Heating up

We were born to work together like feet, hands and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are obstructions – Marcus Aurelius

Why does anger exist? “Fear tells us what to avoid; anger tells us what to resist. Both of these emotions exist to keep us from dying, from getting hurt, from losing energy.”¹ When “anger is roused…it tries to push away and eliminate whatever it is that’s unpleasant.”²

When you have anger, passion, fear, breath can never remain normal. A little harder, faster. Also heat, palpitation at the biochemical level. – S.N. Goenka

Minor irritations can lead to anger. I know that when I’m late for something and I’m rushing around, it’s easy for lots of irritations to stack on top of each other, and I’m more likely to get angry. When I’m swimming laps, leaking goggles, missing instructions or losing track of my time all start as minor irritations but can quickly build up into anger too.

In order for a fight to happen, at least one person needs to take it personally. Just like pain needs to be personal, so does anger. 

Everyone expresses anger differently. Some will express it immediately and then get on with their day. Others don’t acknowledge their anger, but will take it out on their kids, or an untidy house.

Anger, like any strong emotion, literally distorts your perception. Anger can easily spill out into the environment. This is what people mean when they say ‘projecting’. You are sending out your anger, and suddenly all the cars around you are angry, everything is angry but you. Your unclaimed anger might appear as a monster in a nightmare.

I seem to care a lot about fairness (in a subjective, relative sense). For me, the thought ‘that’s not fair!’ is very often associated with a feeling of anger. Perhaps the more righteous you are as a person, the more angry you’ll tend to be. 

A person who is never angry will not be able to love either. – Osho

Anger is hot. Resentment is cold. Resentment is pickled anger. Fritz Perls, founder of Gestalt therapy, believed “the key to resolving resentment…was expressing one’s anger.”³

Another grotesque side product of suppressing anger is passive aggression. Those little snarky comments we can make sometimes are like steam leaking out of clamped down pot.

You can hold a grudge for decades, but the actual emotion of anger leaves your body very quickly. “It takes less than 90 seconds for me to think a negative thought, have a negative emotion, run the physiological response, have it flood through me and flush out of me.”⁴

Cooling down

It is very difficult to observe anger as anger – abstract anger – S.N. Goenka

In the Tibetan Buddhist system, anger is the same substance as clarity and intelligence, which is an interesting comparison. When you think of anger as a form of energy, it’s easier to see that it is “free of any problems, except the problems we create out of fear of that energy.”⁵

There’s lots of ways to express your anger in a safe way. Turn it into aggression in the gym. Do some primal screams. Anything but act on it blindly.

Exercise seems to help, since we can’t really exercise angrily, but we can exercise aggressively.

You can write it down. What was the thing that made you angry?  Or what is the angry thought you’re having? I’ll write down “I have no time” or “This is a waste of time” and an angry face 😡 next to it.

The better you can deal with anger, the more responsibility you have to do so.

Anger is given to us like claws and teeth, to defend ourselves and is vitally important. We need rage and anger. But Jung taught us to first learn to control it and then to use it in a controlled way. Let it out, but let it out so that you could stop any minute if you wanted to. – Marie Von Franz

1. Ego – Peter Baumann ↩︎
2. The Practice of Not Thinking – Ryunosuke Koike ↩︎
3. https://www.anilthomasgestalt.com/about-fritz ↩︎
4. https://www.youtube.com/clip/UgkxLhPBmIvO28k9YC8Z81UMLP_ayXZGV8kT ↩︎
5. https://selfdefinition.org/tibetan/articles/mindfulness-anger-management.htm ↩︎