud music, beat the living shit out of the ‘decorative pillows’ (insight into my own process that last one).

Your Anger

Put your hand up if you struggle with anger - not just in vomiting it out into the world ineffectively and inappropriately - but in letting it in, letting it out, and letting it go.

I’ve never been a violent person.

Never been in a fight.

Nor do I ever care to get in one.

Sure, if the moment needed it from me, I’d give my best crack - as my friend Traver Boehm says, “Be dangerous, not a danger.”

And yeah, for 20 odd years, I played a physically aggressive sport and let fly some of my aggression in a healthy way.

But it was never violence.

And still, I experience anger.

Yet, I’m not angry.

Anything you place after the words “I am…” is something you are choosing to identify with.

Be careful what you place after those words.

And so, many men stumble through life as they struggle to avoid anger or to be ruled by it.

Sometimes, doing so well to avoid it until … MOTHERFUCKINGSNAPBITCHES… I’M ANGRY - THAT THIS!

An explosion goes off, followed by apologies and possibly an “I’m not normally like that” and an internal shame storm (been there).

Identifying with anger or trying to identify as someone who doesn't have it - either one has anger at the centre.

Anger is an important messenger that needs to move some energy. The work is to get the message and then to move it. Welcoming it in and letting it out so we can then let it go in a healthy and safe way for you and others.

But a story that ‘anger = violence’ is a shortcut to being an anger denier externally and an anger wrestler internally.

Anger is something that visits, not who you are.

Note #1: Not intending to shame any arseholes who use anger as violence. Shaming anyone who hasn’t learnt how to deal with their shit yet to the degree that they are violent likely won’t help anyone. However, I’m also not letting them away with their bullshit choices either. We can be better. If this hits you, take it as an invitation to do something better about the behavioural response you have adapted to prioritise.

Note #2: Anger is a giant issue and subject. I’ve done my best to touch a few points of it here. But I could keep going. Let’s use this as a conversation starter. If you want a bit more you can check out this podcast episode I did a while back here. Otherwise email me with your own situations and challenges and we can see if there is something solid that can help you.