Anger Itself Is a Natural Emotion
How you express it is another matter.
Let me begin by making it clear that I am not placing blame here mainly because blame is an utterly useless concept. What I am doing is establishing a background to help us connect and understand one another. That said, here’s my story.
My parents divorced when I was 5 or 6. This was the late 1970s, before divorce became more normal. As a bright, sensitive child, this impacted me hard. While I started therapy back then, it would take another couple of decades, and several therapists, to understand just how this impacted my overall health, wellness, and wellbeing.
What happened? I closed off emotionally. Then, to ease the pain that came from all the confusion, misunderstanding, and uncertainty that their divorce caused me, I erased many of my childhood memories. Not simply repressed, actively erased. Neat trick.
For almost 30 years, I was unable to genuinely feel most emotions. I could logically tell you (and my therapists) what they should be and how they should feel, but I didn’t actually experience them for myself.
Save one. Anger. Yeah, I knew anger really well. This I tended to repress, however, because I disliked how it manifested in me.
For the record, I never hurt anyone. My anger, when released, exclusively focused on inanimate objects. This, however, wasn’t healthy either.
The only emotion I truly could feel
It took me years of therapy to understand and come to grips with this. How was I only genuinely feeling this one emotional state? Was it the only thing I could feel?
There were some offshoots of anger that manifested as other emotions. Jealousy was a big one. Fear was the underlying base for it all. More on that later.
Because I tended to repress my anger, when it finally emerged, it was violent. Again, I never hurt anyone. But I broke several cordless phones after tossing them across the room, punched holes in multiple walls and doors, kicked a hole in a door once, and smashed other items at hand when my anger flared.
I also used to have pretty nasty road rage, too. More than once, I screamed and shouted myself hoarse more than once on a drive when I got stuck behind morons or uncontrollable traffic.
I could call up anger at will, but repressed it because when it flared, it was unpleasant. I disliked what it made me. It wasn’t until the smart therapist who worked out with me that anger was the only emotion I could genuinely feel that I addressed and worked to fix this.
The first step was recognizing the underlying fear that led to my anger. The next was acknowledging that anger itself is a natural emotion. Once I recognized and acknowledged this, I was able to address it, keep it in check, or work with it rather than repress it.
This opened the door to me genuinely feeling all the other emotions I had been unable to feel. It was around this time that my relationships started to get less wonky, and I brought a complete – instead of an incomplete – partner to them.
This is not, however, the end of the story.
Anger doesn’t go away
I had to recognize and accept that anger itself is a natural emotion. Rather than repressing it, I worked on new ways to release it that were less violent and more productive. I learned to meditate for greater grounding, centering, and balance, and to feel other emotions more fully.
Shit happens that makes me angry. One reason I spend very little time on social media these days is that so much of what I encounter there stirs my anger. Watching people harm others because they have different sexual orientations, genders, skin color, or come from a place other than here infuriates me. Getting angry about this is a natural emotion. I feel it because of how I practice kindness, compassion, and empathy.
The difference between this anger and the anger of my youth is fear. My anger from world happenings stems from caring about the wellbeing of others and not understanding why that’s not the default for more people. The anger that was my only genuine companion emotion for so long was based in fear.
Going back to my parents’ divorce, this was fear of abandonment. It didn’t help that my dad moved halfway across the country, and my mom had to split her time between my sister and me, working, and dating. Fear of being abandoned took root. Then it showed itself in fear of failure, fear of success, fear of fucking up, and ultimately manifested as anger.
Years of therapy, taking antidepressants, meditation, and mindfulness have helped me get a handle on this. This is not, however, fixed. That’s because anger doesn’t go away, no matter what form it takes.
Anger and fear are often one
As much as I don’t see my current anger issues as the fear of my youthful ones, they’re still based in fear. But not fear for myself as much as fear about the state of the greater good, the welfare of others, and seeing people hurting unnecessarily, whether I know them or not.
Fear of the unknown is common. And because we tend to merely pay lip service to mental health, rather than address it equally as we address physical health, fear becomes easily weaponized.
Blame is a form of weaponized fear. Especially when politicians abuse it as they do. Even in the face of logical, reasonable, undeniable proof, people still accept blame being placed. This is mostly because anger was used to focus everything. Get angry about that shit going down, blame them, it’s their fault, and let us fix it for you by repressing/denying/harming them (and you, but they hide that part in plain sight).
Fear of the unknown is probably actually fear of change. Yet change is the one and only constant in the universe. Every person, place, and thing changes. The status quo, the way things have always been, is never true. But because human life is usually less than a century, we easily disregard, forget, and ignore that.
For example, it was less than 100 years ago that more people worked in farming than in any other business. Office work, 9-5 jobs? Less than a century. Hard to believe, right?
What can we do about this?
Recognize, acknowledge, and go from there
The truth is, anger is a natural emotion. Everyone experiences it. How it manifests varies, but when all is said and done, you can control it.
How? Mindfulness. Active conscious awareness. This starts by addressing two primary matters. Thoughts and feelings. To understand them, all you must do is be present, here and now, and ask,
- What am I thinking?
- What am I feeling?
- How am I feeling?
Once you know the answers, you know if you’re experiencing anger. From there, you can shift it, alter it, work through it, or repress it. The choice is yours.
Recognize and acknowledge that it’s perfectly normal to feel anger. This is an utterly human condition. Anger itself can be used to blame or turned around and used to build better.
Angry at the government? Vote for better people. Feeling anger toward a business? Boycott them. Angry with a person? Figure out why and either resolve it, cut them out of your life, or take some other action.
I still struggle with anger at times. While I seldom explode in rage, it still happens once in a while. There might or might not be a hole punched in a wall I need to address. Writing this out and sharing my experience is part of how I’m doing that.
Anger happens, but what that looks like and how you deal with it is a choice and decision you get to make.
Thank you for reading. Do you recognize that anger is a natural emotion, and not good or bad in and of itself?
This is the seventh-hundred-forty-second (742) exploration of my Pathwalking philosophy. These weekly essays are my ideas for – and experiences with – applying mindfulness and positivity to walk along a chosen path of life to consciously create reality.
I share this philosophy because I desire to make a difference in the world and help as many people as I can to find their empowerment with conscious reality creation.
Thank you for joining me. Feel free to repost and share this.
The first year of Pathwalking, including some expanded ideas, is available here.
Also, please check out my author website for the rest of my published fiction and nonfiction works.
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