The gift of anger

Anger, outrage and feelings of exploitation present a triad of themes that are ever present in our lives. This complex of emotions, that I’ll refer to as ‘anger’ henceforth, is not just ‘out there’ on social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, it is within us.

Anger is an intimate experience and rules over a big part of our lives, which explains why toxic internet cultures attract so many. It unfailingly leads to pain and unhappiness, cutting us off from others and hardening us. Perhaps hate is the natural progression of this way of thinking.

And yet, difficult as it is to accept the destruction that anger unleashes in our lives, both individual and collective, we cannot get rid of it by talking or willing ourselves out of it, or by rejecting it. It’s a part of the human experience and has to be contended with wholly.

Which brings me to my own experiences with anger. After much jostling with anger — it remains a constant companion — I am now wondering whether anger, for all its negatives, may be one of the more accessible ways available to us if we want to understand ourselves. This could be key to understanding why we get angry and perhaps finding some distance from its workings in us.

What do I mean? When anger takes hold of us in a deep way, identification with it is so complete that we don’t even know that we are acting out of it, let alone trying to make sense of it. But there are times when we have been able to see ourselves fly off the handle with someone on whom we can ‘take it out’ — perhaps a parent, a child, a spouse, or a co-worker. These are times when we become nasty and unforgiving versions of ourselves, driven by a compulsion to hit out and vanquish what we feel is a threat to us, even those closest to us.

It is when we reflect on or, if we are able to, observe, moments such as these that we can begin to discern what anger is. We begin to perceive what exactly it is that we are trying to defend or protect when we become angry. Since there is no real physical threat to our survival in the moment of anger in most cases, what is threatened is the survival of our self-image, our sense of ‘I’.

The gift of anger, and its genius, if one can put it like that, lies in showing us the irrationality of defending a concept, i.e., ‘who we are’, which is an entity that sits on shifting ground, identifying with changing names and forms. The ‘I’ is a shaky project from the get-go because there is nothing fixed or permanent about ourselves (or anyone else), neither our bodies and minds, nor the world.

Since anger makes us do completely unacceptable things in the service of this ‘I’, we are able to see this persona that fights for survival as something unreal, at least in hindsight. What is more, it may be possible to become aware of the ‘I’ in its entirety, not just our irrational angry self, but also that in us which can play the rational self which notes the other. If we allow it to, anger can show the way to the engine room of the self, where ‘who we are’ is manufactured through the process of incessant thinking.

Since anger can bring us to this understanding and provide the intimations of relief from the workings of the ‘I’-making enterprise, perhaps its core aspect is love. Love that has the power to recognise that all of us are prisoners of the idea of ‘who we are’ and that defending this ‘I’ out of a sense of fear is what drives our violent behaviours towards one another.

The Vietnamese Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh used to say that we should be like a mother to her crying baby in the presence of anger. We should go to our anger, pick it up and embrace it. That way lies compassion for our anger and perhaps healing from it, too.

So, the next time we feel tempted to lash out at someone or lacerate ourselves, we could try looking at the growing tide of emotional urgency in us as someone trying to tell us something important. We may be the calmer (and wiser) for it.