I recently saw a meme come across on Facebook. Over a picture of Buddha, it quotes him saying, “You will not be punished for your anger, you will be punished by your anger.”
I’ve seen this a lot.
Putting aside that Buddha didn’t say that, it’s a misguided sentiment.
In fact, I like anger. I’m a fan of anger.
Anger is, indeed, a source of suffering, but not for the reason most people think. Many people find anger unacceptable. They believe it’s wrong. So if they experience anger (as we all do), it follows that they must be somehow doing something wrong, or worse yet, there’s something wrong with them.
Then they think they need to stop that “negative” feeling and either ignore it completely or somehow morph it into something more “positive.” Failure to do so makes it hard to feel good about themselves, sabotages self-acceptance, contributes to depression and anxiety and makes it harder to heal trauma. It’s also the opposite of self-compassion which is key to any kind of healing.
“Anger is easily misunderstood…in our Buddhist practice,” says Lama Surya Das, “causing us to supress it and make ourselves more ill, uneasy and off balance…Learning to understand the causal chain of anger’s arising as well as the undesirable, destructive outflows of anger and its malicious cousin hatred can help strengthen our will to intelligently control it. Moreover, recognizing the positive sides of anger – such as its pointed ability to perceive what is wrong in situations, including injustice and unfairness – helps moderate our blind reactivity to it and generate constructive responses.”
Anger has a bad reputation because people equate feeling angry with doing angry things. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Feelings are not facts, nor are they a call to action. Feelings are not good or bad. They’re just comfortable, uncomfortable or neutral.
The art of anger is to be so angry that you can hit someone in the head, but you don’t hit anyone, or cause harm. Instead, you find a healthy way to express your anger, where nobody is harmed, including you. The art of anger is to experience it, and still make good choices.
Some years ago I heard an interview with Victor Villasenor, one of my favorite writers. The publisher of his first novel, Macho, initially planned to print it on cheap paper with cheap binding and then send it to book stores with no marketing, promotion or other distribution resources. Such “trade paperbacks” usually languish on store shelves for a few weeks, before they are sent back to the publishers and never heard of again.
Villasenor said his anger gave him the energy to take on the publishers and advocate for his book. He said his ability to express his anger appropriately helped him negotiate a more acceptable arrangement.
He has since been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. His book Rain of Gold is still a national best seller and he has become one of the most acclaimed Mexican-American writers.
Villasenor’s story points to the benefits of anger. And there are a few:
First, anger lets us know a boundary has been crossed. It’s a natural reaction to being wronged, hurt or abused.
Anger helps us set boundaries: Anger helps know what types of behaviors and situations we are and are not available for and what is unacceptable.
Anger gives us energy: Villasenor’s story is a perfect example of how anger can give us energy to achieve positive results. When I was a journalist, an editor would occasionally turn my writing to hash. Anger gave me the energy to confront my editor, while my ability to control my behavior while angry helped me get that I wanted without ruffling feathers.
Anger can foster optimism: It can encourage us to focus on what we hope to achieve, rather than merely focusing on the pain, insult, or victimization. When we are angry, we often feel positive about our ability to change the situation, empowering us to take action.
Anger can help us negotiate: I’ve been self-employed most of the time since the mid 1990s. I’ve negotiated several contracts for writing projects, consulting jobs and other services. Anger has helped me stand up for what I wanted, without damaging those relationships.
Anger can help us feel safe: Someone once told me in a therapy session that anger made him feel “like nobody can mess with me.” He had worked hard at learning to keep his control when he was angry and let anger help him stand up for himself.
I had an opportunity to see HH The Dalai Lama several years ago. Someone asked him, “What about anger and frustration?” He just shrugged and said, “I experience those things,” like it was nothing.
In a documentary interview, the Dalai Lama said, “Sometimes, I get short with people, then we move on.”
Again, anger and frustration are normal, “then we move on.”
“With gentleness overcome anger,” said The Buddha in The Dhammapada.
In other words, meet your anger with gentleness and self compassion.
Mindfulness can help us manage anger. Mindfulness puts us at the center of our experience, so we can more easily make good choices in difficult emotional states.
Thich Nhat Hanh’s translation of the Discourse on Five Ways of Putting an End to Anger offers excellent guidance:
To me, the most important of the five is to recognize that the person who harmed us is suffering, and without the skills to heal or contain it, this is what that looks like.
I’m not suggesting that learning a new way to relate to anger is easy. Nor am I suggesting that we can simply set aside trauma or abuse that has deeply harmed us. This is difficult work, especially for people who grew up in abusive and angry homes and had years of seeing the harmful effects of uncontrolled anger.
But I am suggesting that a new paradigm to relating to anger is a necessary part of learning to be okay with ourselves and how we relate in the world. The thing about feelings is they don’t just go away because we don’t like some of them. In fact, the more we resist some feelings, the longer they last.
The more we learn to accept our difficult feelings, including anger, the easier life becomes and the more we can learn to accept ourselves with compassion and love, which is what all of this is about.