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Anger is an interesting topic. I would say, in my opinion, that it’s the emotion that has the second greatest effect on screwing up the world. It’s also one of the most natural and basic human emotions. Just like any of our emotions it has a time and a place, but it seems like very few people understand it. I won’t claim to fully understand it either, but I have seen some patterns.
Now, the most destructive human emotion is fear. Fear drives us to avoid things, both in big terrifying ways and small hesitant ways. There are many things we’re afraid of: death, losing status or wealth, looking bad in front of other people, being rejected, or even being a bad person to name a few. These fears drive us to many irrational things, and it’s our reactions to our fear that end up showing. Sometimes we withdraw and avoid and trap ourselves in a world of safety, and sometimes we lash out.
You see, anger exists to help us survive. When we’re threatened we only have one choice: get rid of the threat. When we flee, it’s gone for a while, but when we destroy it it’s gone forever. The latter case is obviously where anger comes in. From a survival perspective, it makes sense, after all, but the problem is we’re not apes anymore.
Actually, the fact that we’re so evolved socially creates huge problems for us. It makes absolutely no sense to be afraid of other people who aren’t out to hurt you physically, but we still attach too much importance to, for instance, the approval of other people because of the complex rules we have for getting along with other people and playing nice. It scares the bejeesus out of us to know that we could be rejected and emotionally hurt by another human being. No one likes feeling vulnerable, even though a little heartbreak won’t actually kill you. Non-physical injury is not at all life-threatening, but it screws up our perceptions, sets off our fear response, and we treat it like it’s a real threat.
So, if you have someone who’s essentially afraid of interacting in some way with other people (and I’m being vague because there are many different ways to do this) then aside from avoiding people, the other natural reaction is to lash out. Anger is often our way of protecting ourselves. Physically protecting ourselves is one thing because the threat is either neutralized or it isn’t and you can let it go afterward, but the need to emotionally protect ourselves is in response to such a vague, ever-present threat that the anger doesn’t go away. This second kind of anger is more unnatural and contrived than the first kind.
Now, I’m sure you’ve all seen examples of this emotionally reactive anger. The vindictive spouse or the jealous co-worker, for instance. I consider these to just be obvious. I want to get to the root of the patterns people refuse to see, here. The person who always finds someone to blame for the world’s problems, the person who doesn’t get enough respect, the person who is always bitching about something in their life, the asshole who likes to push people’s buttons, and the person who will argue and put up a fight rather than ever admitting they’re wrong. These are the examples that most people don’t really see because they’re either too personally offended (and thus pissed off) by the person’s behavior to see what’s going on, or they ARE the person.
I knew a guy once who would come to work and spend all day bitching about what’s wrong with the company, from owner on down and never hesitated to nitpick when people did something wrong. He would bitch about how little he was getting paid, how incompetent every department we worked with was, how many hours he’d been working, etc. It could go on for hours, and after a few months, he started driving everyone else nuts, too.
Now this guy was a friend of mine, and I finally sat him down to do some 3D Mind work with him. Turns out that there was this general sense that he’ll always fall short of being good enough. A few days later, I came to work and he was MUCH more calm and relaxed. He’d lost a lot of his venom and although he still wasn’t happy about where he was working, he just didn’t feel the need to start bitching about it, either. So without this sense of inadequacy to cover up, he had no more need for the anger.
This is how the dynamic works. Anger, in my experience, is often a reaction to feeling inferior or vulnerable in some way. When there’s physical danger it’s justified, but when it’s in response to a vague social fear, then it just becomes another defense mechanism. Because he didn’t feel good enough, he’d lash out to convince everyone (including him) that he was too good for the situation he was in-even though he never actually made a move to leave it behind.
There’s another dynamic, though, that I think even fewer people are aware of. Anger is the drive to overpower and overcome, but anger without a target falls back upon oneself. Hell, you could even say that all anger is self-anger and anger that’s directed at others is a way of changing one’s focus away from how one really feels about oneself. Both are equally true, after all, since anger is just a drive toward movement. The catch, though, is that when there’s no obvious target to attack, it’s easy to turn to fighting with oneself.
Since the real issue is our own personal fears and insecurities, we get angry at ourselves to try to overcome them and browbeat ourselves into doing better. We also spew venemous statements at other people and at the situations we’re in to justify our status as innocent victims who haven’t done anything to deserve ending up where we have-just as we haven’t done anything to get our sorry asses out of where we’re at. Any way you look at it, we lean toward self-destruction if we let our anger go unquestioned.
Now, I’m not saying it’s all doom and gloom and we’re a horrible species who is going to destroy itself. I’m saying that people need to wake up and start seeing the dynamic that’s going on. People who react to the world in anger need to stop putting on a tough face and start facing what is REALLY bothering them.
I’m also NOT saying that we should have love and understanding for these people because they don’t know better. That’s a moronic, elitist attitude to take, no matter how much you sprinkle in words like “love” “peace” and “light”. Airy-fairy types are often just covering up their OWN massive insecurities by pretending to be above their own anger. And I’m not talking to just airy-fairy types here. I’m talking to YOU, whoever you are, because we ALL do this some how, to varying degrees, and if you don’t understand how anger works, it controls you.
Sometimes we’re angry at ourselves because of something small and that passes or we take care of the problem, but sometimes we’re angry at ourselves because we hate our lives and that anger lingers but we never do anything about it. This second kind of anger causes problems, so instead of trying to fight with the world the solution is a great big dose of self-honesty followed by making the effort to clear out that fear we cover up. When we do that, then life becomes a lot less stressful… and maybe even enjoyable.
And that is worth giving up the fight for.
