The American Psychological Association describes anger as an emotion characterised by antagonism toward someone or something you feel has deliberately done you wrong. It can give you a way to express negative feelings or motivate you to find solutions to problems. The Mayo clinic describes anger as a natural response to perceived threats. It causes your body to release adrenaline, your muscles to tighten, and your heart rate and blood pressure to increase. Your senses might feel more acute and your face and hands flushed. However, anger becomes a problem only when it isn’t managed it in a healthy way.
Both these descriptions point to the fact that anger, if managed well is a useful skill for navigating life. Gabor Mate describes this ‘healthy anger’ as a boundary defence.
Anger has a range of hues hot anger, such as hatred and rage and cold anger such as bitterness and resentment. It also has a range of intensities, from irritation, displeasure and frustration to fury and tantrums.
Some of us have been brought up to believe that we must never feel anger and so may find the arising of anger in our being a terrifying experience. As a child we might have experienced rejection when we manifested anger and so now it is too dangerous to allow. As a result, we suppress our anger, which then often transmutes into bitter resentment or passive aggression and an inability to hold healthy boundaries or to express our authentic needs. So, can we find a way to express anger in a healthy way, without suppressing it or acting it out by blaming others or blaming ourselves?
Unhealthy ways to deal with anger, include suppressing anger and elaborating anger by keeping it alive with endless rumination. As the Buddha said “Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.”
Elaborating anger involves self-referential rumination. We can act anger outwardly by blaming others where we tell ourselves and anyone else who will listen to us endless stories about how this thing or that person made us angry, how terrible that is and how awful they are. We might work ourselves up into losing our temper and perhaps say or do things which we later regret. We can also act anger inwardly by blaming ourselves for being angry and feeling ashamed, useless or unworthy. Does any of this this sound familiar?
So how do we manifest healthy anger?
Well self-compassion helps as it helps us to accept and feel good about ourselves. This makes us less susceptible to acting our anger inwardly. It also builds our sense of inner safeness and self-worth making us able to defend ourselves with healthy anger to hold a boundary with those around us. We also become more able to recognise that someone else’s anger, projected towards us is theirs and not ours, so that we do not take on their anger.
Cultivating mindfulness can enable us to gain insight into any habits we have of angry reactivity. It can help us to find the gap to not act anger outwardly or inwardly, but to remain with the felt sense of anger in the body without agenda. This creates the conditions for insight to arise about how our habits of anger cause harm to ourselves and to those around us, which forms a basis for transforming those habits. Then when we see how anger works within us, and causes us to suffer, we can understand it in others and how it causes them to suffer. This is a doorway to compassion.
Loving kindness practice also helps. Setting an intention to be a force for kindness in the world, rather than a force for anger can motivate us to explore kindness towards those who trigger anger within us. As we mix the intention and practice of kindness into scenarios where anger is triggered, this creates the conditions for understanding and compassion to arise. Although, without condoning or doing nothing about injustice or harmful behaviour.
Healthy anger, motivated by compassion, is a force for good in the world. The energy of anger has a quality of vividness and clarity which enables us to see situations and the dynamics within them fully, from a broader more spacious perspective. It enables us, over time, to express our needs and boundaries clearly, balancing self-compassion with compassion for those around us.
If you are interested in exploring some of these ideas then please join my upcoming course Managing Anger: You Own and Those Around You, taking place on Thursday evenings from Thursday 27th March to Thursday 24th April from 7-9pm. Please click here for more information.