Tag Archive for: anger management

Trade it for Tears

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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.

Bridle the Beast

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Over the past few years—a stressful period during which a contentious presidential election, a coronavirus pandemic, and the death of George Floyd all occurred—you may have felt some anger from time to time, beyond your normal experience of the feeling. Even if you wouldn’t call it “anger”, increased levels of impatience or frustration certainly count.

My interest in anger began a few years ago, when—to my shock—I found myself resembling this masterful description of the wrathful:

When some word or deed or suspicion causing annoyance has roused this disease [of wrath], then the blood boils round the heart, and the soul rises up for vengeance. As in pagan fables some drugged drink changes human nature into animal form, so a man is sometimes seen to be changed by wrath into a boar, or dog, or panther, or some other wild animal. His eyes become bloodshot; his hair stands on end and bristles; his voice becomes harsh and his words sharp. His tongue grows numb with passion and refuses to obey the desires of his mind. His lips grow stiff; and unable to articulate a word, they can no longer keep the spittle produced by passion inside the mouth, but dribble froth disgustingly when they try to speak. 

Gregory of Nyssa, Homily 2 on the Beatitudes

Not my proudest moment. But because what I’ve learned from this experience may be helpful, I write to share a few thoughts about anger.

First of all, anger is a gift. It’s a natural response to a threat and a motivation to protect what needs protection, a sign that something needs to be confronted. Moreover, it’s the energy to get things done. Without anger it’s difficult—if not impossible—to achieve certain goals.

But for all the good it can do, anger is a double-edged sword with enormous destructive potential. It needs to be managed. Here are three principles by which to do that:

  1. Bridle the Beast—Sometimes you’ll be fuming. Unless you’re an extraordinarily virtuous person or surrounded with relationships of exceptional trust, it’s generally not advisable to blow your top. Practice self-control, the ability to pause between stimulus and response—at least for that moment if not forever.
  2. Look it in the Face—Once you separate yourself from the anger you feel and objectify it, you can examine it, which will enable you to state at whom or what you’re angry and why. Very often, just hearing yourself articulate these facts can reframe or refresh your perspective. Sometimes you’ll find your anger justified, many other times not. Once you can say why and at whom or what you’re angry, you can engage in confrontation much more constructively.
  3. Relax the Reins—Sometimes the anger will stick around and move you to action. Sometimes it will trot away after being identified as selfish or unjustified. But if it remains, you must let yourself take appropriate action and engage in constructive confrontation and conflict. Without this final step, you run the danger of repression, resentment, and even physical illness. 

A more difficult spiritual path by which to manage anger is to purify it through detachment and the uprooting of self-will. Desire, particularly when it’s thwarted or its object is threatened, drives anger. The more we sacrifice self-will in favor of a desire for something greater, the less problematic anger will be.

That’s all very philosophical, and there’s a chance we could still blow our tops from time to time. So finally, humility and asking forgiveness are indispensible for those moments when our failure to manage our anger turns it into a bucking bronco instead of a well-trained racehorse.