I've been thinking about my relationship to anger.
Becky and I knew we’d need help when we moved back in together in 1998, after a separation that lasted seven years. So we called Chris, a therapist neither of us had seen before, and saw him every Friday afternoon for eighteen months. We were dealing with the awkward adjustments of living together again; in some instances, rather than collaborate on a decision we wound up as adversaries. Several months into our sessions, with this seething in the background, I ended the hour by going off on Becky. I didn’t yell or threaten her, but my ice-cold eyes and chilling accusations of her failures were, as her tears acknowledged, deeply hurtful.
The following Friday, as soon as we were seated beside one another on Chris’s couch, he said, I want to talk about what happened last Friday, his cold gaze eerily similar to the way I’d stared at Becky a week earlier. What was that all about, he asked, that anger at her? I was caught off guard, but regrouped with my therapist jargon. Well, I was just getting with my feelings, trying to honestly share my anger, I insisted. Really? he asked facetiously, his eyes fixed on mine. And where did you learn that it was okay to talk to someone like that? Who gave you permission to speak to anyone, especially to someone you love, with that kind of cruelty?
Those sessions with Chris were twenty-four years ago, but the exchanges live in my mind with an immediacy that never wanes. I wrestle continuously with the role that anger plays in my life and in the lives of my clients.
I’m a practicing therapist, not a social science researcher, so my observations come from personal and clinical experiences.
Anger lives in every one of us; it’s a universal human emotion. As we develop, very few of us are taught to handle our personal anger well. All too often, we suppress it, or we just let it fly. Seldom is either a benefit to our self-respect or to our relationships.
Anger is sometimes referred to as a secondary emotion. Rather than dealing with fear, hurt, or sadness, which make us too vulnerable, we get angry to push ourselves away from whomever we now perceive as our adversary. I think this is especially true of us as men; we will do almost anything to hide our tender emotions. We get frightened or hurt or sad, but rather than acknowledge these feelings, we lash out at whatever frightened us (or whoever might be in our path). Vulnerability feels like weakness; anger restores our sense of power.
As current research summarizes it, anger initiates one or more of these tactical responses:
Fight: facing any perceived threat aggressively.
Flight: running away from the danger.
Freeze: unable to move or act against a threat.
Fawn: immediately acting to try to please, to avoid any conflict.
So how shall we manage our own anger? As a society, we stagger into and out of convictions about what to do with our rage. Shall we shout at one another? When, if ever, is interpersonal physical violence acceptable? Shall we stuff everything down and paste on a smile?
A friend recently described his twenty-minute session in a Rage Room. In a safe room by himself, he broke a bunch of discarded electronic equipment, then picked up his late mother’s dysfunctional lap-top computer (which he’d brought along for the occasion) and beat it with a pipe and crushed it and smashed it to the floor, letting his rage destroy this reminder of his recent loss. Then he cried, deeply. He dealt with his grief by expressing his anger, and found a great deal of relief.
Decades ago, I learned a similar tactic that involves the use of Batakas, foam rubber encounter bats which couples were encouraged to use while taking out their rage at one another. I bought a set of Batakas, and in our therapy sessions couples whacked each other to express their anger. I always felt like an awkward bystander but the couples often found the experience cleansing. You can still buy them, and as their ads say, Batakas are designed to help release aggression and anger without causing injury.
I claim little scientific expertise about these expressions of rage. But from my personal experience as a client in therapy, from hundreds of hours with my enraged clients, and from my observations of how anger is expressed in our culture, I have my own view. After all these decades, I'm a strong believer that verbal and physical expressions of anger and violence most often produce more of the same. Our brains learn from such behavior. Rage metastasizes. And what begins in the safety of Batakas in a therapist’s office or smashing stuff alone in a Rage Room reinforces our brain’s belief in the healing power of violence.
I believe we need to find alternatives to these ruinous expressions of our anger.
So if we don't beat the emotional or physical shit out of people, and if we don’t teach our brains that it’s okay to express our anger violently, how do we make room in our lives for rage?
I’ve always been grateful to our therapist that his chastising words about my icy attack on Becky were not his final comments on the issue. As we continued to unpack how I handled my anger, he used the word containment to suggest a better process than verbal or physical rage. I came away from those discussions with a mental image and a relational process that have served me well ever since.
When I feel my temperature rising in a conversation (it’s still most often with Becky), I picture myself with my eyes closed, arms outstretched in front of me, fingers entwined, creating an emotional wall. I stop talking, and will not respond to any continuing questions, accusations, or expressions of frustration at my silence. She has now learned that, for me, this particular conversation is over. And I will not return to it for twenty-four hours.
Here’s what I’ve learned. Somewhere between eighty and ninety percent of the time, after twenty-four hours I cannot remember what made me angry and she has let go of whatever she needed to say in response. So we never mention the incident again. Ten to twenty percent of the time, one of us recognizes that what we were fighting about is important, so we bring it up. But with the anger drained from both of us, now we can have a conversation, not a war, and clear up whatever was off-balance between us.
I continue to rage in my soul, but I don’t allow that rage to turn into verbal or physical violence. I’ve never hit my children or my wife, though at times I’ve been furious at each of them. I don’t yell (except at certain images on our television screen or while driving by myself); I’ve never slugged a friend, though there have been those moments . . .
I remember the wisdom an old New York psychoanalyst shared with me a decade ago, while we soaked in the baths at the Esalen Retreat Center near Big Sur, talking about anger. Remember, Rick, he said, in the animal world the purpose of anger is to kill the enemy. I simply don’t want to participate in any expression of rage that could lead to violence that might run its course.
I hope you’ve found a way that works for you, a way to deal with your anger without turning it into emotional or physical violence. If not, you should figure out such a way before there’s another incident in which, as I did, you injure someone with your emotional or physical rage.
Blessings,
Rick
Hi, I’m Rick Thyne and I’m grateful that you found your way to these pages. Perhaps in these conversations we’ll find our way to more of the common good that is - for me - our best hope for a future in which all of us thrive. If you've found this column and would like to get my latest column delivered, free, to your inbox every two weeks, you can subscribe now.