Responding Wisely to Anger

In the early months of the MindLetter, responding to the descent of an unprecedented global pandemic, I wrote pieces about working wisely with fear, worry, and sadness. Using Tara Brach’s RAIN practice, I explored all the tricky layers of reaction that we typically layer on to these emotions – not liking, pushing away, fixating; and outlined just how helpful it can be to do what Tara calls the ‘U-turn’: turning attention, when the mind spirals outwards into rumination, back towards the physical and sensory realm. We might feel our feet on the floor, breath in the belly; the clutching at the throat that comes with fear, or the deep pulsating hollow that comes with sadness. The clue is in the word ‘feeling’, for feelings are information, and must be felt – honestly and with care – in order to resolve, and move us forward.

I meant, at the time, to get around to anger: the defining emotion of the internet, the marker of interrupted boundaries, the white-hot, cold-ice feeling whose energy feels like it could burn up a thousand winter suns. But six years later, I find that I did not. It was not that I did not feel anger during this time, or encounter it in the world, at work and at home; not at all. It was, perhaps, because I had not yet had my bathroom redone. This, I discover, lends itself to a special kind of anger, a rage so acute and complex that its components multi-layer like the piles of cardboard boxes in the living-room that contain the wrong sink, towel rail and shower enclosure. It is, moreover, an anger which comes with a ready-made roster of helpful analogies.

Anger, you see, is multifaceted, dynamic, shapeshifting. Let us say for the sake of argument that your tiles were held up for a week in the snowstorms down south, which they wouldn’t have been if they had been ordered in December – for which, read August – like the company were meant to. When anger comes, its energy, that visceral force that emerges from your very centre, wants to move you. The word ‘emotion’ literally means to move out, move from: your anger wants to carry you over all those miles, over frost and flood and snowbank to dig your tiles out yourself. That is its job. But if it can’t fulfil it, it may start to turn inwards, outwards, or both. You may find a way to start blaming yourself or others, not in a feel-your-feelings way that leads to resolution, but a festering-pipe-blockage way that regurgitates shame or resentment, long after the plumber has gone home.

When anger conceals itself beneath shame, it is often because in some way the anger is too threatening to feel. If we were punished for strong feelings when we were young, a child’s view of anger may have been encoded in the psyche, a sense that we are not permitted stewardship over our internal world, that a feeling is the same as a thrown plate or a shouting match, and must therefore be stopped at all costs. Or perhaps it is just that, in a given situation, to feel angry comes with implications that are too hard to face: that something needs to change, or that someone has hurt us. Blaming ourselves in some way may feel easier than apportioning responsibility elsewhere. It may even, in some power dynamics, be a matter of survival. So we shrink, in the face of what has happened to us, rather than rise up to challenge it; move the boundaries, rather than assert them.

Resentment, on the other hand, is the marinating whirlpool of anger that happens when we eject energy without ever feeling it through to its conclusion, a miasma of hurts that have got trapped in the waste pipe and threaten to take the whole wall down with it. Watch for what may be hidden here, under the floorboards, behind the worktop: for behind this pattern of anger may be lurking painful grief, or secret fear. Sometimes it is easier to anger than to feel a loss that must be grieved; likewise, anger can put on a show, in a way that feels like our own terms, where fear threatens to ruin us on someone else’s.  

When shame and resentment get going, like an overflow pipe after the diaphragm has cracked in the toilet, they may be quite difficult to stop. Emotions may pour out in such a manner as to crash down on your neighbour’s window-sill, or freeze hazardously on the path below. Suddenly you have a new set of problems – and still no tiles.

Here, I return to Tara Brach’s RAIN. For if we have come to a place where there is nothing left but to feel the feelings, some kind of wise framework or practice may help us do so amidst the chaos.

Recognise

Acknowledge, name, label what is present: anger, rage, fury; hammering heart, heat in face, thoughts of revenge, self-blame, shock, worry. You might do this internally, or grab a piece of paper and write it down. Strong feelings are an amygdala-hijacked blob: naming what is present, as much as you can discern of it, enables wiser parts of the mind to come online to help.

Allow

Allowing what is present to be here does not mean that you will act on your thoughts of revenge, or that you are proud of your rage, or that it is uncomplicated. It just means that you allow that your feelings have some purpose – they are coming up to move you on, or move you forward in some way – and that you are willing to see what it is. You might say to yourself, ‘it’s ok to feel this’, or place a hand on the hammering heart or the hot face.

Investigate

Ask yourself, ‘what does this feel like in my body?’ Be curious here, because sensing what is in the body – goosebumps, heat, pressure – will help you integrate the feeling when it threatens to shatter like a misfired tile.

Ask yourself, too, ‘what am I believing in this moment?’ Is it that you are being disrespected, or that others are out to get you, or that your stud wall is ruined? Greet what you find lightly: these beliefs may be true or they may not; your task is neither to disprove nor affirm them, but simply to see what they are.

Nurture

When you attend to your experience in this way, often clarity arises as to how you might best help yourself in this moment. This is not something you need to force; it is the natural result of slowing down, opening up a little space between yourself and the vortex of rage. Nurturing yourself now could be something as small as a cup of tea, or reaching out to a good friend. Sometimes the energy of anger requires a dance-out or a brisk walk around the block.

RAIN is not a substitute for action when action is required. But it is a means of seeing all the facets of this most persuasive of emotions as clearly as you can in the moment, when its shame-and/or-resentment bedfellows are poised to take over the story. If you can bring curiosity to these fight-or-flight processes, befriending the deadweight of frustration, the fragile stuckness of irritation, the boil and bubble of raw rage – a wise next step may well present itself. Decisiveness is often the gift of anger, the place where it wanted to take us all along; and those glimmers of insight can be like weekend sun falling on a freshly tiled floor. (‘Nordic cream.’ Worth the wait.)

Warm wishes

Kitty