Some Thoughts on Anger

A Zoom group I’m in had a discussion about anger recently, and it brought up some thoughts for me. They began with the notion that not all anger is alike, or equally damaging, and may in some cases be preferable to the alternatives—especially suppression. In my experience, to be specific, with a real father and a stepfather, parental anger was handled in two very different ways. My real father, born in Italy, had a rather volatile temper. He got mad (that’s what we used to call it, never “anger” which would have seemed unnaturally formal for us) regularly, and expressed it freely with choice Italian curse words. He also got mad at us children, sometimes gave us a swat for misbehaving (though it was usually my mother who administered physical punishment), and then could often not help laughing about the whole thing shortly after. In short, the swat ended the trouble and the punishment, and that was it. 

            My stepfather, whom my mother married after my father died, was fully American, of French-Canadian descent. He typified suppression. We knew he got “mad” because of the threatening atmosphere he created, but he never expressed it. Never yelled at my brothers or sisters or me, at least not publicly. The same with my mother: he clearly got annoyed at some of what she said or did, but he never expressed it (other than obliquely) in front of others. We learned later that he was pretty hard on her in private, but none of us knew that, except perhaps by inference. What we did know was that she never crossed him, and we assumed it was out of the fear we could feel. Towards the end, she did leave him once, to live with my sisters in a house they had rented, but after a short time went back; he kept pleading that he couldn’t live without her, and that his health was failing. Even though it wasn’t, she yielded, and remained with him until her death from pancreatic cancer. A few years after that, when he had sold their CT house and moved back to Lowell, MA to live with his sister and her husband in a mobile home, the situation in that enclosed pressure cooker produced its bitter end. We read it in the newspapers: the man we had lived with for years had shot and killed his sister and her husband, and then turned the gun on himself as police closed in. I and my older three siblings were stunned. But my younger brother told us he wasn’t surprised at all: “Didn’t you know he always had a .38 caliber pistol in his safe?”  

            So: two fathers, with different styles regarding anger. One expressed it freely, verbally and sometimes with a smack, but that was it. It was over and done with. The other brooded in silence, and laid down an atmosphere of dread that went on and on. And that brooding, that suppression, finally ended with three deaths via his gun. For me, at least, the quick acting out of anger was far preferable to the quiet, brooding suppression of it that always felt as if it could—and finally did—explode. The immediate expression seemed healthier for all concerned, including for the one that gave vent to it. 

            Sigmund Freud, as I recall, had a lot to say about instinct suppression (killing anger being one of these instincts) in Civilization and its Discontents (1930). Civilization, that is, makes the expression of both the sexual instinct and the killing instinct with which all humans are equipped, unacceptable in most societies, and Freud saw that necessary suppression as dangerous. (It should be said here that the expression of rage cannot be lightly dismissed, as Jared Diamond [Guns, Germs and Steel] shows in his examination of primitive cultures, where encounters among males often lead to violent death). Such extreme suppression is toxic in the long run, Freud said, and can lead to blowouts such as wars or other conflicts that can do widespread damage. My stepfather’s case is instructive. More to the point, I years ago met a psychotherapist named Zaslow who had developed a therapy called “rage reduction” meant to treat the suppressed rage Freud wrote about. In Zaslow’s view, the suppression of rage was just as toxic, if not more so, than the suppression of sex which had been given far more attention. To treat this rage, he would encourage its expression in a controlled treatment where the patient was held firmly in the laps of eight or so helpers, so that the patient could give vent to  extreme rage without the risk of harming others or him/herself. I witnessed one or two of these sessions (they could go on for as long as eight hours in order to elicit this rage, which is so deeply repressed), and they seemed helpful. Unfortunately, a few patients did not do so well long after treatment (at least one committed suicide), and the therapy came under such intense criticism it had to be abandoned. But the point remains: the suppression of rage or anger in modern society can lead to deep psychological, physical and societal problems. 

            This brings us to the present. The alarming rise of guns in the hands of so many millions of Americans swiftly comes to mind. But guns themselves are not the real issue here. It is the anger that arises so often in mass culture, and which can, and increasingly does, result in mass gun violence, and more. The recent case of a large Black man pummeling a Chinese woman in the entrance to her New York apartment is a case in point, and it asks the question: what could possibly elicit such monstrous rage?  In my limited view, such outbursts stem largely from one main issue: the feeling on the part of most individuals that they cannot control their environment or their lives (in some cases leading to the feeling that such a life is hardly worth living). Whether most humans have ever been able to control these things is not obvious, but it certainly seems that it would have been easier to control one’s life circumstances when the group one belonged to was a village or small town where most people were known. Interpersonal problems might be addressed directly with the person or persons involved; larger problems with a local priest or local official or council. In mass culture, of course, this is no longer an option. We are forced, most often, to deal with entities that are remote, and impersonal, and often mechanical. We dial a number to solve a problem, and we get a machine-answering system. The “person,” driven by an algorithm impervious to our frustrations or our specific human needs, mindlessly goes through the options available; and if those options do not fit our situation, we are left with the ridiculous option of screaming at a machine. And even if we finally succeed in reaching a real person, the ones we get to speak to are often just as mechanical. We are left with anger and rage that literally have no outlet. So we smash the phone or kick the dog. 

In short, the whole modern world, which turns most of us into non-entities forced to deal with robots, contributes greatly to the frustration and anger we are left with (which is not to say that no other causes or incitements to anger exist. The constant need of humans to assert dominance, and the reaction to it, is certainly one.) Our lives seem increasingly meaningless in the greater realm of things, where we seem helpless to affect the majority of our world. And it now seems clear that this frustration with having no control, with being non-entities, has led in recent years to more and more Americans (and people world-wide) opting for authoritarian alternatives like Donald Trump to, if nothing else, shake up or thumb a nose at those in charge. The dangers in this case need not be enumerated. 

            And what do our helpers, psychological or spiritual, offer? Reason. Patience. We are advised to either take nonviolent action, such as writing letters to our representatives, or, more generally, consider the person(s) we are angry with, and try to have compassion for their plight. Or understand that they are not at fault; their passion is. Therefore, we should empathize, and treat them with love. All of which are nice ideals. But how effective are they in dealing with the likes of Vladimir Putin, and his mass murder of Ukrainians? Or Donald Trump and his violence-prone minions? And worse, what if such ideals help only in suppressing our rage? What results if we end up never dealing with them, but pushing them beneath our supposedly wise exterior? Will they fester and grow larger and blow along with us, making us ‘go postal’ eventually?

            I am afraid that, for me at least, there are no good answers to all this. In our wired world, we are not only exposed to more of the troubles in the world, from global horrors (such as Putin’s vicious invasion of Ukraine) to murders in the smallest hamlet, but are also increasingly removed from anything like an effective response or remedy. No places to make such a response. Our letters and posts seeming to fall on deaf ears. Our screams at the TV audible only to us and perhaps our families. Leaving us left only with the personal, self-regarding response. Is there a good way for an individual, that is, assailed constantly in every media forum by all this, and assailed by interpersonal conflict as well, to respond? 

            Perhaps what Zen practice teaches us works best. Take pains to be fully aware of how we are feeling, how our bodies and emotions are reacting, and where in the body and how strongly; and then making the decision not to act upon those powerful feelings. That is to say, pretending that we do not have strong feelings, such as anger, about what is happening in our offices or relationships or in Ukraine, pretending that we don’t have to feel any upset but can adopt feelings of  “calm” and “equanimity,” is only feeding the beast with denial. No, feelings of anger, if they occur, are better admitted, acknowledged as human, and thoroughly examined. What does not need to happen is our acting upon them. That is to say, we can feel anger without expressing that anger physically. We can hold that anger in our awareness, and be aware of each impulse to strike out. But not strike out. Eventually, we can become better aware of what triggers anger in us, see what in us feels out of control (including  whether it really is or should be in our control in the first place), and better able to manage it when it arises. Eventually, too, we may come to see more sides of each situation (including the position of the “other,” who is usually just like us) before it arises. 

            All this, to be sure, takes time, and practice. And we must admit that. We must also admit that, in the short run, instantly giving vent verbally or physically to our anger can seem much more satisfying. But in the end, we can come to see that it truly is not; that the expression of anger, pent up or not, can harm not just others, but ourselves, often leading to a greater inclination to express that anger in more and more violent ways. The spiraling results of which we can easily see, vividly appearing in our own troubled world, every single day. 

 

Lawrence DiStasi