anger

This post is partly building on the previous one by Tree Collards on forgiveness (thanks for that!).

There are a lot of mental health practices and theories, therapy modalities (modalities = framework or way of doing things), and spiritual movements which address the question of the anger experienced by victims of violence, as well as the anger of perpetrators. I've noticed repeatedly that I tense up when people start talking about overcoming anger, or presuming that anger itself/alone is the basis for abuse.

I believe in anger. More specifically, I believe that any kind of project related to healing, personally or socially, is nonfunctional without anger. Someone once offered me a definition of anger: anger is the information that something is wrong, contained in the energy to do something about it. That definition pretty much sums up why I feel protective of anger --- my own, and that of survivors generally. I respect and empathize with why people find anger scary or hard, or certainly why people tune it out or avoid it. The information can be hard, and the energy exhausting, if there isn't somewhere useful to go, or because it's been suppressed for many survival reasons. But I really really distrust theories or practices or ideologies which treat anger as a negative, or devalue it, or think the goal is to eliminate it completely.

I once heard bell hooks speak. She was talking about meeting Thich Nhat Hanh, and she was trying very hard to be in some particular kind of emotional space. Then when she met him, she expressed in much distress, "I'm so angry!", feeling that she shouldn't be, or ought to be able to overcome it. He replied, "Use your anger as fertilizer for your garden". I like that response: it says to me that even if anger is hard or has unpleasant things about it, it's also nourishing, and helps things grow into what they need to be. I think demonizing anger (or any emotion, including hate) keeps the focus on the symptom rather than the underlying illness. Kind of like Tree Collards' points about forgiveness --- attacking or trying to eliminate anger itself is about adjusting the way we respond to oppression, rather than changing the oppression. I like the adage, "if you're not angry, you're not paying attention", though I would expand it to, "if you're not angry, you're not paying attention, or you're immersing yourself in privilege, or you have complex and necessary dissociative mechanisms, or you're broken, or you've been terrorized when you've displayed signs of anger or resistance, or you've lost hope that you have any power, or you've been shamed for not being happy, etc".

There are lots of reasons, both about privilege and oppression, and about despair and survival, why people can't deal with anger, or aren't in touch with anger, or don't like anger. But it's never anger itself that's really the problem. In fact, anger is part of what makes up a whole human, like sweating, breathing, sleeping, eating, hugging and being held. Imagining that it should ideally be excised is just about as ridiculous. We can survive without enough sleep or food or comfort, for awhile, and even without enough to breathe (I've experienced all of those, actually) --- but it's not like we're okay living in deprivation. Losing the ability to know things are wrong and act on it is, when you think about it in those terms, dangerous. It would only make survival sense in times when ones own survival instincts are mostly so useless or assaulted (like during torture) that it's too much to keep having the reaction. At those times anger can be like a fever that's gone too high and for too long, so you have to cool your body down and quit trying to burn the disease out cuz otherwise you'll die trying.

In hierarchical societies, we learn to continually misdirect anger away from its appropriate targets (the privileged, the perpetrators) because we're punished when we do, so we learn to habitually turn it on ourselves, or stifle it into depressions, or turn it on others, horizontally, or down the hierarchy. And this explains a lot of why many abuse victims also find anger hard or scary, because we so often see it channeled harmfully. So someone has the information that something is wrong (i.e. "I feel miserable/small/poor/ugly/less than/inferior") and uses the energy around that feeling to lash out. Witnessing that pattern, we come to understand anger as just the continual venting of pain on those within reach, or on our own bodies, and so forth. We don't have as many models of truly healing, righteous beautiful anger. But they're there if we look, in poetry, in the work of social movements and activists, in artwork, in resistance to perpetrators. When we do look at those models, it becomes really clear that the beautiful, healing, justice-making actions couldn't have taken place without rage or anger--- as fuel, stimulus, basis for clarity. It's why so many abuse victims who fought back against batterers, or got out of abusive situations, will talk about a moment when they fought back or escaped in terms of "I really, finally got mad".

shrayberin