anger management

The buzz phrase says it all- anger needs to be managed.

Recently though I have been in arguments (muted, fairly respectful but still a failure to agree) with friends about the value of anger.

I've discovered that the less contact-physical a friend is (ie. never been a physical fight, no martial arts training or rugby) or if they have never enjoyed adventurous travel, the higher a value they put on 'anger'. They all repeat some half baked notion that anger must have evolved for a reason and therefore anger is, if not 'good', at least 'ok', kind of like a big mac- alright as long as you have a balanced diet...

But anger isn't OK. Like those other products of evolution- laziness, lying and betrayal- it needs strict management.

The other notion along with the bogus evolution argument is that anger must not be 'repressed'. This hand-me-down Freudian notion has no basis in reality - neither in the latest scientific research nor my own experience. The reason for its proliferation and for other positive notions about anger is that expressing anger can very often generate substantial attention. Since most people in the Western world are signally bad at managing their attention needs they confuse the buzz of getting attention from being angry with some value in anger itself. Simply by 'acting angry' the same result would occur. But to return to the main point- repressing anger is bad - first off, the latest neuroscience supports Hebb's Law- what fires together wires together. Therefore the more we express anger the more we wire it into our neural networks and ...the angrier we become. The latest research over the last twenty years points in one direction- we are learning machines and we learn from what we repeat and give attention to. 

A deep inability to express certain emotions such as sadness and loss may give rise to anger- frustration- but what is being repressed is a feeling of loss not anger itself. Why? Because anger is simply the fight or flight mechanism finding one form of expression. If you act angry when you feel the adrenaline rush of a fight or flight situation you are simply giving rise to one kind of behaviour. You could equally run or punch someone. Indeed after one very heated and angry argument I went for a five mile run- pure adrenaline to burn off.

I used to suffer from road rage. As my job at that time was driving a van in London there were many opportunities to get angry and shake my fist, bang the horn etc. One day I realised I was getting angry at least once a day. Heeding the oft mentioned requirement of most religious systems that anger is a bad thing I thought I ought to do something about it. So every time I felt like angrily responding I counted to ten first. By some incredible magic the angry impulse was entirely gone by about seven, sometimes by three. Because I had stopped a connection being made. No fire, no wire. And amazingly I stopped getting road rage in about a week after this. Anger simply does not exist- unless we act 'angry'.

And I believe it is this imaginary quality of anger as much as anything else that makes most moral and religious systems very keen to avoid anger. As it is said, 'Anger and Enmity" have no place in the Sufi Way. If anger is an illusion in the very real sense that it can disappear by simple waiting and counting, then why should we pay heed to it? My good Iranian friend Farhad Nasre always said never make an important decision when you are angry. So right! If we did, we'd half of us be divorced, out of business or otherwise in a bad way. So if anger screws up our personal lives how come some people think anger should be a guide?

One reason I have mentioned- the attention buzz. The second is that after a life of getting sand kicked in your face these non-physical types feel powerful when they are angry. They feel tough and sometimes they make a stand and the other person stands down. So anger has finally been rewarded. I have experienced something similar in Egypt where I found that shouting at policemen often got me through checkpoints and other hold ups. Then I tried shouting at a policeman in the Sinai who had (I later learned) just been machine gunned by some would-be terrorists. He very quickly shut me up with the point of his gun menacingly held in my direction. Though anger may get results it breeds bad habits. Now I try to always reign in anger but use the adrenaline I feel to keep me sharp and not to lose focus- if you can, silently count to five during the 'interview phase' of any altercation (sometimes ten is too far away!) before launching in (the interview is the bit that precedes most verbal and non-verbal fights where insults escalate). For a very good in depth treatment of how to manage the fight or flight reaction I suggest the excellent "Mind my Back" by Geoff Thomas a former bouncer.

The non-physical people have usually not had enough real experience of fighting to know that anger can really let you down in fight and that being playful in a fight is often a way better strategy- if you can manage it. Sometimes of course it gets very nasty and gritty early on- but thinking of anger here as chanelled aggression is probably a much better characterisation. Thinking of aggression and violence in precise terms- like in using a hammer to deliver the right power to drive a nail in- is one way how you 'manage' anger.

As for those stories about Sufi and Zen teachers who shout and rave at disciples from time to time, the answer is: they are feigning or exaggerating anger to impart a specific lesson. Very often to warn a student away from some bad influence, rather in the way we may shout at a child playing near a busy road. It is another precise tool and very far from feeling angry about something you can do nothing about.

In the end, as commonsense tells us, if you cannot act to remove something that potentially angers you then you must...do nothing. Including the rather feeble reaction of 'getting angry'. As another saying goes- griping and complaining are the kicks and punches of the weak.