A friend responded to my last article on anger and its management with the following:

Right now, mentally, I’m really angry at the anti-vaxxers, and at #45 (I stay mad at him…), and I’m not sure how much reading of your article is going to help.

Leaving aside the highly politicized topics of vaccines and past presidents—for there are plenty of angry people on both sides of those dividing lines—I agree that rereading the article will probably not help with the sort of anger she has. My friend is quite intelligent and surely caught everything the first time she read the article, but more than reading and thinking is necessary to deal with anger. Once we bridle the beast and look it in the face, we need to relax the reins and let it move us to action. 

But if the best destiny of anger is to move us to constructive action, I’m concerned about the pain this enduring anger may be causing my friend, for there are so many circumstances in which the actions of others stir up our anger…and there is little or nothing constructive we can do about it. In such situations, we have at least two options:

First is Andy Dufresne’s option: scrape away, bit by bit, day after day. If there is some small, constructive thing we can do with the anger—civil conversations, writing for the sake of understanding and seeking truth, tunneling out of the cell in which we were unjustly imprisoned—then we can channel the anger into that activity.

The other option is to trade it for tears. When there’s really nothing constructive that we can do—when the drunk driver who killed your loved one also died in the accident, when cancer ends your child’s life early—we can trade anger for sorrow.

Or maybe we can do both. Maybe we can take action to help others and alternately lament our helplessness. Maybe we can harness the power to confront constructively and also accept our powerlessness.