What purpose does anger serve? When I ask clients this question, I often get a response along the lines of “obviously, it doesn’t”, but is that true?
I think we need to slow down and take a minute here because ALL emotions are OK and can indeed teach us something, however, the only way we can figure that out is with a willingness to understand it. We truly live in a disembodied, brain-worshiping culture, so feeling all of our feelings and remaining responsible for our them, is a piece of the larger restoration.
Anger as a Defense
On a psychological level, it can be helpful to understand anger as a secondary response, a result of sensing a threat. Just consider when animals attack or show ‘anger’? When they need to defend. When you are trying to understand an anger response in yourself or others, look for clues of vulnerability. Anger is a defense, it is energy to protect us by hiding, or making us believe we are hiding, our weakness.
Remember though, sometimes anger actually just walls you off from your own awareness of vulnerability. We would rather posture our anger than to feel our fragility.
On a different plane, you can also understand that you deepen the divide with anger. The energy and intensity of your reaction adds volatility to an already unstable situation. In order to stay justified in our anger we stay focused on the differences between us, and hold dearly to our righteousness. When positioned in this polarity, resolution is evasive if not impossible.
Here anger constricts our thinking and repeatedly narrows on the wrongs of the other.
Us vs Them
When we look at situations in which, perhaps, entire groups or populations are feeling threatened and angry, we understand that divisiveness between subsets of the population will intensify. Threat management researchers have found that when threatened people perceive stronger in-group / out group distinctions.
Along these lines we also perceive members of the out group and more similar to each other, judge them more severely, and as more threatening to our in-group. Brain imaging studies show that when assessing members of the ‘out group’, the compassion circuitry in our brain shuts off. In this state we slowly move people one by one from our in-group to the out-group until we live in a world of ‘us’ vs ‘them’.
Addressing Anger
Two ways to address anger are working through and letting go with the help of Anger Management Therapy. Working through with counselling services in Calgary is hard work and involves shifting into our resiliency mindset of responding, not reacting. We practice active listening, try to compassionately understand the vulnerability the other group experienced as valid, and make requests going forward. We know that not all requests will be accepted, and we understand that anger may be compassionately present in this process but that our anger does not push us to reactivity.
Keep in mind that our survival systems are 300 times faster than our whole-brain processing, so it takes conscious and effortful practice to stay grounded. This is an act of holding a boundary, even if that means walking away, without reactivity. This is not a drop in the bucket of appeasement; let me shape me based on what I think you need or want.
The letting go piece is significantly harder, and not a process many of us want to look at, at least not initially. This piece involves a sober recognition that the ‘other’ person’s behavior is their problem entirely and your reactivity is yours to own.
Your reactivity is not ignorance, it is born out of the wisdom of your body and was at one point extremely adaptive; so be kind and know this as you explore this.
This is not a working through, this is a recognition and a dropping that involves incredible self-compassion. This is an act of seeing the humanity in it all, and finding a way to allow the difficulty of that to reduce the “others” or “out group”, so that we can focus more on our own healing and restoration.
