Anger is one of the more challenging emotions in the palette of human experience. It’s what we generally place under the umbrella of negative or unpleasant emotions. It’s uncomfortable and can be destructive and dangerous for ourselves and those around us. Experiencing and expressing intense anger can be very problematic or even violent, but NOT expressing one’s anger can be equally dangerous for physical and mental health. According to Traditional Chinese and Ayurvedic Medical discourse, unprocessed or repressed anger leads to a buildup of heat in the body that has a negative impact on the nervous system and causes liver issues.
If anger is this feeling that we don’t want to experience, but cannot avoid, our best way of navigating it is to better understand it.
What is anger?
Anger is a secondary emotion, the result of feeling disregarded, disrespected, stepped over, hurt etc. Indignation, resentment and frustration are emotions that follow the initial wounding. One might say, anger is a kind of extension of love and care—love and care for the self or other self that is being wronged. You have to care for something in order to feel anger towards it. We feel angry about social, economic and climate injustice because we care about the planet and the people on it. When we start unpacking what primary emotions lead to anger we can learn more about ourselves and the things we value.
If you are someone who suffers from road rage, for example, and somebody cuts you off in traffic, you may feel a surge of heat within you as the anger overcomes you, so you hoot and shout and maybe flip them off. What is the underlying emotion in that situation? Perhaps the altercation triggers a wound representing the subconscious belief that you are not worthy of being noticed or respected, and it’s okay for others to push past and disregard you. You retaliate in anger to this deep subconscious belief, and you feel indignant and the need to prove that you do not accept being treated in this manner. Maybe, if you were feeling very at peace that day, rooted in the knowledge of your inherent worth and value, you might shrug it off thinking to yourself that the person who cut you off must be in a rush to get somewhere important etc.
In this example, your anger is a sign post directing you to parts of yourself that might need some love and attention. Anger can be an interesting messaging mechanism notifying us about a number of different internal agitations. Perhaps a boundary is being crossed and you feel ill-equipped to make a stand for what you want or feel. Maybe you don’t feel like you are being seen or heard in a situation and are frustrated by the fact that the only solution is to take responsibility for others’ lack of awareness. Maybe you feel afraid to take that space because you believe you might be exposed as something unpleasant that you subconsciously believe yourself to be.
Our subconscious beliefs about ourselves often inform how we experience and express anger. When we experience anger we have an opportunity to heed the call of our inner voice, seeking to get our attention, and reflect upon what is truly going on inside of us. The unfortunate truth about anger having such a detrimental impact on your emotional, psychological and physical wellbeing is that it doesn’t really matter who is at fault in the situation, the responsibility of processing that anger is ultimately yours as the one who will suffer the consequences should you not.
So how do we go about processing anger? Ideally we do not want to contribute towards more suffering on the planet, we don’t want to lash out, amplifying anger and possibly causing destruction and pain. We live in a complex world that we share with other complex beings, and we move through it constantly unknowingly projecting our own issues onto those around us, as they do to us. As a starting point it can be helpful to practice being less attached to our ideas of what is right and wrong. When it comes to matters of processing your own feelings and freeing yourself from caustic emotions, it matters less what happens outside of you and more how you choose to deal with it. This is not to say that you should not stand up for yourself, set healthy boundaries, and speak up when you feel compelled to, but simply to say that although the majority of what happens outside of ourselves is out of our control, the majority of what happens inside IS; that is an empowering thought.
Compassion is a powerful tool for dissolving anger. Extending yourself to try to understand those around you a bit better can often help with your own feelings of anger. There are laws that govern our world that are beyond the laws man has made, for example cause-and-effect or the law of karma. This law states that there is always consequence to action, even to thought. What you put out comes back to you. We know so little about the lives of those around us, we see only a fraction and in addition to this we perceive it through the lens of our own subjectivity. If you can imagine someone who is at peace behaving in such a way that reflects their internal state, you can see how someone in pain would move around the world making everyone else victim to their suffering. If we manage to maintain the awareness of others’ “bad behaviour” being a product of the poverty of consciousness, it can help us have a bit more compassion.
Depending on our uniquely faceted personality and character, we feel anger about different things, we feel it in different ways, and we will have different ways of processing it. Perhaps a good boxing session at the gym helps exorcize some of that aggression held in the body, for someone else it could be a thorough audit of their feelings and getting them all out into their journal. As long as the impulse is to lovingly and without judgment allow the self to feel, explore and give space to whatever emotions are underlying whatever process calls to you is the right one. Embarking on the journey of attempting to transmute anger into self knowledge and discovery—even love and compassion—is a challenging and admirable pursuit. Anger is a catalyst to help us grow and evolve. We might not always get it right, we might not reach the point in this lifetime of seeing and understanding why we are the way we are and why the world is the way it is, but maybe that’s not the point anyway. Maybe doing our best every day to see the love within ourselves and others is all we really need to do.
You explain such detailed and complex things so beautifully and in a way that can be more easily applied, and I'm so thankful for that. The road rage example is a very helpful practical application.