Anger
It's easy to trash anger.
After all, when it "possesses" us, are we not more prone to violence, ill will, and lovelessness? And, even if we can successfully counteract such "possession," we have, it seems, only curbed the beast — it still paces behind its bars, fanged and all too eager to do damage, while we play vigilant zookeeper. Or, less commonly, we may romanticize anger, rationalizing our "natural" urges to uninhibitedly express it, in the name of emotional de-suppression and honesty.
In both cases, however, anger is treated as though it were no more than an indwelling entity or mass, a thing either to be muzzled or set loose. Enthusiasts of "cooling down" and their "getting it out of our system" counterparts snipe at each other, citing — and making moral real estate out of — the dangers of either letting anger out or keeping it in. But there is much, much more to working with anger, as we shall see.
There is nothing inherently wrong with anger. Anger is not necessarily a problem, a hindrance, a sign of negativity or spiritual slippage, an avoidance of something "deeper," nor a demonstration of unlove. It is our use of our anger that is the real issue.
Do we blame our anger for clouding or befuddling our reason — playing victim to our passions being one of our oldest alibis — or do we assume responsibility for what we do with it? Do we turn our anger into a weapon, hiding our hurt behind its righteously "pumped-up" front, fueling and legitimizing our defensiveness with it, or do we instead keep it as transparent and permeable as possible, remaining non-blaming and vulnerable even as we allow it as full or penetrating a passion as fits the situation? Do we use our anger to get even, to score points, to overpower or outdebate, or do we use it to deepen or resuscitate our intimacy with our partner, to compassionately flame through pretense, emotional deadwood, and life-negating investments?
It's easy, in the name of angerphobia, to reject, crush, incarcerate, bad- mouth, or otherwise violate our anger, allowing it so few life-enhancing outlets that it — like an animal kept too long in a cage — usually behaves badly when finally released, thereby confirming our suspicions that it is indeed in need of much the same treatment as a savage beast that has somehow found its way into our house.
It is also easy, though less common, to glorify anger, with equally harmful results. Exhorting the inhibited to "get into their anger" may just lead to a forced anger, an anger of performance, an anger that leads not to healing insight, but rather to an overreliance on simplistic (and possibly aggression-reinforcing) cathartic procedures.
It is, however, not so easy to cultivate intimacy with our anger. Getting close to its heat, its flames, its redly engorged intensity, without losing touch with our basic sanity, asks much of us.
But if we do not ask — and ultimately demand — this of ourselves, we will surely miss knowing not only the heat of anger's fire, but also its light. As much as anger can injuriously burn, it can also illuminate — it all depends on what kind of relationship with anger we choose to cultivate.
Anger is an aroused, often heated state which combines (1) a compellingly felt sense of being wronged (hence the moral quality of most anger), and (2) a counteracting, potentially energizing feeling of power.
Can we identify anger — which is not a single emotion, but instead a family of related emotions, ranging from annoyance to rage — through the observed presence of particular behaviors? Not necessarily. We can display none of the behaviors supposedly characteristic of anger, and still be angry. Instead of pounding the table or cursing the idiot who has dared to cut us off in traffic, we may instead in our anger try even harder to please our partner, or smilingly withhold a piece of information that we know would help our partner. So can we — or others — recognize our anger through observing our behavior? Not necessarily!
Similarly, can we identify anger through the observed presence of particular feelings? Two emotions — like envy and resentment — may feel very similar, having much the same physiological characteristics, yet they do differ. We discriminate between emotions by attuning, however unknowingly, to the context of the situation.
Because bodily sensations are usually so obviously involved in emotion, we may confuse them with emotion itself. There is, however, more to emotion than just the feeling of it. Anger is an attitude, not just a feeling. We evaluate emotion, but not feeling — we may speak of our anger as "justified" or "unjustified," but would we speak of our feeling like vomiting as "justified" or "unjustified"?
Also, we can cease being angry, and yet still feel the very same feelings that a moment ago we identified as anger.
For example, I am raging at you for scratching my newly bought car, and suddenly I find out from a deeply trustworthy friend that you are in fact completely innocent of doing so, and I am now no longer angry at you. My evaluation of the situation has radically and almost instantaneously changed, yet the very feelings which I was experiencing just a moment ago — pounding heart, facial flushing, shoulders knotting, hands ready to strike — are still clearly present, having diminished only slightly.
So can I now call these feelings angry feelings? No, because their evaluative framework — or emotional basis — has changed.
Anger, contrary to popular opinion, is not necessarily the same as aggression. Aggression involves some form of attack, whereas anger may or may not. Aggression is devoid of compassion and vulnerability, but anger, however fiery its delivery might be or might have to be, can be part of an act of caring and vulnerability. Nevertheless, anger in general remains all but synonymous with aggression.
Aggression is not so much an outcome of anger, as an avoidance of it and its underlying feelings of woundedness and vulnerability. Recognizing this is essential for relational depth and maturity.
Viewing anger as aggression — or as the cause of aggression — gives us an excuse to classify it is a "lower" or "primitive" emotion. Or something far from spiritual. But anger is far from "primitive," though what we do with it may be far from civilized!
Rejected anger easily mutates into aggression, whether active or passive, other-directed or inner-directed. Thus does a means of communication become a means of weaponry.
Anger assigned to do injury, however subtly, is not really anger, but hostility. Anger that masks its own hurt and vulnerability is not really anger, but hardheartedness or hatred in the making, seeking not power with, but power over.
However, there is a potential healing here: to reverse the equation, to convert aggression, hostility, hatred, and every other diseased offspring of mishandled anger back into anger.
This conversion, however, does not mean eviscerating or drugging the energy of such negative states, but rather liberating it from its life- negating viewpoints, so that its intensity and passion can coexist with a caring, significantly awakened attention. In this sense, the world needs not less anger, but more. Especially anger coming from the heart.
Violence — the brass knuckles of abused wounds — ignores, tramples or dynamites personal boundaries, but anger, in many cases, protects or guards such boundaries, at best resolutely exposing and illuminating (or perhaps even flaming through) barriers to intimacy or integrity, without abusing those who are maintaining such barriers. Anger that burns cleanly leaves no smoldering pockets of resentment or ill-will.
Violence is not a result of anger, but is an abuse or violation of anger. Working with Anger: Four Approaches
The four approaches to working with anger introduced below provide a framework not only capable of making sense out of the diverse, complex, and enormous amount of material concerning anger, but also sufficiently inclusive to cover both personal and transpersonal considerations of anger.
(1) Anger-In:
Anger-In refers to strategies favoring the restraining and redirection of the energies characteristic of raw anger. Not surprisingly, advocates of this approach emphasize the importance of not directly expressing anger. Self-control, subduing and recontextualizing our anger — these are the cornerstones of anger-in. Anger-in "experts" tend to equate the expressing of anger with "venting," a lack of self-control, violence, and aggression. Anger-in practices teach us not only to identify those perceptions and interpretations that catalyze anger, but also relaxation and cooling-off techniques. Reinterpreting supposed provocations is essential to anger-in; such reappraisal reduces the probability of anger being openly expressed by removing or at least shrinking the perception of being under attack.
Though anger-in may make too much of a virtue out of controlling, managing, and non-angrily "expressing" anger, it does make a strong case for learning to step back from anger so that its more extreme or irrational impulses can be reconsidered or given more contextual space. Nevertheless, anger-in has a difficult question before it: How successful can a way of working with anger be that does not include openly expressing the actual feelings of anger? Would we, by analogy, consider a grief therapy to be successful that did not include the actual expression of grief?
(2) Anger-Out:
Anger-Out refers to approaches that emphasize the importance of directly and fully expressing the energies and intentions of anger. At the very core of anger-out theory and work is the notion of catharsis, which remains a controversial topic in therapeutic practice, despite evidence that incorporating catharsis in anger-management work makes it more effective.
Advocates of anger-out say that suppressed anger is not healthy — better to bring it to the surface (or "dig it up") and release/express it, they claim. As appealing and apparently medically sound as such "down-to-earth" logic may be, it can tend to overemphasize a merely physical approach to anger, as if anger was just something to discharge or eliminate from the body. The emotional-release work that characterizes anger-out practices can range from enthused licence to blindly cut loose (or irresponsibly "act out" anger) to profoundly healing, integration-promoting release and illumination.
(3) Mindfully Held Anger:
Mindfully Held Anger refers to approaches in which anger is consciously contained, not emotionally expressed, and meditatively attended to, with a key intention being neither to suppress anger nor act it out. In its emphasis on neither repressing nor acting out emotion, this approach appears to offer a solution to the anger-in/anger-out dichotomy. In being wakefully present with our anger, thereby closely witnessing the actual process of it (in its feeling, cognitive, perceptual, and social dimensions), we also bear witness, at least to some degree, to the very "I" who is busy being angry. That is, our perspective shifts from how angry we feel to who it is who feels it. We then take good care of our anger, cradling it much like we would an upset child.
At its best, the mindful holding of anger is not so much a containment of anger as a deliberately intimate embracing and investigation of it, a willingness to stay with our anger without outwardly expressing it.
Through such loving alertness, anger can be transformed into the energy of understanding and compassion. However, this practice carries its own dangers — as suggested by the more negative connotations of the term "holding" — especially when it is engaged in prematurely or in order to flee or suppress anger, as when we are not so much sitting with our anger as on it.
(4) Heart-Anger:
Heart-Anger refers to approaches in which openly expressed anger and compassion consciously and beneficially coexist. Put together the virtues of anger-in, anger-out, and mindfully held anger — healthy rationality and restraint, emotional openness and authenticity, meditative openness and compassion — and minimize the difficulties associated with each, and heart-anger emerges.
Heart-anger is anchored both in full-blooded aliveness and in clear caring for the other. As fierce as it sometimes can be (or has to be), heart-anger is but the emissary of wrathful compassion. Here, the expression of anger is not necessarily rethought or kept to oneself, nor always given free rein, but rather is deliberately infused with wakeful, investigative attention, without any requisite dilution or non-expression of its passion. It is "clean" anger, incisive, non-blaming, mindful, contextually sensitive, heated yet illuminating — rooted in both the personal and the transpersonal.
As such, it could be called soul-centered anger (by soul, I mean that depth of individuality in which egoity is clearly and functionally peripheral to Being). Such anger has a broad enough sense of human suffering to embrace a radically inclusive morality; it possesses sufficient faith in Life to persist in its fierce caring; and it has the guts to carry all this out.
If all that was necessary was that it shine, heart-anger surely would, but it knows that it often must also burn. And, because of this, it knows that it must also weep.
Getting Closer to Anger
Anger is moral fire. Whether it is destructive or constructive is in our hands. And our hearts. In the fiery care of clean anger, passion and compassion coexist, as do heat and light. We need to respect our anger, to cease viewing it as a problem, spiritual hindrance, or something beneath us, so that it might serve our well-being.
Neither to repress nor to indulge in our anger is far from easy, asking, among other things, that we meet it with genuine caring. Anger that is denied compassion easily becomes anger that is delivered, however indirectly, without compassion.
But how to bring compassion to anger? First of all, we need to approach it without aversion, which means becoming more intimate with whatever aversion we might have toward anger. The degree of caring with which we approach our anger is the degree of caring with which we can infuse the anger we give to others.
Anger that does not violate — this is the fiery face of compassion, the wrathful shout of the awakening heart.
The exploration of anger ought not to be the occupation of just a few. Not to explore anger, not to be intimate with it, is a dangerous choice, leaving us cut off from the very forcefulness and energetic underlining that may already be enlisted in the service of aggression, hatred, and mean-spiritedness. Not to know our anger is to keep ourselves in the dark, and in danger of being violent instead of simply angry.
At its best, anger — heart-including, open-bellied, open-throated, and so, so passionately alive — cannot help but support love and integrity, for it is then deeply connected to need, to vulnerability, to bareness of soul. It is then but relational fire, helping to both clear and light our way into an ever deeper intimacy, an intimacy that ultimately includes all that we are.
The fiery intensity at the heart of anger asks not for smothering, spiritual rehabilitation, nor mere discharge, but rather for a mindful embrace that does not necessarily require any dilution of passion, any lowering of the heat, nor any muting of the essential voice in the flames.
Bringing our anger into our heart is not only an act of love for ourselves, but for all beings, since such a practice increases the odds that we will not let our anger mutate into aggressiveness, hostility, and hatred, but rather into compassion-centered activity.
In no longer abandoning or destructively harnessing our anger, we move a step closer to being and standing up for the very love that we most desire from others.
Anger can be love — may we permit it to be so. Gender and Anger in Intimacy
The disempowerment of women has, among other things, meant the suppression and devaluation of their anger. Where male anger, despite anger's supposedly "lower" origins, has in many circumstances — war, contact sports, vigilante heroics — often been viewed as healthy, morally justified, or even ennobling, female anger has generally been viewed far less favorably, as illustrated by our less-than-flattering labels for angry women. He's assertive, hotheaded, pissed off, just letting off some steam, taking care of business; she, on the other hand, is just a nag or bitch.
Thus have anger-in or anger-suppressing practices tended to be more expected of women than of men. Anger is culturally held as less legitimate an expression for women than for men. The result is that for many women anger is largely unavailable as a resource.
A woman marooned from her own anger is likely going to have a harder time maintaining healthy boundaries; she may feel more helpless, more fearful, more prone to despair and depression. When her anger cannot be depressed — that is, kept or pressed down — its energies may be routed into resentment or bitterness. And what a pity this is, given that anger can be, including in its fieriness, a form of caring. In my work I have often seen a woman's rage — full-out, clean rage — cut through the cognitive muddling of her partner or other men, waking them up to what they're actually doing.
For anger to be a resource in relationship requires not only that it be permitted its innate vulnerability, but that it also be valued, and valued equally, in both women and men. So long as female anger is treated as something less worthy of respect than male anger, relational approaches to anger will remain superficial or unproductive.
Anger asks not for domestication, but for an honoring of its wildness, a receptive, suitably expressive outlet for its elemental, primally alive nature. Unfortunately, the wildness in men often tends to be either crushed or channeled into mere savagery (however sophisticated), and the wildness in women just as often tends to be smothered, reduced to various forms of nagging, or trivialized as mere bitchiness.
Women have been much more subject to domestication and niceness implants than have men, and yet I have observed again and again that heart-anger usually comes more readily to women than to men. A possible reason for this is that women generally are more willing to bring some caring into their anger, whereas men are typically more prone to converting their anger into aggression.
There is more to this, however. The active/dynamic (or going-toward) capacity commonly attributed to men, in contrast to the corresponding passive/receptive (or taking-in) capacity commonly attributed to women, may have some truth in certain areas, but not very much at all when it comes to psychological/emotional life. Much of marriage counselling deals with the far more active roles that women generally take — for better or for worse — with regard to the interior life of their relationship. Thus it is no surprise that women would tend to be more accessible to heart-anger, since they are, in general, already more inclined toward both caring and taking an active or even challenging role in the arena of psychological/emotional communication.
A woman's impassioned and resolute shaking up of the relational status quo — disturbing her partner's complacency, disembodied rationality, or supposed expertise — can be a potent awakening agent. And vice versa. Anger and love can exist at the same time in a mature relationship!
Imagine a new image: The warrior of intimacy, female or male, who can give anger with full-blooded yet compassionate and vulnerable intensity, and who can also receive anger — not absorbing or swallowing it, nor playing martyred target for it, but simply responding to it nondefensively, letting it in not like an invader but like a guest.
Expressing and Receiving Anger
Brian and Tina are at a stalemate. Both are articulate and insightful, yet they are stuck. Their knowledge — both are therapists — does not seem to be making any difference. He wants more commitment from her, she wants less pressure from him, and both are unhappy. She says she feels guilty about her lack of commitment to being with him, so we talk about her guilt and its roots, but still there is little life in the room.
They are both clearly angry and very much under control — firmly in position, armed in their attempted openness, trying to be non-combative in their combativeness. The stage is set.
"Face each other," I say, "and keep eye contact." Tina briefly raises her hands slightly, palms out, smiles, and delivers some more dead-end insight. "Do that again with your hands," I say, "and breathe deeper." She grins. I see a flash of shame. Her hands are sliding up and down the outside of her thighs. "What do your hands want to do?" I ask her.
In an instant, her hands are on Brian's knees, pushing him back. Immediately, she pulls back, smiling, changing the subject. I ask her what she's feeling as she smiles, and she says that she's angry, and that she's withdrawing from him. Tension fills the room. We briefly talk about how easily she puts herself down for not wanting to be closer to him; even to directly give him her anger would be, she says, a kind of giving in. And so on. Brian is hurt, but still present.
"Let's try a different tack," I suggest. "Tina, I want you to express your anger to Brian as fully as possible, but without any words." She no longer can smile. I have her hold her a pillow between her hands, to be squeezed as hard as she can. A half minute or so passes. I can see and feel her rage, but she is silent. I ask her where she is most tense, and she says her throat and jaw.
Suddenly, she leans forward, screaming at him, her sounds deep and powerful; she is clearly not acting. Brian now looks much more awake — and caring. Tina is full-blooded in what she is allowing, and is simultaneously very vulnerable. Tears mix with her rage. Less than a minute later, I have her interlock hands with him while she bites down on a towel that I pull on; this loosens her jaw and neck. For a minute or so, she pushes against him, biting very hard, her eyes pure fury and hurt. Then I have her let go of the towel and his hands. Silence, and a deeper silence.
Both had complained of not having enough of a soul-connection, but now it is evident that they are plugged into a very real intimacy. He, unlike many men, did not pull back or "disappear" in the face of her raw anger. They are not through their difficulty, but are now in a place where they are far more capable of getting through it.
The expression of anger and the need to take action are not necessarily the same thing. The direct expression of anger-energy is simply an act of exposure, whereas the need to have events go this way or that has more to do with power and control.
Restricting anger expression to verbal combat only keeps it from being as healing a process as it could be if it were to also — under the right conditions! — to safely include the nonverbal expression of undisguised and uncensored anger (as illustrated in the vignette above).
When anger is "uncaged" in a suitable environment at the right time, it often will, after a minute or two of full-throated, full-bodied release, be accompanied by fitting words and phrasings that potently articulate the heart of the matter. Thus can skillfully steered anger-out become more than venting, more than a merely eliminative strategy, eventually mutating, to a significant degree, into heart-anger.
In a relatively awakened relationship, the actual intent of our anger can, at least some of the time, be safely verbalized, openly and specifically. At times — if there is enough trust, love, and mindfulness — the confession of such intent may need to be also physically expressed (as when anger is particularly intense, edgy, or gripping) through wringing a towel, pounding a pillow or sofa, or engaging in other similarly nondestructive expressions of such energy.
To expose our darker reactive intentions with clarity, vulnerability, and perhaps some degree of dramatic exaggeration, can be, even though it might appear otherwise, an act of love, providing an illuminating — and valuable — inside look at our uglier urges, soul-crushing habits, core wounds, and their attending anger.
Openly sharing what we are ashamed or afraid of in ourselves makes us not only more intimate with such qualities, but also with each other.
Even so, we may still go to great lengths to avoid exposing or sharing not only the more shameful or embarrassing imperatives of our anger, but also its passion. Getting righteous during our anger may be pointless, but no more so than submitting to our partner's demands (tacit or not) that we: (1) not get openly angry; (2) spare them such raw intensity; (3) prove (through suffocating, sterilizing, or at least muting our anger) that we are loving; and (4) in short, let them in this particular situation remain in control, "safely" removed from the heat of our anger.
If we are on the receiving end of anger coming from our partner, particularly heated or wide-open anger, it may be very tempting to deny them significant access to us, even if their anger is being delivered cleanly. We may interrupt, deflect, minimize, or try to detour their intensity of feeling (and/or content), perhaps informing them that they are out of control or behaving irresponsibly, saying to them in so many words, "Can't we do this another way?"
This apparently reasonable request, however appropriate it might be at times (as when the environment is not sufficiently supportive of an "uncivilized" exchange, or when anger is being abusively expressed), is usually an avoidance of anger, as well as a confession of not being intimate with our own anger. That is, if we don't successfully defuse or mute our partner's anger at us, it might catalyze our own anger into a more active form, and the more opposed we are to this, the more we will tend to oppose, obstruct, or sabotage our partner's direct expression of anger.
We may even — without raising our voice, of course! — demand from them in the midst of their anger that they demonstrate that they do indeed love us. To do so may mean that they have to cease being angry (or at least looking angry), given that our prevailing model of love very likely does not include an angry-faced or wrathful love. If anger signals the end or absence of love for us — as it might have in our past — then we are going to have a strong investment in suppressing it, both in ourselves and in others, stranding ourselves from the realization that anger and love can both exist at the same time.
For anger to enhance intimacy, it needs to be met with nondefensive, empathetic listening (which does not necessarily mean that the partner listening should suppress his or her own anger!), listening in which agreement or disagreement with what is being said or conveyed remains secondary to our empathy and caring for the other. Such is the essence of receiving anger.
Rejecting our partner's anger — not aggression, but anger — simply short- circuits it. This generally encourages the stockpiling of anger-energy and frustration, along with a resulting pressure to find other outlets, such as the subtle cruelties of passive aggression.
Anger that is rejected, anger that is denied compassion, anger that is vilified or ostracized or declawed, is the very anger that corrodes and sabotages intimacy.
Sharing anger in an intimate relationship does not always have to remain a serious affair. Playfulness and healthy anger expression are not mutually exclusive. Skillful teasing in the midst of anger may in fact create more room for hearing what is really being said, testing the health and resiliency of our edges, keeping us fluid, even if our bones are brittle with age. Such teasing is the leavening of healthy criticism. It puts down our sweaty fretting and fussing without putting us down.
In the fierce heat of anger, a happy-to-be-alive feeling may sometimes emerge — especially when deep intimacy and trust are present. Some signs of anger may still linger, but there will also be a deep and natural empathy, plus a spaciousness which allows integrity to surface, tears to stream freely, humor to upstage righteousness, and love to shine bright.
When anger and love are permitted to coexist — as happens most commonly in being-centered relationships — intimacy cannot help but deepen.
Anger does not disappear as we awaken, and in fact may become even more fiery, but burns cleanly, serving the well-being of all involved.
No comments:
Post a Comment