The Secret Power of Anger
I wanted to open this with a quote, but upon searching for quotes about anger I came to realise that they largely held the ‘anger is bad’ sentiment.
It seems that anger is often conflated with aggression, which itself holds a lot of positive power.
We live in a world that villainizes anger, yet much like all villains, anger is somewhat misunderstood. It is an inescapable part of the human experience, and one that should be considered and explored, instead of pushed deep down inside.
This trait is a survival mechanism and a facet of emotional intelligence, so how can we even contemplate supressing a core part of the human experience?
We see it as a threat, particularly in the social setting, yet it is a part of our fighting spirit.
In psychological terms it is the fight response in contrast to the retreating flight response that we associate with anxiety. Yet both anxiety and anger are both about not knowing how to hold a powerful energy emanating from our solar plexus or third chakra from which power emanates.
For some reason, society at large seeks to pacify anxiety and quell anger, rather than educating us on how to use these powerful, unintegrated emotions. Is it better for us to be a little lamb, or to be a trained wolf?
Education on Anger
When a parent punishes a child for acting with anger, this teaches them to supress this powerful emotion. This is like trying to contain a nuclear explosion inside the body. It will cause mental and physical difficulties both in the short term and long term.
We often see the violent reactions of anger, and decide it is better to oppress this powerful emotion, rather than trying to understand it.
Destruction
The analogy of the nuclear explosion is precisely why we live in a culture that seeks to supress anger, or even pacify it, because it is a very powerful and potentially destructive force.
We often confuse violence with anger, but this is merely a destructive way of expressing it. We are less frequently taught to use the energy of anger for creative purposes, to transmute this energy into something beautiful.
This is analogous to using nuclear power to create energy and using it in bombs.
So how can we learn to harness this energy without causing a few explosions?
Transmuting the Energy
The question remains, how does this benefit an interaction between two parties? If someone has triggered my anger, how can I engage with this force without being destructive? How can I use this nuclear energy?
How comfortable am I with the tension of confronting my trigger?
Is this a teachable moment for the trigger?
Is the trigger the fire in your belly needed to begin cooking up a creative project?
Is it to remind you to get back to work because you recognise the truth in the trigger that you are not satisfied with your current status?
Merely by observing the thoughts we attach to these feelings we can understand why something triggers such a powerful emotion within us, and hopefully learn to act with this energy.
The trigger can be subtle, but the emotional reaction is not. The body knows.
We can’t know what events motivate us, or how they motivate us, when we first experienced them, or why we feel the need to respond differently. This is the inflection point in which we learn self-awareness, to understand our body and learn about ourselves.
Compassion
This Buddhist idea of not acting with anger but being compassionate is beautiful in sentiment, but there is a journey to arriving at compassion. We are not born saints, and must observe and experience the anger before we can rise above it.
There is an idea of spiritual bypassing, in which we forego the process of experiencing the anger for another form of suppression. We should remember this when we are trying to assert ourselves above our trigger.
Even if we recognise the trigger of our anger to be the suffering and unintegrated actions of another, we are often triggered by a boiling in our solar plexus.
The D-Anger
When I shied away from the anger there was nothing but the shame of a quivering little boy, a man of weak will and little substance. An empath attacking himself to spare the soul of their attacker. A martyr acting with omniscience because they couldn’t face the devastating effects of the power of their anger. Sins of carrying the hate, shame and insecurity of those who have shamed me. Those who convinced me that I was the devil and they were the attacked.
Within the narrative that anger has no place here, it can easily be turned in to shame. Shame for even having a remote bit of anger, yet anger is the energy behind creativity. Anger drives us. It drives us to respond in kind immediately, or to contain it and use it whether creatively or destructively.
Anger is deeply powerful. Many of us are afraid to use it and many of us let it off like an AK-47 without considering the damage it’s doing.
Truly sensitive people know the power of their anger. They can read others well and know exactly where to strike to have the biggest impact. They know they will feel the recoil of their rifle unless they are properly poised to absorb it, because there is a direct emotional response. This, I believe, is why many shy away anger, because they have witnessed the destructive nature of it and do not want to hold this.
How to use anger
We know that feeling of being triggered and wanting to punch someone. We desire to get this explosive feeling out of us as quickly as possible. The anger is an opportunity to educate another. Do we teach them to attack in defence, or do we show them that we can still find compassion for their hurtful actions. Perhaps it is as innocuous of having a tense conversation with someone, or perhaps you feel that this person must be put in their place.
While anger may be the energy for this, compassion should be the vehicle through which it is done.
Compassion is not another form of spiritual bypass, but acknowledging that the other party is struggling or suffering from something and does not deserve to be punished during the education process. If only my school teachers had awareness of this.
Self-awareness in these situations is invaluable, and like a crying baby eventually learns to self-soothe and to control this intense force, we can learn to integrate these emotions and use them appropriately.
What Power?
There is a shift in power dynamics here, depending on who is the trigger and how they are responded to.
In an ideal situation we are looking to restore the balance of power, whether that means to give or to take it. We cannot resolve the anger born between us when there is an imbalance in power.
For more on empowerment & disempowerment read this.
Jungle is Massive.
