Personal Growth

Anger is a Wonderful, Terrible, and Essential Emotion: Part I

A personal exploration of anger, repression, assertiveness — and today’s politics

Anger — he smiles, Towering in shiny metallic purple armor ….

Jimi Hendrix, from ‘Bold as Love’

I am fascinated by anger. I don’t mean that I love anger, or am drawn to it, or seek it out in any way. I just find anger, in all its many manifestations and disguises … fascinating. And powerful.

There’s justified anger. Jealous rage. Petty resentment. The dreaded ‘silent treatment.’ Vengeful fury. Blaming. Angry self-protection. Righteous anger. Childish tantrums.

There are ‘tears of rage’ (thanks, The Band). There’s steely, calculating anger. There’s sneaky, disguised anger. There’s open anger and aggression … and covert, passive-aggressive manipulation.

Anger takes so many forms, and gets expressed in so many different ways. It’s truly fascinating. It’s wonderful, terrible, scary, empowering, and above all crucial.

For we couldn’t exist, or ‘grow up,’ or get anywhere meaningful in life without it. Our anger is an essential ingredient in self-assertion and our personal growth and maturation.

A shocking discovery about anger

Back in the 80s, I went through a phase where I believed that self-hypnosis was ‘the answer’ in my quest for personal growth and inner peace (it wasn’t — but it was helpful). I owned several guided hypnotherapy tapes focused on different topics, and I listened to them frequently — and the one that influenced me the most made some shocking assertions about anger.

Today, after much searching, I found that hypnotherapist, Barrie Konicov, online — but was unable to find this particular tape/CD. However, at the time — 40 years ago — he took me on an amazing and very potent inner journey.

On that tape, he insisted that in our everyday lives the dominant, ambient emotion we experience and feel emanating from others is not love, but anger.

Not love — Anger. Everywhere. We’re swimming in it.

To hear him baldly state this truth shocked the hell out of me … for I suppose that I, like most of us, wanted to believe that people are generally warm-hearted, caring, and loving.

But the hypnotherapist cut right through all that too-hopeful, Pollyanna nonsense — and then gave numerous examples of anger and its effects, ranging all the way from infancy and childhood to adolescence and then adulthood.

The bottom-line cause of most of our anger, it turned out, was (unsurprisingly) love and acceptance being cruelly withheld or denied during childhood. Feeling alone, unloved, and/or abandoned triggers vast fear in us — a deep fear of personal annihilation — and also vast rage.

Learning to be afraid of anger

Growing up, most of us learn to be afraid of our own and others’ anger — often for good reason. Others’ anger, when we’re children especially, can feel totally overwhelming and frightening. And in the case of physical abuse, it can also be mortally dangerous.

Unfortunately, as children we are mainly exposed to the ‘negative’ aspects of anger, and often experience anger as a dangerous, out-of-control emotion that needs to be tightly controlled or suppressed.

We may be scared of a parent’s drunken rages … angry slaps … loud yelling … verbal abuse … or of nasty neighborhood or schoolyard bullies. Later, as adults, we may be scared of an abusive, controlling boss, or the police, or a raging, abusive partner. Creepily, some so-called ‘adults’ are primarily just self-centered rage-aholics.

Throughout our lives, we keep getting exposed, over and over again, to the anger, rage, and even emotional or physical abuse exploding from the overly-angry people all around us.

Thus, we usually grow up thinking and believing that anger is essentially a bad and very dangerous emotion — and do everything in our power to repress, divert, or squash it.

Or at least, that’s what introverted types like me do. The extroverts tend to ‘externalize’ their anger, and freely unload and dump it on those around them.

While introverts internalize their anger and ‘go quiet,’ the extroverts often become overt aggressors, bullies, or terrorizers.

The disastrous effects of emotional repression

As a child and early adolescent, I was a quiet, polite kid — and was terrified of anger. I avoided confrontation, and would do anything to avoid a fight.

I was so terrified of ‘doing something wrong’ and being massively punished — whether by God, my parents, my teachers, or some other authority figure — that I gradually shut down inside and started repressing all my feelings.

Of course, repressing all feelings leads directly to inner numbness, ‘deadness,’ and depression — because guess what, if we’re stuffing down or denying all our feelings, we’re not allowing any aliveness/change or any ‘flow’ of our energies, and are in effect killing ourselves.

Yes, my fear of feelings, and anger in particular, led me to shut down almost totally — and soon, being openly assertive in any way at all, even making tiny decisions, became excruciating for me.

I remember times going out to eat with my family, when just looking over the menu and having to pick what I wanted to eat became an extraordinarily frightening task. My emotional ‘shut down’ was so effective, and so complete, that my will and inner power of decision became unavailable to me — thus, any decision or choice was sheer torture.

Imagine: sometimes I was still fearfully ‘thinking about’ my meal choice long after everyone else had ordered! (Every damn choice was somehow of ultimate importance, so I had to make the ‘correct’ decision — or else!) This, of course, annoyed my parents and brother, and cemented my self-image of being ‘weird,’ ‘different’ — and unable to cope with life.

I was such a pathetic loser — for God’s sake, I couldn’t even make up my mind about a stupid meal in a restaurant!

Choosing to live, grow — and awaken

Fast-forward to adulthood … and I was still that repressed, quiet guy who couldn’t quite cope with life … or love … or anger.

I was so ‘stuck’ and so miserable inside that I finally had to embark on a quest for healing and growth. I had to — or I probably would have died. I would have either committed suicide (but that would have been way too decisive), or cleverly arranged for the external world to knock me off somehow.

Yet deep down, I still wanted to live — desperately — and badly wanted to feel fully alive. So, I embarked on a personal ‘vision quest’ — my long inner journey of growth and healing. And it’s been an amazing journey: at times wonderful, at times terrifying, at times terribly sad, at times exhilarating.

And opening up to my anger and ‘letting it rip’ was a crucial part of the process.

Experiments in feeling and ‘discharging’ anger

I remember how scared and embarrassed I was the first few times I experimented with ‘discharging’ anger using a tennis racquet (or bat) and a heavy pillow.

It was a simple enough exercise: create a safe space by closing the door to my bedroom, then put the big pillow on my bed — and then pound the hell out of it with the racquet!

To my surprise, after the first few hits it started feeling pretty natural — and also really good! Equally surprising, I found that just 20–30 seconds of rapid hitting usually ‘did the trick,’ and let me walk away feeling both energized and much calmer.

Another similar exercise involved sitting opposite someone, and taking turns yelling at the other person or being yelled at. In that exercise also, I was strengthening my anger-expression and resilience ‘muscles,’ and learning that I could get openly angry, and also have someone very angry at ME — without falling apart or being destroyed.

I was learning to experience and harness my inner demons, my anger, and my rage. I was starting to learn that anger and love, and anger and inner peace, could not only co-exist, but were in fact inseparable and totally intertwined.

Anger, rage, and politics

These days, there’s a lot of ‘politicized’ anger in the air, and a lot of racism and rage directed at groups of supposedly malevolent (usually darker-skinned) ‘others.’

Whether we’re talking about illegal immigration, urban decay, the decline of the middle class, or the moral collapse of our society … it’s always easy to find, and focus our wrath on, various human scapegoats — especially in today’s U.S.A.

Sadly, most people can’t deal with anger very well, and tend to ‘dump’ their anger and rage on those who are less powerful or more vulnerable.

Right now, and for the next 1–2 years (minimum), the U.S. political scene is overwhelmingly dominated by the words and actions of a major anger addict: Donald J. Trump. He is a potent embodiment of ‘negative anger in action’ — and he attracts legions of frustrated, angry (mainly White) Americans who love his brash, insolent, and antagonistic style of communication.

It seems he is doing — and dares to do — what most of his followers would never dare or choose to do, on their own. In this way, he truly does ‘speak for them,’ commands their attention, and expresses their deep angst and anger. In return, he gets the ultimate political ‘prize’: their undying allegiance and support.

Unfortunately for the U.S., his brand of loud, divisive ‘anger and revenge politics’ is quickly undermining democracy and civil society itself — and is teaching Americans all across our nation to latch onto, enjoy, and freely express all our worst, most toxic forms of racism and anger.

Speaking of freely expressing anger: Sometimes my articles include some intensely angry, profane rants about Trump and the current state of U.S. politics. I utilize ‘rants’ very selectively and deliberately, in order to communicate the intense level of anger and frustration I and many other Americans feel.

Some folks (not many) have objected to my rants and profanity — but I’m fully aware of the risks posed by such writing, and occasionally ‘go there’ anyway. At those times, I use my intense anger and outrage to point to the craziness and dangers of our current ‘Twilight Zone reality.’

It’s a calculated (but worthwhile) risk.

Releasing and re-learning everything we ‘know’ about anger

All around us in our society, we see — and have always seen — plenty of misdirected anger, and plenty of harmful, dangerous anger as well.

We’re surrounded by people — many millions — who have no idea how to best ‘handle’ or ‘be with’ their anger, and resort to all kinds of unhealthy, aggressive, and socially-dangerous expressions of anger: rage at ‘illegals,’ rage at ‘liberals,’ fury over abortions, hatred of LGBTQ+ folks, rage at ‘the Feds,’ fury over the ‘green’ movement, etc.

America is now overflowing with Trump-inspired, ‘patriotic’ rage-aholics.

So, today is really the perfect time to examine and understand the emotion of anger, and learn how best to ‘deal with’ our anger and frustration(s). As with most things in life, there are healthy and unhealthy ways of being human, and healthy and unhealthy ways of expressing anger.

Repressing and ‘stuffing’ our anger sure doesn’t work out very well — but neither does constant, intense anger and outwardly-directed, paranoid fury.

Neither repression nor being a furious rage-aholic is an effective, healthy lifestyle choice — or a positive response to anger. The best way forward necessarily involves balance; it involves finding and expressing the middle ground, which can be termed aware assertiveness.

Aware assertiveness helps us in several ways: it fosters self-examination and greater self-awareness; it allows us to harness our anger and use it to create desired results; and it keeps us from getting ‘stuck’ in destructive self-repression OR destructive aggression.

Aware assertiveness is a truly enlivening and beautiful experience.

[Part II will explore anger, passivity, and assertiveness in greater depth.]