Ok I’m back with a tome on this topic. Very interesting question Athenacus and on a topic dear to my heart!
I think in our society/western culture, there’s a real moratorium on anger per se – it might not be overtly regarded as ‘evil’ but it may as well be – there’s a general consensus that anger is somehow ‘bad’, even pathological – something to be gotten rid of, avoided, controlled, ‘managed’, transmuted, transformed. It’s not ok in our society to express anger, it is neither acceptable nor accepted. That doesn’t just apply to overt expressions of uncontrolled anger either (like violence for instance, or abusive language).
So given that we have a history of rejecting and condemning anger, it’s not surprising that we learn it’s at best, not really ok. Oh you get the lip service, it’s ok to FEEL anger, but it’s not ok to EXPRESS it, not in its raw direct form. So immediately a conflict and a catch 22 – how can you feel an emotion without the option of expressing it? And how often even in the feeling of it aren’t we ‘punished’ for it? A frown, a sigh, a critical word automatically incurs a negative response. Anger is not ever seen as ok or good or praised or encouraged that’s for sure. And only rarely understood and validated.
And as children we’re in the insidious position of inevitably experiencing anger as a perfectly normal and natural human response but being responded to and treated as if we’re doing something morally and socially terribly wrong and bad. As if it’s not normal, not human, not natural. Well quite a lot of us, maybe some of us had emotionally mature parents who were good with teaching about feelings, but I suspect they are the minority.
What I’m trying to say is that I don’t think it’s just having particularly stupid or superstitious or defensive or authoritarian caretakers that has given us such negative messages about anger, it’s the global cultural context within which those messages had and continue to have so much more power.
I learned not only that anger was bad, but that all feelings were bad. I didn’t even know I had feelings let alone be able to label or understand them. I thought feelings were behaviours, that crying was bad behaviour, that being scared was shameful behaviour, that not feeling 100% fine and peachy keen when being treated badly was REALLY bad behaviour. The point being that the messages I got weren’t overt or open – I wasn’t told that anger for instance was evil, I got the message that I WAS EVIL for feeling angry (for instance). I was attacked into whatever I was feeling without knowing it was a feeling. For me, feelings didn’t exist independently of who I was. Hard to describe this actually so I’ll stop trying...
I know for me that I have a really hard time accepting feeling angry. I work hard at letting myself both feel and try and express it, but it’s always accompanied by a terrifying feeling of paranoia – my feeling angry at someone is ipso facto going to incur THEIR anger and retribution on me, and when it’s global (as in culturally, everyone frowns on overt expressions of anger and even on passive aggressive expressions of it) then that kind of internal defensive fear can turn into full blown paranoia. Classic projection but with a terrifyingly realistic aspect to it – other people DO retaliate and respond with their own anger, at the least they respond with dislike and judgement and defensiveness…
I don’t know how it is for others here trying to deal with feeling angry, I suspect that it’s not just childhood messages that we’re trying to deal with, but general moral and social ones too, and that all makes anger the big bad wolf of emotions. We need courses in anger expression, not anger management
. Keep it in and it destroys you, let it out and it antagonizes others who in turn also destroy you. We need a way of learning to accept and express anger safely and with impunity. Anyone got any ideas?
LL
