I think I’ve always been an angry person. Even as a toddler, my parents described me as the worst behaved toddler they ever saw, just an absolute terror. Which is ironic, because in school, I went on to be bullied and an outcast. Like I lost access to my rage. Probably a parenting mishap, or maybe not, who knows.
I’ve long noticed, writing this blog, and posting on twitter, that I have a completely different personality over text than in person. Text allows me easier access to my rage.
But anyway, I think I had a breakthrough on dealing with rage recently, because I noticed a feature of it that I previously had not noticed. I think rage has a process that goes like this:
I am feeling angry.
This anger is a problem.
It is not my problem.
It is X’s problem (X could be some person, women, normal people, the entire world, etc.)
I will give my rage to X, since it is their problem.
I have experimented with giving my full rage to someone or something, like when I keyed up the car of some guy who had double parked in a blatantly egregious way. Which felt good, but was no lasting solution. If you give your rage away, you have lost the ability to do anything with it.
My realization is that the step in which to interrupt the rage process is… 2.
Seeing the rage as a problem. If you don’t see the rage as a problem, but rather as a friend, you can observe it wordlessly, be with it, and I find that this makes it become a free energy, that is like rage, but not quite.
Of course, when you’re in the middle of it, maybe that’s too high-falutin', you really have to sit with it, and acknowledge not just the rage, but the aversion you have to it, you have to feel too that you want it to go away, and feel that fully, and don’t try to make either go away. It’s not an intellectual exercise, words are not involved in any part of the process, it’s about directing your attention.
Anyway, I wrote this because I feel there’s no good material out there for dealing with anger. There’s a lot more talk for dealing with more acceptable1 negative emotions, like sadness, depression, fear, but anger, that’s one of the antisocial emotions, like hatred, there’s strong conditioning that adds guilt and shame on top of them for anyone feeling these emotions.
However, I wonder how useful this is for most angry people, I have the tantric Vajrayana perspective and Sufi stories for inspiration, plus meditation experience.
But even if you don’t have spirituality backing you up, I think the basic message, that you have to fully feel your emotions, whatever they are, no matter how unacceptable they may be to others, is workable.
One final observation: I think anger has a protective effect against depression. During my twenties, where I more or less didn’t have access to it, I would get periodic depressive spells. Now I have more access to my anger, I feel it more often, but I no longer get depressed, and I’ve been through a couple rough situations.
So yes, anger really, truly, is your friend. Keep your friend close, don’t give it away to anyone else.
They’re still fairly unacceptable in society.